Your child’s school has almost certainly introduced some form of AI tool by now, and the communication you received about it was probably one paragraph in a newsletter.
You are entitled to know more than that. Here are the questions worth asking, and what a good answer sounds like.
“What is it actually being used for?”
This sounds basic and it’s the most important one, because “we use AI” covers wildly different things.
A teacher using a tool to draft lesson plans has essentially no implications for your child. A tool that adapts practice questions to your child’s level has some. A tool that generates feedback on your child’s written work, or contributes to assessment, has a great deal.
A good answer is specific about which of these it is. A vague answer about enhancing learning outcomes usually means nobody has thought about the distinction.
“What data about my child goes into it?”
Ask specifically: does it receive their name, their year level, their assessment results, their written work, anything about disability or learning support, anything from their wellbeing record?
Then ask where that goes. Is it processed by a company overseas? Is it retained, and for how long? Is it used to train the vendor’s models?
A good answer names the vendor and can point to a data protection agreement. Schools operating properly have done this assessment before deployment. If the answer is “I’d have to check”, that’s reasonable — but do follow up.
“Does it ever make a decision about my child?”
This is the one that matters most and gets asked least.
There is a large difference between a tool that suggests to a teacher that your child might benefit from revising a topic, and a tool that streams your child into a lower group. The first is information supporting a professional judgement. The second is an automated decision with real consequences for a child’s trajectory and self-belief.
A good answer is that a teacher makes every decision that affects your child’s pathway, and the tool only informs. If any decision is automated, you should be told what it is and how to challenge it.
“What happens when it gets something wrong?”
These systems produce confident, fluent, incorrect answers sometimes. That is not a flaw being engineered away; it’s a property of how they work.
In a classroom this matters more than elsewhere, because the student is by definition not able to judge whether the explanation is right. A child taught something incorrect, confidently, by a tool they trust, may carry that misconception for years.
A good answer acknowledges this openly and describes how teachers stay in the loop. An answer that claims the tool is accurate should increase rather than decrease your concern, because it suggests the school has been sold something by someone who was not honest with them.
“Can my child opt out, and what happens if they do?”
Ask what the alternative looks like in practice. If opting out means your child sits doing something different while the class uses the tool, that has a social cost you should weigh.
A good answer describes a genuine, non-punitive alternative.
“How do you know it’s working?”
Schools are under real pressure to be seen to be doing something about AI. That pressure produces adoption that isn’t always evaluated.
A good answer describes what they’re measuring and when they’ll review it, and ideally includes a willingness to stop using it if the evidence isn’t there. “We’re trialling it this semester and reviewing at the end” is a perfectly good answer. “It’s the future of education” is not an answer.
A note on tone
Ask these as a parent who wants to understand, not as someone building a complaint. Most teachers I’ve worked with are thoughtful about this and are navigating it with very little support, often while being told by vendors and by their own systems that they must adopt quickly.
Sometimes the honest answer is that nobody at the school has thought about a particular question. That’s not a scandal. It’s a small school with a lot going on. Asking the question is often the thing that causes it to be considered, which benefits everyone’s children, not just yours.
I build in this area and I ask these questions about my own children’s school. The two are not in tension. If anything, knowing how these systems are made is exactly why I ask.