ChatGPT is widely used by teachers because it's flexible and familiar — most staff have already encountered it outside school. For primary use, it's strong at drafting, brainstorming, and rewriting, and weaker at anything requiring precise factual accuracy without checking.
Strengths for schools
- Fast, flexible drafting of letters, resources, and planning ideas
- Good at adjusting tone and reading level on request
- Large user base means plenty of shared prompt ideas online
Limitations
- Free tier settings around data use need checking before staff-wide rollout — look for the option to opt out of chat history being used for training
- Can produce confident but incorrect factual content, particularly for maths and specific dates
- Not purpose-built for education, so lacks some safeguarding-specific guardrails that education-specific tools include
Who it suits best
Schools without a strong existing preference for Microsoft or Google's ecosystem, or that want the widest possible base of shared prompt examples and community knowledge to draw on, tend to get on well with ChatGPT as their first general-purpose AI tool.
For schools wanting a general-purpose assistant with strong writing support, it's a solid choice — provided staff are trained on data protection basics first.
Worth knowing: Whichever tool your school lands on, AskColin's training and safe-use guidance is tool-agnostic — the same do/don't principles apply whether staff are using ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini. See the safe-use approach →
Key takeaways
- Strong general-purpose drafting tool with a huge shared knowledge base.
- Check data-use settings before wider staff rollout.
- Always verify factual and maths content before using it with pupils.