Copyright and AI: What Schools Need to Understand

Copyright and AI is a genuinely unsettled area of law, and schools shouldn't expect certainty where none exists yet. That said, a few practical principles keep most day-to-day use of AI in primary schools low-risk.

Practical guidance

• Treat AI-generated text and images as a first draft you'll edit, not a finished, publishable asset — this reduces both quality and copyright risk.
• Be cautious about using AI-generated images in published, external-facing materials (like a prospectus or website) without checking your tool's licensing terms.
• Don't ask AI to reproduce copyrighted material — song lyrics, published worksheets, textbook extracts — even for internal use.
• Keep a light record of which tools were used for which published materials, in case questions arise later.

Where most schools actually run into this

In practice, the most common copyright question isn't about AI generating something original — it's staff asking AI to "rewrite this worksheet" or "adapt this text," where the underlying material is already copyrighted by a publisher. Rewriting doesn't remove the original copyright if the result is still substantially the same content; treat this the same way you'd treat photocopying beyond fair dealing limits.

When to seek advice

For anything genuinely public-facing and high-stakes — a rebranded prospectus, a paid resource, a MAT-wide publication — it's worth a quick check with your legal advisers rather than relying on general guidance like this. For everyday classroom use, common sense and the principles above will cover almost every situation.