The gap between what students do and what schools teach
Somewhere between a third and three-quarters of British teenagers started using generative AI in the space of a single school year. In 2023, 37% of 13–18 year olds reported using it; by 2024, that figure had risen to 77%, according to a National Literacy Trust survey of 15,830 young people. That is not a gradual shift — it is a classroom already changed.
There is no particular reason to think students in South Kesteven sat this out. The tools are free, available on any phone, and unrestricted by postcode. Whether a secondary school in Grantham or Sleaford has a formal AI policy, a lesson plan that mentions ChatGPT, or any structured guidance at all, the statistical likelihood is that most of its older pupils have already used generative AI — for homework, for ideas, for drafts.
That reframes the question local schools are actually facing. The debate about whether AI belongs in education has largely been overtaken by events. The more useful question now is a practical one: what are South Kesteven schools doing about it, and is what they are doing keeping pace with what their students are already doing outside the classroom?
What The King's School Grantham is already running
The King's School Grantham offers one of the clearest local examples of AI already embedded in secondary education — not as a topic on the timetable, but as a tool running quietly beneath classroom activity.
The school uses CENTURY, a platform that combines machine learning and neuroscience to map what individual students know and, crucially, where their understanding breaks down. Rather than presenting the same material to everyone, CENTURY adjusts the content a student receives based on how they have responded to previous questions — identifying knowledge gaps and directing practice at the specific points where it is needed. At King's, it forms part of the remote and blended learning offer, supplementing teacher-led instruction rather than replacing it.
The distinction matters. CENTURY is AI as infrastructure — working in the background, shaping how learning is paced and personalised — rather than AI as subject matter. The school's Computing curriculum, delivered across three fully equipped ICT rooms running professional Microsoft software, covers programming, data handling, internet safety, and hardware and software design. Based on the school's published curriculum pages, a discrete AI module does not appear in the syllabus. The technology is present in how the school supports learning; it is not yet the thing being taught.
That gap between using AI and teaching about AI is not unique to King's — but the school's deployment of CENTURY makes it a concrete local case of the distinction.
Where AI is taught as a subject: Grantham College's Institute of Technology
The provision described so far sits within the secondary phase. For anyone asking where AI can be studied as an explicit subject locally, the answer lies further along the education pathway — at Grantham College's Institute of Technology, based in the restored Stonebridge House.
The college offers Level 4 and 5 courses in Artificial Intelligence, Digital Marketing, and Cybersecurity, delivered through purpose-built IT design studios and digital technology suites. Level 4 and 5 qualifications — Higher National Certificates and Higher Technical Qualifications — sit above A-level and correspond roughly to the first year or two of a degree. They are aimed at post-18 learners and adults looking to retrain or upskill, not at students still in secondary school.
That positioning matters. The Institute of Technology is not a pipeline feeding into secondary AI teaching. It is the local answer to the question 'where in this part of Lincolnshire can I study AI formally?' — and the answer is post-16, post-secondary, and deliberately vocational.
Grantham College sits within the Lincolnshire Institute of Technology consortium, led by the University of Lincoln, which spans agri-tech, energy, engineering, and a connecting digital strand. That means Grantham's AI provision is part of a coordinated regional skills infrastructure rather than a standalone course listing — a meaningful distinction for anyone considering it as a career-change route or employer-funded progression step.
The rules every local school is working within
Behind every decision a South Kesteven school makes about AI sits a set of rules that are real, layered, and often poorly understood by people outside the staffroom.
The most immediate constraint is academic integrity. Both Kesteven and Sleaford High School and The King's School Grantham require students to declare any AI use in their work. Submitting AI-generated content as one's own — without attribution — is classified as academic malpractice under Acceptable Use policies aligned with JCQ (Joint Council for Qualifications) guidance. For certain assessed coursework, JCQ requires drafting to take place under direct teacher supervision, precisely to close the window that AI opens.
The data protection rules are less visible but arguably more consequential. Under UK GDPR and ICO guidance, staff cannot enter personal student information — SEN status, assessment scores, behavioural records — into a public generative AI platform. The model may retain or process that data in ways that fall outside what schools can lawfully permit. This rules out some of the most intuitive applications of AI in education: automatically tailoring feedback based on a student's learning history, for instance, is not straightforwardly permissible if it requires feeding identifiable data into a consumer-facing tool.
Age thresholds add a further practical limit. Most generative AI tools, including ChatGPT, set a minimum age of 13. In a secondary school, that covers the whole of Years 7 and 8 — some schools in Lincolnshire restrict AI access for those year groups specifically as a result.
Lincolnshire County Council adds another governance tier for council-linked services: any AI deployment must clear a Data Protection Impact Assessment and an Information Assurance Assessment before going live. The council's own pilot of Microsoft Copilot for administrative tasks suggests the institutional stance is cautious adoption rather than blanket resistance — but caution, here, is a deliberate and legitimate position, not institutional inertia.
What teachers can use right now — national tools reaching local classrooms
The governance picture in the previous section describes what schools cannot do. The national provision picture is somewhat more encouraging about what they can.
DfE guidance published in June 2025 explicitly confirms that teachers in England may use AI for lesson planning, creating resources, marking, giving feedback, and handling administrative tasks. The requirement is straightforward: professional judgement applies, accuracy must be verified, and accountability stays with the teacher. Schools may set additional rules within those legal limits — but the national position is permissive rather than prohibitive.
The most concrete tool available to any South Kesteven teacher right now is Oak National Academy's 'Aila', launched in September 2024 with £2 million in government funding. Aila is free. A teacher can use it to generate a bespoke lesson plan, slide deck, worksheet, or quiz in minutes, tailored to their class rather than assembled from generic templates. There are no licensing fees and no institutional agreement required — a teacher at any local school can open it today.
The DfE is also funding AI tools specifically designed to assess handwritten and hand-drawn student work, which points toward future applications in geography and practical subjects. These are in development rather than deployed, but they indicate where assessment technology is heading.
Beyond the school gates, a fully funded short course — 'AI Introduction: Skills for Work and Life' (CGE0AI0004), run through 2aspire and Lincolnshire Adult Education — is open to adults in the county. It covers practical AI use for CVs, research, interviews, and everyday planning: a signal that the local ecosystem is building AI literacy across generations, not only within the curriculum.
What this means for students in South Kesteven now
For most secondary students in South Kesteven, AI is something they are likely to experience rather than study. CENTURY at King's runs in the background — adjusting what a student practises based on their performance — without making AI itself the subject of attention. That is a coherent pedagogical choice, but it means a student can move through secondary school benefiting from AI-assisted learning without ever being formally taught to interrogate how it works, what it gets wrong, or whose interests shaped it.
The gap sharpens when you look at what sits six miles along the A52. The only place in the district where AI is a named, examined subject is Grantham College's Institute of Technology — and its Level 4 and 5 courses are designed for adults retraining, not teenagers still in school. The local infrastructure for studying AI formally begins precisely where the school system ends.
For the schools whose public curriculum pages do not address AI teaching directly — Kesteven and Sleaford High School, De Aston School, and others — what is happening in classrooms is simply not visible from outside. Some may be doing significant work not reflected in published materials. Students and parents can ask: a direct question about how AI is appearing in lessons is a reasonable one to put, and most schools can point to a policy that explains the rules they are working within.
What the evidence does suggest is that most students are already working this out for themselves. The more pressing question, for anyone in Years 10 to 13, is whether that self-taught practice includes the habit of checking what AI actually produces.