What a good AI Trust Charter actually says

Five clauses every school charter needs — and three it should quietly drop.

SB Simon Bond Mar 2026 · 6 min read
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A charter is not a policy. A policy tells staff what to do; a charter says what the trust believes and will be held to. Confuse the two and you get a document that’s too vague to act on and too long to read.

The clauses that earn their place are the ones that commit the trust to something uncomfortable: that staff will be trained before pupils are expected to comply, that the trust won’t adopt a tool it can’t explain to parents, that decisions get reviewed on a fixed schedule. Commitments with a cost are the only ones anyone believes.

The clauses to drop are the reassurances — the paragraphs that exist to sound responsible without obliging anyone to do anything. “We take data privacy seriously” is not a clause. It’s a vibe. Replace it with the specific thing you’ll actually do, or cut it.

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