Claude Foundations for Teachers

Use Claude safely at school

Set up your Claude safely, from the first chat to the first agent. A self-paced course for teachers, in twelve lessons.

It covers three questions: whose data is this, what may I paste, and what happens when my students use it too.

Twelve lessons · No technical background needed

See the twelve lessons ↓ What is included

Course approach

Set the boundaries before using the features

Claude knows nothing about your classes, specification or marking policy until you provide that context. It also needs clear limits on the school information it may receive.

Each lesson explains one feature, its data protection implications and the settings you need before using it.

The journey

Twelve lessons: from chat to agent

The course starts with the safe foundations for using Claude in chat. It finishes with agents working on their own while you are away. The first part builds the judgement the second part needs.

In chat · Claude responds to you

Lesson 1Intro: Why Claude The tool you choose is your first data protection decision, and the first one your head will ask about.

Lesson 2The safe setup A few toggles that outrank every prompting tip you will ever read, and where your personal account falls within your school's duties.

Lesson 3Personalisation: Make it yours Claude learns your subject, your key stage and your tone. You decide what it keeps, and what it must never write down.

Lesson 4Everyday chat Uploads, screenshots, model choice, saving your work, and anonymising as a reflex rather than an afterthought.

Lesson 5Projects: A room for every area One room per area of work, with your spec and marking policy inside it. You decide where the walls go.

Lesson 6Artifacts Knowledge organisers, worksheets and reports you refine in conversation and keep, checked before a child ever sees them.

Lesson 7When they use it too Academic honesty, assessment that survives AI, and why a detector score is not evidence.

Lesson 8Skills: Your procedures manual Write a recurring task down once as a Skill, then reuse it every week. Your first taste of building.

Lesson 9Connectors: Keys, handed carefully Your school inbox and drive hold everything, and Claude gets one narrow door.

the line: chat becomes agents

Up to here, Claude answers when you ask. Beyond it, Claude works while you are away.

Beyond the line · Claude acts for you

Lesson 10Routines: The night shift Watch a Routine prepare next week's planning brief overnight, inside a folder that holds nothing else.

Lesson 11Cowork: An agent at your desk Multi-step work on your own files, sandboxed to the one folder you allow. Last year's resources, brought up to the new spec.

Consolidation

Lesson 12Checklist: The end-of-term review Audit your whole setup against the Safe Command checklist, then work one new unit through everything you built.

Page 13The quiz Twenty-three questions across everything you built. Eighty per cent clears the way to your certificate.

Page 14Your certificate Add your name and generate your personalised certificate of completion.

Woven through, lesson by lesson

The four questions a teacher has to answer

Each of these arrives where it comes up in real work: at the toggle, at the memory note, at the student's name, at the connector.

Data protection

Who is the controller, what counts as special category data, and the red line no setting moves: no identifiable child, no safeguarding material, no marks with a name attached. The course includes a method for anonymising notes before pasting them.

Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 12

Shadow AI

The personal account doing school work that the school knows nothing about. What it costs your school in visibility, and the four questions to ask your data protection lead so the arrangement stops being invisible.

Lessons 1, 2, 12

Ethics

Check accuracy, invented statistics, who appears in generated examples, who is missing and the reading age before anything reaches a class.

Lessons 3, 6, 10, 11

Honesty and detection

What JCQ counts as misuse, the one line per task that removes most of the problem, why detectors falsely flag EAL and autistic writers, and how to design assessments that need your classroom rather than your vigilance.

Lesson 7, with a callback in 12

Nothing switched on before you understand it.

Every lesson has the same rhythm: what we are about to do, the idea behind it, a walkthrough on a real account, something to practise, and what changed. No lesson asks you to enable a feature before you know what it does and what it costs.

One story continues through the whole course. Sofia teaches Geography and History in a secondary school, and her weekly notes travel with you from Lesson 4 to Lesson 10: the scribbles about what worked with 9C and who is still lost, which have to become next week's plans. Each time, Claude handles them at a higher level: pasted into a chat, then inside a subject project, then through a saved procedure, then straight from her drive, and finally overnight while she sleeps.

Alongside her, every lesson carries examples from elsewhere in a school: primary class teachers, heads of department, SENCOs, IB coordinators, MFL and science and computer science, exams officers, trainees.

What you get

Twelve self-paced lessons

Claude, from setup to agents

Claude Foundations for Teachers

Set up your Claude safely, from the first chat to the first agent, with a data protection and academic honesty lens on every step.

Twelve lessons with practice on your own account
The Safe Command checklist for reviewing your setup in Lesson 12 and each half term
The twenty-three-question quiz and your personalised certificate of completion
Sofia's running example, one real chore climbing from chat to overnight preparation
Course updates as Claude changes, included
Access by personal link, with no separate course account or password

Secure checkout by Stripe. The total, including any tax, is shown before you pay. VAT invoice included. Sold under the Claude Foundations for Teachers Licence, which you accept at checkout. The only thing we store about you is the email your access link goes to. Whole-staff access is arranged school by school: ask us.

Before you decide

The practical questions

Does this cover using AI with students in lessons?

The course is about your own professional work: planning, materials, marking, reports, and the data protection duties that reach your laptop. Lesson 7 covers what students do with AI outside your classroom, and how to design assessments around it. Classroom AI-literacy lessons to teach are a separate thing, and they live in the resource library.

My school has not decided anything about AI. Is this still for me?

That is the common case, and the course is built for it. Lesson 12 gives you four questions to put to whoever holds data protection at your school, and one paragraph you can write about your own practice. If your leadership team wants the whole-school view, the readiness toolkit is what to send them.

Which countries does the legal side apply to?

The data protection material is written around the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR, with the EU AI Act named where educational uses reach its high-risk category. The assessment and honesty material cites JCQ, which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The principles carry further than the citations do, and the citations are exact so you can check them.

What do I need before I start?

You need a computer and an email address. Lesson 1 helps you decide whether Claude fits your work, and Lesson 2 covers account setup from the first screen.

Do I need a paid Claude plan?

The free plan carries you through most of the course. The two agent lessons near the end demonstrate features from the paid plan (Claude Pro, about €20 per month at the time of writing), and Lesson 10 is built so you learn the idea fully even if you stay free.

Is it technical?

It is written in plain English for teachers. Technical terms appear where they help and are explained when first used.

How is the course delivered, and for how long?

Your personal access link arrives by email after payment and opens the course in a browser. Access has no expiry, and updates are included for as long as the course exists.

I mostly use ChatGPT. Is this for me?

The safety habits, the red line, the assessment design and the honesty material transfer to any AI tool. The walkthroughs are all Claude. Lesson 1 makes the case that the tool you choose is itself a data protection decision.