The best use of AI in primary schools for lesson planning isn't asking it to write your lesson for you — it's asking it to do the slow, unglamorous parts so you have more time for the parts that need your judgement: knowing your class, adapting on the fly, and building relationships.
What works well
- Generating three alternative starter activities for a topic, so you can pick or blend the best bits
- Turning a rough lesson outline into a structured plan template
- Suggesting cross-curricular links you might not have thought of
- Drafting differentiated task instructions for different ability groups
What to keep for yourself
The parts of planning that depend on knowing your specific class — which pupils will need extra support today, what misconception came up last lesson, how a particular activity landed with this group last year — stay with you. AI has no memory of your classroom, and that's exactly why it should never be doing this part.
A simple workflow to try this week
Try: describe the objective and year group, ask for three starter ideas and a main activity structure, then rewrite the output in your own words and adjust for your class before you use it. That edit step is what keeps lessons feeling like yours rather than generic. Most teachers find this whole process takes ten minutes rather than the thirty or forty a full plan from scratch can take.
A prompt to try today
"Suggest three different starter activities for a Year 3 lesson on [topic], each taking no more than 8 minutes, using only materials commonly found in a primary classroom." Notice the specificity — year group, time limit, and material constraint all narrow the output toward something genuinely usable rather than generic.
Key takeaways
- Use AI for the slow parts of planning; keep class-specific judgement for yourself.
- Specific prompts (year group, time, materials) beat generic ones.
- Always rewrite the output in your own words before using it.