There has been much said about how teachers and pupils can use artificial intelligence (AI) tools - for good or bad - but how about school leaders?

Can traditionally time-poor, task-heavy principals, headteachers, deputies and other leaders make use of AI, not only to improve efficiency, but to improve judgement and support them?

I’d say the answer is a tentative yes - but with caveats, of course. After all, it is important to respect confidentiality and data protection in your jurisdiction, and to remember that AI is merely a part of the process rather than a producer of final work.

Nonetheless, here are five ways I have found it to be helpful in my daily leadership life.

1. A critical friend

When planning for difficult conversations with parents, pupils or staff, AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude can be a perfect sounding board.

They can provide scripts, conversation pathways, bullet points and key phrases with as much or as little detail as required, and you can go back and change the request based on individual circumstances. You can also test different responses based on possible scenarios.

I often provide the AI tool with a few possible ways the conversation could go and ask for key phrases in each situation. I then print them and stick them in my notebook, which I will have during the conversation.

Often, they are never referred to, but they provide the security of having something to turn to. To improve output, ask the AI to be a “critical friend” to you, and provide context for the conversation - without any personal information, of course.

2. Project management

Project management in schools can be a messy affair. As an expanding school, we often start with an objective that then necessitates several different workflows or action plans overseen by different teams or different people.

For example, our recent work opening a secondary section needed separate action plans for facilities in terms of capital expenditure, from academic teams with regard to curriculum and from HR in terms of hiring.

AI can be hugely valuable for leaders as you can ask it to bring detailed plans back together into one synthesised document - be it a Gantt chart or a timeline.

I also often ask the AI tool to analyse all the action plans together and look for overlap, redundancy or areas where the timelines are not matched.

3. Writing up informal notes

AI tools will do a reasonable job of making sense of even the most jumbled handwritten notes if you upload them as a photo.

The simple instruction, “Make sense of the notes in this photo,” can be very powerful. It can also do this in context - for example, I often take handwritten lesson observation notes and then upload them with background as to the focus of the observation.

I then provide the tool a copy of the lesson observation feedback form and ask ChatGPT to complete the form for me based on my notes.

4. Minuting meetings

Tools such as Otter.ai, Krisp and Tactiq can provide clear meeting minutes with action points, summaries and detailed transcripts of both online and offline meetings.

This saves administrative staff from having to take minutes and ensures detailed records are always available. These can also be stored and shared in the tool itself, minimising admin work.

Different tools have different strengths, and most offer free trials so you can find the one that works best for you and your team. Many offer integration with Microsoft Teams or Google Drive, too.

Always check with participants to ensure they are comfortable with being recorded, though.

5. Changing the format of content

Often, as leaders, we find ourselves writing the same, or very similar, content for different audiences - for example, what staff need to know about an event will be different to what pupils and parents need to know.

One good timesaving hack is to take an event plan, upload it to an AI tool such as ChatGPT and ask it to “write an email explaining this event to parents”.

This can be repeated, changing, for example, to writing a reminder WhatsApp message for the event to parents, or writing a post to go in the newsletter.

Likewise, when drafting staff and parent handbooks, it can be time-saving to upload a policy and ask the tool to distil it down to its key elements suitable for reproduction in a handbook.

AI tools are far from foolproof and can never be a substitute for a “real-life” critical friend. However, in a world where time is at a premium, leaders who learn to use these tools critically will stay ahead in a rapidly changing educational landscape.

John McEnhill is head of Junior School at Viet Nam Tinh Hoa supported by NLCS International, an IB school

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