Education edition

From 1 October 2026, OpenAI turns ChatGPT for Word on by default in ChatGPT Business workspaces. In the Word sidebar, you'll be able to draft a text, summarise a document, or revise a piece of writing. The key word is 'default': nobody has to switch it on. If your school has this kind of workspace, the feature is simply there, even for colleagues who never asked for it. Admins can turn off access through the admin console, but they have to do that themselves, before 1 October. For you, this means: teaching material, a report comment, or a letter to parents can soon be drafted straight from Word, without switching to a browser. That saves time. But something shifts too: a text you always started yourself now starts for you. Finding out if this applies to your school is step one. This kind of sidebar works differently from ChatGPT in your browser: the AI reads along with the document open on your screen. So whatever is in that document goes along when you ask for a summary. If it contains a pupil's name, a grade list, or notes from a conversation, that information goes to an outside service. With ChatGPT in a separate window, you consciously paste something in; here, you only have to forget that the document is open. The line stays the same, but it gets easier to cross without noticing. A school may only let an outside service process pupil data if there's a data processing agreement, a contract stating what the supplier is allowed to do with the data. Turning a feature on by default doesn't arrange that contract. If your admin switches the feature off for everyone, you lose the time saving too. The best outcome isn't 'on' or 'off', but 'on, with clear agreements about which documents you have open'. Ask your IT admin this week whether you have this kind of workspace and what happens on 1 October.

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