The question no one in Grantham can fully answer yet
The King's School Grantham has been educating young people since at least 1329 — Isaac Newton sat in its classrooms in the 1650s. Nearly four centuries on, the school describes preparing pupils with "skills and qualities for successful futures," yet its public pages carry no mention of artificial intelligence and no published AI policy.
That absence is not unusual. None of South Kesteven's secondaries appear to have placed their approach to AI on the public record. And yet the national picture is unambiguous: between 40 and 60 per cent of UK secondary teachers now report students using ChatGPT-type tools, largely for homework. The Department for Education told every school in England to develop its own AI policy in 2023. Whether Grantham's schools have done so — and what those policies look like in practice — is not yet visible to anyone outside the staffroom.
The gap between a clear national shift and a local silence is exactly where the interesting questions live.
The digital foundations Grantham has been building
South Kesteven has been laying groundwork, even if AI itself is not yet centre stage.
Grantham College's Institute of Technology — housed in the converted Stonebridge House and part of the University of Lincoln-led Lincolnshire Institute of Technology consortium — gives post-16 students access to IT design studios, digital technology suites, and engineering robotics. The practical focus matters: Level 4 courses in cyber security, data analytics, and software engineering are designed explicitly to fill a local recruitment gap, with entry-level digital roles starting around £27,000 and, according to the college's LIoT profile, employers across the region still struggling to find suitably skilled candidates.
At secondary level, West Grantham Academy's partnership with Grantham engineering firm BGB puts students in front of CAD software, milling machines, and real project briefs — not as a classroom simulation but as live exposure to how technical work actually gets done. It is the kind of employer-led model that normalises working with complex tools before students ever reach further education.
None of this is the same as AI in the classroom. But a student who has already navigated data analytics coursework or a CAD assembly task is better placed to engage critically with an AI tool — and more likely to notice when its output is wrong — than one encountering digital technology for the first time. These are foundations, not proof of readiness.
Industry is getting there before the classroom
On the factory floor of Autocraft, a Grantham-based manufacturer, workers are already using augmented reality overlays and predictive Digital Twins to train on machinery and anticipate faults. That is not a classroom — but it is, in effect, a learning environment where AI-adjacent tools are the everyday reality.
This pattern is common nationally: employers tend to adopt new technology faster than schools can, partly because procurement cycles are shorter and partly because schools carry safeguarding and academic-integrity obligations that slow experimentation. What makes it worth noting in South Kesteven specifically is that employer-led learning is already embedded in the district. West Grantham Academy's BGB engineering partnership — where secondary students handle CAD and live project briefs — means the conceptual distance between classroom and workplace is already narrower here than in districts where school and industry rarely intersect. Autocraft's use of AR and Digital Twins suggests that narrowing may soon extend to AI-adjacent tools too.
For many young people in the area, a work placement or first job may therefore be where these technologies arrive — before any school policy catches up.
What the national picture suggests is probably happening here
Nationally, the picture is clear enough to be useful, even without school-by-school confirmation from South Kesteven.
Between 2023 and 2025, surveys consistently found 40–60% of UK secondary teachers reporting students using ChatGPT or similar tools — almost entirely for homework rather than in supervised lessons. Teachers themselves are catching up: a growing share use AI to draft lesson plans, generate differentiated resources, and produce first-pass marking feedback, typically at individual discretion rather than through any whole-school system.
The tools gaining traction in English schools reflect this piecemeal pattern. Sparx Maths uses adaptive algorithms to set and track maths homework; Century Tech personalises learning pathways across subjects; MagicSchool AI helps teachers generate lesson materials quickly. Most remain individual teacher pilots rather than formal whole-school rollouts — a direct consequence of the DfE's 2023 guidance (covered in the previous section), which placed policy responsibility squarely on each school and produced considerable variation in how quickly and systematically institutions have responded.
Ofsted has sharpened the stakes. Inspectors now treat digital literacy as a curriculum outcome, not an optional extra, and have signalled they will examine how schools manage AI to protect academic integrity. That reframes the central question: not whether students are using these tools, but whether schools have a coherent plan for engagement that is already under way.
Apply this baseline to South Kesteven's secondary schools and a plausible picture emerges. Students at The King's School, Kesteven and Grantham Girls', and West Grantham Academy are likely using AI tools in some form — the national numbers make the alternative improbable. The real unknowns are whether formal policies are in place, which tools staff are adopting, and how unevenly the district's connectivity gaps affect access.
Why AI readiness is uneven across the district
Grantham Library, housed in the Isaac Newton Centre, runs regular digital drop-in sessions in partnership with Lincs Digital and 2aspire under the Lincolnshire Health and Care Digital Inclusion Strategy. Those sessions exist because basic digital access and confidence cannot be taken for granted across South Kesteven — and that fact has direct implications for what AI adoption in local schools actually looks like.
Rural parts of the district compound the problem. A village school eight miles from Grantham town centre may be serving families with limited home broadband and may itself be running on connectivity that makes cloud-dependent tools such as Microsoft Copilot, Khanmigo, or Century Tech unreliable mid-lesson. AI platforms that stream responses from remote servers are only as useful as the connection supporting them; patchy infrastructure turns a promising tool into an intermittent one.
Device access adds a further layer. Tools that assume a personal device per student — a laptop or tablet — are not equally available across households or schools, and the gap between a well-resourced town school and a smaller rural setting can be substantial.
The district has genuine ambition and is building infrastructure to match. But AI readiness in South Kesteven classrooms starts from meaningfully different points depending on postcode, and any account that skips over that unevenness misses something structurally important about what 'AI in schools' actually means here.
The questions worth asking locally
The question that matters most locally is not whether AI tools are arriving in South Kesteven classrooms — the national numbers make some form of student and teacher use probable — but who is deciding how they get used, and on what basis.
That is a governance question as much as a technology one. Grantham College's Institute of Technology is publicly explicit about its digital ambition: Level 4 qualifications in data analytics and cyber security, engineering robotics, a purpose-built digital environment. Its secondary counterparts — The King's School, Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School, and West Grantham Academy — have no equivalent public statement on AI policy, at least in what their websites currently share. That gap between the college's stated direction and the secondary schools' public silence is not evidence of inaction, but it is a legitimate thing to notice. It is also the specific local discrepancy that makes the question worth asking directly.
Anyone with a direct line into those schools — as a teacher, parent, governor, or student — is closer to the actual answer than any national survey. The interesting question to put to them is not 'do you use AI?' but 'do you have a policy, and did the people who teach here help write it?'