Governing AI, and Letting AI Support Governance: The Question on Every Board’s Agenda

If you chair a local governing body, sit on a trust board, or clerk either, you will already be feeling it. The questions are coming faster than the answers. Which AI tools can our teachers actually use, and under what conditions? What happens to pupil data when a member of staff pastes a safeguarding note into a chatbot? Is the trust’s new “AI strategy” a policy, a procurement plan, or a wish list? And whose job is it to hold anyone accountable if the AI gets something wrong?

These are governance questions, and in the last few weeks the policy ground has shifted sharply beneath them.

The policy moment

February’s Schools White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving², contained what is arguably the most explicit AI education policy the UK has yet produced. A £23 million, four-year EdTech evidence programme. Sovereign AI safety and pedagogy benchmarks. A new AI Safety and Pedagogy Taskforce bringing teachers and AI experts into the same room. Teacher co-created AI tutoring tools pledged for schools by 2027.³ And, significantly, a government willing at last to commit publicly to a distinction the research community has been pressing for years: that general-purpose consumer AI is not the same thing as purpose-built educational AI, and that confusing the two has real costs for children.

Alongside this, the DfE’s Generative AI Product Safety Standards⁴ — first published in January and now operational — are beginning to sharpen what “safe” actually means for any AI product used with pupils. In March, Dame Alison Peacock told the Voice 21 Speaking Summit that AI should be used to assess oracy⁵ — a useful reminder that the conversation has already moved past “should we use it?” into “where, how, and with what safeguards?”

There is a structural dimension too. The White Paper’s consultation on requiring every trust to have local governance arrangements⁶ has given fresh significance to the role of governors at school level, the people closest to communities and, often, closest to the concerns that families are raising about AI in their children’s classrooms.

Two challenges, one board

This is the landscape every governing board is now operating in, and it poses two challenges at once.

The first is strategic. Boards have to govern AI adoption in their schools: managing risk, interrogating ethics, overseeing the money, checking that what is going into classrooms is educationally sound and genuinely safe. That means holding leaders to account on data protection, safeguarding, curriculum oversight and procurement, and asking the awkward questions when a proposal arrives with more marketing than evidence behind it.

The second is practical. AI can also support governance itself. Papers that used to take a weekend to read can be summarised, compared and interrogated in minutes. Data that once needed a specialist to unlock can be explored by any trustee who can hold a conversation. Challenging questions for the next committee meeting can be drafted, stress-tested and refined before you ever sit down. The board’s focus can then shift, where it belongs, to strategy, ethics and impact.

Both sit squarely with the board, and the boards that navigate this well over the next twelve months will be the ones that govern AI thoughtfully and let it make them better governors in the process.

What we’ll cover on Wednesday 10th June

At this year’s Surrey Annual Governance Conference, I’ll be tackling both halves of that question head-on.

We’ll look at the strategic side first – how to think about AI strategy, compliance and risk at board level, what the DfE guidance and new safety standards actually require of you, how to interrogate an AI investment case, and the oversight questions every agenda now needs to include.

Then we’ll turn to the practical side. Drawing on live work from The Kite Academy Trust, I’ll show how AI is already being used to prepare for meetings, interrogate data, generate challenging questions, and sharpen the board’s line of sight on impact. You’ll leave with five concrete actions you can take the following week, some practical starting points, and I hope an appetite to lead this conversation on your own board rather than wait for it to arrive.

It is a governance session, about a technology that is already in our schools, already in our board papers, and already reshaping the leadership moment in front of us.

Book your space at: Surrey Annual Governance Conference 2026 Tickets, Wednesday 10 June  •  15:30 – 18 | Eventbrite

I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday 10th June.

References

¹ Education Secretary speech at UK AI for Education Summit, 19 January 2026: gov.uk/government/speeches/education-secretary-speech-at-global-ai-safety-summit

² Every Child Achieving and Thriving, Schools White Paper, 23 February 2026: gov.uk/government/publications/every-child-achieving-and-thriving

³ Analysis of White Paper AI commitments — FE News, 25 February 2026: fenews.co.uk/exclusive/the-schools-white-paper-just-showed-us-where-ai-policy-is-heading-fe-needs-to-pay-attention

⁴ DfE Generative AI Product Safety Standards, January 2026 — Browne Jacobson analysis: brownejacobson.com/insights/latest-dfe-ai-guidance-for-schools

⁵ “Dame Alison Peacock: Use AI to test oracy in schools”, Tes, 23 March 2026: tes.com/magazine/news/general/dame-alison-peacock-use-ai-test-oracy-skills

⁶ NGA response to the Schools White Paper, 23 February 2026: nga.org.uk/news-views/directory/nga-comments-on-the-schools-white-paper-and-send-reform