5.3 Roadmap for Schools

Who this section is for

School leaders, deputy heads and those responsible for professional development in a school. You do not need to have read the preceding sections in full. If you have read the nine stages in 5.2, this section tells you how they apply to a school; if you have not, you can start here.

Where schools enter the roadmap. This roadmap was developed for teacher education institutions, but its change logic is not specific to them, and one stage concerns schools directly. Stage 6, Embed AI into CPD, is the in-service arm: it is where teacher education institutions organise the continuing professional development that your staff attend. That is your entry point. What your institution offers as Stage 6 arrives in your school as professional development, and whether it changes anything in your classrooms depends on conditions within that school. 

Why you cannot start there and stop. Sending staff to a one-off course is the most common approach and at the same time unlikely to change practice on its own. What works is sustained engagement with a content focus, opportunity to practise, and follow-up in the form of coaching or collaboration (Lipowsky & Rzejak, 2021). This has a direct consequence for a school leader. The scarce resource is not the course; it is the protected time afterwards in which teachers try something, discuss it with colleagues and adjust. 

Figure 1. DUAL.AI.TEACHer Integration Roadmap: Nine stages for the institutional integration of AI in teacher education.

The three stages to prioritise at school level

Stage 6 is your connection point, but Stages 1-3 create the conditions that make it work. 

Stage 1, Strategic Alignment. Establish where your school actually stands. Some of your staff are already using AI, some are avoiding it, and schools may not have a clear picture of current practice. A short, honest stocktake is worth more than a strategy paper. Name what you want to achieve, and be prepared for the answer that AI is not currently your school's most pressing problem; that is a legitimate result of this stage.

Stage 2, Enabling Governance. This is particulary important at school level and easy to overlook. Staff and students need to know what is permitted, how AI use is to be disclosed, which tools have been checked for data protection, and what counts as academic dishonesty. Where this is unclear, two things happen at once: cautious teachers avoid AI entirely, and confident ones use it without any agreed limits. Clear, enabling guidance helps addressing both. It does not need to be long.

Stage 3, Staff Capacity. In the original roadmap this stage concerns teacher educators; in your school it concerns your teaching staff. The same quality conditions apply. Consider starting with a small group of willing colleagues in one or two subjects rather than a whole-staff rollout, and make their results visible to the rest of the staff. Innovations spread when colleagues can see them working in their own setting (Neal et al., 2018).

What is different in a school

Three constraints distinguish your situation from that of a teacher education institution, and the roadmap should be read with them in mind.

You have less curricular autonomy. Stages 4 and 5 assume an institution that can revise its own course content. Much of your curriculum may be set within national or statutory frameworks and your room for manoeuvre lies in how subjects are taught and how learning is assessed, not in what is prescribed. Read those stages as being about task design and assessment practice.

Your staff have less discretionary time. A teacher education institution can assign development work to academic staff as part of their role. In a school, every hour of development competes directly with teaching. This makes Stage 2 disproportionately valuable: guidance costs little time and removes a great deal of friction.

You are closer to the consequences. Schools experience the the practical consequences of questions around equity, student data and access particulary directly. Stage 8 asks explicitly about equity for this reason.

Lipowsky, F., & Rzejak, D. (2021). Fortbildungen für Lehrpersonen wirksam gestalten: Ein praxisorientierter und forschungsgestützter Leitfaden. Bertelsmann Stiftung.
Neal, J. W., Neal, Z. P., Lawlor, J. A., Mills, K. J., & McAlindon, K. (2018). What makes research useful for public school educators? Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 45(3), 432–446.