Microsoft Copilot can help UK schools, colleges and universities with the work that takes up staff time outside the classroom: drafting lesson materials, summarising long email threads and meetings, and pulling reports together from documents you already hold. Staff with an eligible Microsoft 365 A1, A3 or A5 licence already have Microsoft Copilot Chat at no extra cost, and the paid Copilot licence adds Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, working from your own files and email. Before you switch any of it on, get your SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams permissions in order, because Copilot will find anything a user is able to open.
What staff can do depends on which of three layers they have.
Microsoft renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot to Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to Microsoft Copilot Chat, in 2026, so older licences and documents may still use the previous names.
The best early results come from repetitive writing and summarising tasks where a member of staff can check the output quickly. For teaching staff that includes:
For business managers, data managers, heads of department and university professional services teams, the licensed version tends to earn its keep on:
Copilot does get things wrong, so a person needs to read the output before it goes anywhere.
Students aged 13 and over can use Copilot Chat, but there are age controls that IT needs to set up. In a school tenant (Microsoft calls these K-12 tenants), Copilot Chat is off by default for students aged 13 to 17. An administrator has to set the Microsoft Education Tenant Identifier and each student's age group in Microsoft Entra ID before those students get access. Students under 13 can't use Copilot Chat at all.
Higher education tenants treat students as adults by default. If your university or college has learners under 18, set their age group explicitly so the right policy applies to them. Bring your safeguarding lead and exams officer in early, because student access to generative AI affects how coursework and assessments are set and checked.
Copilot only shows a user content they already have at least view access to, which sounds reassuring until you look at how school and university tenants have grown. There are usually years of class Teams that were never archived, shared drives that were migrated into SharePoint with access for everyone, and sharing links created for a single meeting that still work. If a member of staff can technically open the SEN register or an HR folder through an old link, Copilot can find it and summarise it for them.
The things we would look at first are:
On a recent AI readiness assessment for a UK organisation, we found 46 sites with broken permission inheritance and 220 guest accounts, 198 of which no longer needed access. The two most urgent fixes, changing the default sharing link and tightening external sharing, took less than a day between them. You can read more about that on our case studies page and in our guide to AI readiness assessments.
On data protection, Microsoft states that prompts, responses and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train the underlying models, and Microsoft Copilot is covered by Microsoft's data residency commitments for tenants that signed up in the United Kingdom.
Copilot Chat is included with Microsoft 365 A1, A3 and A5 and Office 365 A1, A3 and A5 licences. The paid Microsoft Copilot licence has an academic offering for faculty, staff and students aged 13 and over, bought as an add-on to Microsoft 365 A5, A3, A2 or A1, or Office 365 A5, A3 or A1, through an Enrollment for Education Solutions agreement or a Cloud Solution Provider. Academic pricing differs from commercial pricing, so get a current quote from your reseller rather than working from list prices you have seen elsewhere.
A sensible way in is to get everyone using Copilot Chat first, then give paid licences to a small group with the heaviest admin load for a term and measure what changes before committing to a wider rollout.
Copilot Chat is included at no extra cost for staff and eligible students with Microsoft 365 or Office 365 A1, A3 or A5 licences. The full Microsoft Copilot experience, which works from your own email and files and sits inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, is a paid add-on licence.
Students aged 13 to 17 can use Copilot Chat once an administrator has set the tenant type and the student's age group in Microsoft Entra ID. In school tenants it is off by default for this age group. Students under 13 can't use Copilot Chat.
No. Microsoft states that prompts, responses and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train the foundation models used by Microsoft Copilot. Copilot also only works with content the signed-in user already has permission to see.
Review who can access what in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, fix the default sharing link, tidy up old class Teams and inactive sites, and put sensitive areas such as safeguarding and HR behind tighter controls. Agree an acceptable use policy at the same time so staff know what is expected.
It depends on the size and state of your tenant. Our AI readiness assessment usually takes three to four weeks, and on a recent assessment the remediation plan that followed ran to eight weeks, with the urgent fixes done in the first week.
If you would like to know whether your tenant is ready for Copilot before you spend money on licences, our AI readiness assessment covers permissions, sharing, governance and where Copilot is likely to pay back. Get in touch and we can talk it through.