Microsoft’s AI Safety and Privacy Standard for Schools takes effect in the US today. UK schools already have a baseline through Enterprise Data Protection. The AFT standard adds specific contractual layers UK schools do not have.
Chancellor John Healey's first Budget drops on October 28. The pre-briefing has been about crumbling schools. The four line items that will tell you what the Budget means for school IT and EdTech capital are elsewhere in the fine print.
The DfE has given state schools until December 31 to publish an inclusion strategy. Independent schools face a parallel ISI conversation. Both come back to the same question: can your MIS, your safeguarding system, and your intervention records actually prove what the strategy claims?
On September 23, the DfE announced new Vocational GCSEs for first teaching from 2029. Digital Technology is one of the five subjects named. Three years feels like a long time. For IT departments being asked to help deliver a rigorous qualification in the school's own subject area, it is not.
The DfE has removed two exemptions from its Core Cyber Security Standard. MFA is now non-negotiable. Patching has zero tolerance. The more interesting question is what framework the DfE is quietly aligning schools to, and how it compares to what the rest of the world uses.
Schools have moved fast on the KCSIE 2026 phone-free-by-default position, and Yondr pouches are the enforcement product of choice. At £20 to £25 per pupil per year, the question worth asking is whether the product actually delivers on the enforcement promise.
The widest regional divide the modern GCSE grading system has ever produced. Independent schools' top grades fell slightly while state schools held steady. UCAS warned students about AI misinformation on results day itself. This may be the first genuinely AI-aware results week.
Fifty years of AI on screen, from HAL to M3GAN, and what those films actually got right, wrong, and still open. HAL got the alignment problem. Blade Runner got the philosophy. WarGames got the ethics. And Charlie Brooker's Be Right Back may turn out to be the most prescient of all.
On July 29, the DfE confirmed hackers stole 607,000 records from its help desk and Turing Scheme portal. Names, emails and job titles of headteachers and senior leaders were among them. The DfE says the risk is "not high." That position needs challenging.
The DfE published new EdTech procurement guidance on July 9. It is the first DfE document to reference the ICO's Edtech Examined findings, and it tells schools to treat procurement as a connected governance decision, not an isolated IT one. Read it before September.
A short note as the school year ends. The summer isn't quiet for everyone, the readership has grown in ways that continue to surprise, and September will bring the KCSIE deadline and everything else. Thank you for reading.
KCSIE 2026 has been published and comes into force on September 1. It makes phone-free schools the default, brings AI-generated content into safeguarding practice, updates data protection for the DUAA, and rewrites volunteer vetting. Schools have six weeks to update policies.