Can My Child Use ChatGPT for Homework? What UK Schools Actually Allow

The homework comes back with a comment you didn't expect. Or it was finished in eleven minutes and reads better than anything your child has written before. Or you ask how the history essay is going and are told that everyone uses ChatGPT, that the teachers know, and that it's fine.

Some of that may be true. The difficulty for parents is that nobody has told them which parts.

This guide sets out what the rules actually are in England, where the line that matters sits, and how to tell in two minutes whether AI is helping your child learn or doing the learning for them.

Is it allowed? It depends on the school

There is no national rule on using AI for homework. The Department for Education's policy paper on generative AI in education says schools are free to make their own choices about how AI is used, as long as they meet their wider duties such as safeguarding. Some schools only let teachers use it. Others allow pupils to use it, but only in certain subjects or year groups.

“Schools and colleges may wish to review homework policies, and other types of unsupervised study to account for the availability of generative AI. This may include developing guidance on when it is acceptable or appropriate to use generative AI tools for educators, students and pupils.”

Department for Education, Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in education, updated 12 August 2025

Note the word "may". Reviewing the homework policy is a suggestion, not a requirement, and so is the line that follows it, that schools may wish to consider how they talk to parents about AI. In practice, one school bans AI for homework outright, the next encourages it for revision, and a third has a policy on its website that nobody has mentioned to you. Two children in the same street can be working under opposite rules.

Teachers are not settled on it either. In the National Literacy Trust's 2026 survey, 60.1% of teachers said they were worried about pupils using AI, up from 43.2% a year earlier. Among secondary teachers the figure was 67.7%.

What ChatGPT's own age rules say

Before the school's rules come the app's. OpenAI's terms for UK users say you must be at least 13 to use ChatGPT, and that anyone under 18 needs a parent or guardian's permission and should ask them to read the terms together. Other chatbots set their own age limits, and the Department for Education tells schools to comply with them.

So the first decision is yours, not the school's. Here is how it maps onto school years:

Terms are not a lock. Nothing stops a 12-year-old typing in a false birthday, and AI assistants now sit inside apps your child already uses. But if a Year 7 child is using ChatGPT for homework, the service itself says they shouldn't be, which is a useful fact to have when the conversation starts.

How teenagers are actually using it

It's easy to picture every teenager handing their homework to a chatbot. The best UK data is more mixed than that. The National Literacy Trust surveyed 40,543 young people aged 13 to 18 in early 2026, and 79.0% said they had used AI.

That is the number to worry about, and it has barely moved in a year. The rest of the picture is more encouraging. More than half (56.5%) said they usually add their own thoughts to what AI gives them, and 52.3% said they check its answers because they might be wrong, both clearly up on 2025. And 62.8% agreed that you should use AI to help you think, not to think for you.

One young person in the charity's focus groups put it better than most policies. They had stopped letting AI do their work, because "I can't bring it to the exam anyway."

Parents are divided too. In a separate survey of 3,073 UK parents for the same charity, 35.9% agreed that AI is not something they want their child to use, while 32.9% disagreed. Among parents of 12 to 15-year-olds, 33.7% said they had used AI with their child to help with homework. If you are unsure where you stand, you are in good company.

Homework and coursework are not the same thing

This is the distinction that matters most, and the one most children have not been told clearly.

Ordinary homework, such as a worksheet, a practice essay or a set of maths questions, follows your school's rules. If a child copies from AI, the usual result is a conversation with the teacher and a lesson they didn't learn.

Work that counts towards a GCSE or A-Level grade is different. Most marks come from exams sat under supervision with no internet, so AI is not available there at all. But some subjects include coursework, which exam boards call non-exam assessment (NEA). GCSE design and technology is half coursework, and several A-Levels, including history, English literature and geography, have an NEA component. The Extended Project Qualification is coursework from start to finish. All of this is governed by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which sets the rules for the main exam boards.

Misuse is malpractice. The sanctions available include disqualification and being barred from taking qualifications for a number of years. And even where a student openly acknowledges the AI, JCQ says the copied sections will not be rewarded, because they don't show the student meeting the marking criteria themselves. Put simply, acknowledged AI text scores nothing, and unacknowledged AI text can cost the whole qualification.

If your child is in Year 10 or above and has any coursework on the go, ask the teacher exactly what is and isn't allowed for that piece. The rules for that work are far stricter than for anything else they do at home.

Uses that help, and uses that replace learning

Take the rules away and a simpler question is left: is the AI doing the thinking, or helping your child do it? The same tool can do either. It depends on when it is used and what it is asked to do.

Summaries deserve a special mention. In the 2026 survey, 53.5% of teenagers who used AI at least monthly said they had used it to shorten or summarise something to make it quicker to read, up from 33.0% a year before. For a class novel, the reading is the homework. Our post on children who hate reading explains why that reading matters so much in Key Stage 3.

There is also a plainer problem: chatbots get things wrong. OpenAI's own terms warn that output may not always be accurate and should not be relied on as a sole source of truth. A general chatbot doesn't know which exam board your child sits, which method their teacher wants to see, or how a mark scheme gives out marks. Only 16.4% of teenagers in the 2026 survey agreed that you can trust the information you get from AI, which is a sensible instinct.

How people learn points the same way. Pulling something out of your own memory is what makes it stick, which is why the techniques in our guide to active recall and spaced repetition work, and why reading an answer, however good, does so little.

The two-minute check: can they explain it back?

You don't need to understand the technology, or even the subject, to tell which kind of use your child is making. Pick one piece of finished homework and ask, casually, for a quick walk-through with the screen closed.

If most of what you see is in the right-hand column, don't start with a ban. Start by asking why. A child who copies every night is usually a child who is stuck, and AI has become the quickest way to make the stuck feeling go away. The copying is the symptom.

Five questions to ask the school

Ground rules that work at home

If homework is already a nightly fight, our guide to homework battles covers how to help without taking over, and most of it applies here too.

Where a tutor fits

A good tutor won't do your child's homework either. What a tutor can do, and a chatbot can't, is notice why your child is stuck. A chatbot answers the question it is asked. A tutor sees that the same kind of question has gone wrong three weeks running, works out that the real gap is two topics back, and teaches that until your child can do it with the laptop closed.

That matters most for the child who copies because they are lost. AI can hide a gap like that for a long time, right up until the mock exam, where there is no chat window.

Our online homework help is one-to-one, built around the work your child has been set. We teach the method and never hand over the answers, so your child finishes the session able to do the next one alone. Lessons are one hour and start from £15 at KS3, £20 at GCSE and £25 at A-Level, with no contract and a free demo class first. See KS3, GCSE and A-Level tutoring for how lessons work at each stage.