A parent on Mumsnet posted in January 2026:

"My child's school informed us that all students from Year 1 to 6 have completed a writing assessment, which will be uploaded to something called a comparative judgement app and marked by AI.“

She asked whether this was now standard in primary schools.

The replies were illuminating. One parent pointed out that edtech data companies conducting these assessments can drill down into

Another had found that the privacy policies of apps her children used on school iPads stated that data may be shared with third parties for software development and analytics.

Her question: Is this for training AI? Is this allowed without my consent?
These are the right questions. And they do not yet have easy answers.

What the comparative judgement app actually is

The tool the Mumsnet parent was describing almost certainly refers to No More Marking, an edtech company used by thousands of UK schools to assess children's writing. Its platform uses comparative judgement, where assessors compare two pieces of writing and decide which is stronger. The company has assessed nearly 200,000 pieces of writing using AI-assisted methods and says AI agreed with teachers in 83% of evaluations across 177 UK schools.

That is a significant amount of children's written work passing through an external system.

At the school level, your child's work is an assignment.
At the system level, it becomes a data point.

Tools that assess children's writing can offer useful insights. They can also require uploading student work to external servers, processing it through AI models, and comparing it across datasets of thousands of children nationwide. Teachers see individual work. Platforms see patterns across thousands of children. That system improves by comparing those patterns, whether or not the work is formally used to train AI models.

Edtech companies have access to data that teachers simply do not: nationwide trends, demographic breakdowns, attendance patterns, geographic and socioeconomic variables. Over time, that data could help identify children falling through the cracks. It could also be used commercially in ways the school, the parent, and the child may not fully understand at the point of collection.

Both things can be true.
This is not a failure of individual schools or teachers.

What good practice looks like

A letter sent to parents by Aylesbury High School in early 2025 shows what transparent communication on this looks like.
The school told parents that children's writing responses would be digitally copied and placed into No More Marking's online platform. As part of a trial, anonymised images of children's writing would be shared with AI cloud services for transcription. Data may be transferred to servers in the United States. The school gave parents a specific opt-out form and stated that data is deleted within 30 days and is not used to train AI models.

That is a well-handled communication.
That level of clarity is unusual.

Most schools do not specify where data goes, how long it is kept, or whether it leaves the UK. Most parents never see a letter like that.

What is actually happening in classrooms

AI and edtech tools are not coming to UK schools. They are already there.
In January 2026, the Department for Education expressed an interest in increasing reliance on AI in educational settings and announced plans to invest £23 million to expand the edtech testbeds pilot programme. The government's message is unambiguous: AI in schools is not a future question. It is a present one.

There is no dedicated regime that certifies AI edtech for school use. No single place where a parent, a teacher, or even a school can verify what a tool does with children's data. A single school can be managing dozens of these tools at once, each with its own data policies, third-party relationships, and terms and conditions most teachers have never read, and most parents have never been shown.