Is your school marketing strategy AI-ready?

There have been plenty of articles written about the rise of AI in education... but most of them are talking about how students use AI.

What about how schools use it?

Can AI help schools with marketing, promotion and communications — or is it all a waste of time?

How many schools are using AI?

AI has seen a marked increase in schools, both as a tool and a topic of conversation. Google Trends data for "ai in schools" shows interest in the term jumping massively in the first quarter of February, after a relatively slow rise throughout 2023 to 2025.

But this data alone does not suggest that the rise is due to school staff using AI. With the topic of students using AI for homework, exam preparation and other schoolwork remaining a focus in many education forums, we can assume it contributes to a healthy chunk of that spike.

To understand how, if and why school staff are using AI, we need to ask them. Luckily, a recent survey by the National Education Union did exactly that.

School leaders are more likely to use AI

In a survey of over 9000 National Education Union members, data showed that school leadership are significantly more likely to use AI than classroom teachers.

Leadership are 55% more likely to turn to AI for administration tasks, with only 35% of classroom teachers saying the same.

When teachers do use AI, they are most likely to use it for resource creation (61% of respondents) and lesson planning (41%). 

But what about AI's role in school marketing?

AI is under-used for school marketing

One area where AI has yet to be picked up by schools is marketing and promotion.

According to a 2025 Marketing Advisers for Schools survey, just 30% of schools use AI for marketing, content and campaign support. The education sector is behind the curve here, with 64% of people in the marketing sector saying they use AI tools in their role (Statista, 2026).

But in a sector where time is valuable, AI has significant benefits for school marketing. AI can be used:

• To translate communications to parents into other languages, making sure all families get the same information and updates.
• To create clear and concise updates for parents and students from a teacher or other staff member’s notes.
• To create automatic captions for videos, so families who are hard of hearing can still enjoy them.
• To improve images by removing distracting backgrounds, improving lighting or resizing images automatically.
• To schedule emails and updates for specific times or days.

By using AI to reduce the hours spent on the small but time-consuming details baked into most school marketing, staff time is freed up to concentrate on the bigger picture. For school marketing staff, that's time that can be spent on strategy, content and campaign creation or analysis of results. 

Do schools need AI policies?

A minority of schools have guidance on AI usage for both staff and students, with an average 49% of teachers saying their school has no policy whatsoever. While secondary schools are slightly more likely to have policies in place then primary schools, many school staff are being left to guess at the most appropriate use of AI in their setting.

Without this guidance, staff cannot be sure whether use of AI in public-facing contexts, such as school marketing, is acceptable or not.

The solution is clear: forward-facing schools and Trusts need robust AI policies for both staff and students to be ready for a world where platforms like ChatGPT and Claude are increasingly used for admin tasks, resource development and communications.

Until then, school staff will be left to guess at how and when AI can be used to improve or refine school marketing strategies - despite other sectors racing ahead.

Does your school have a strategy for communications? Does it really have one? Have a look at our guide to creating a foolproof school communications strategy.