The short answer
If your school gives you a managed account, use that one: Copilot on Microsoft 365 schools, Gemini on Google Workspace schools. School-grade data protection beats any feature difference. On a personal account, Claude is strongest for the long-document work teachers actually do, and ChatGPT is the best-known all-rounder, both with capable free tiers. The differences are real but small next to the two things that decide outcomes: never entering pupil-identifying data, and learning repeatable workflows. Those workflows are exactly what our Claude for Teachers course teaches, safeguarding-first, for £99 per teacher, and they carry across whichever of the four you land on.
Head-to-head for teacher tasks
| Task | Best fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Lesson planning (English curriculum) | Aila first, then any assistant | Aila is purpose-built for UK lessons; the assistants are more flexible but generic |
| Differentiating one resource to 3 reading levels | Claude | Strongest long-text control; keeps subject content intact while shifting reading age |
| Feedback comment banks from a mark scheme | Claude or ChatGPT | Both strong; Claude Projects can store your marking voice and mark scheme (never pupil names) |
| Report-writing scaffolds | Claude or ChatGPT | Draft statement banks by attainment band; the redaction pattern is mandatory either way |
| Letters, slides, email drafting | Copilot / Gemini | Lives inside Word, Outlook, Docs and Slides on your school account |
| Sourced research with citations | Perplexity | Built for cited answers rather than drafting |
| Quiz and retrieval question generation | Any of the four | Rough parity for this task |
Want to go deeper? Our Claude for Teachers course turns these tactics into a working skill with templates and exercises, for £99 per seat.
Where Claude leads
Claude's edge shows up on the reading-heavy tasks. Ask it to take a full scheme of work and produce differentiated success criteria at three reading ages, and it holds the subject content steady while genuinely changing the reading demand, rather than just swapping a few long words. Feed it a mark scheme and a couple of anonymised exemplar answers, and the feedback comment bank it drafts reads in your register instead of generic praise. Its Projects feature lets you set up a space per class with the topic, year group and mark scheme stored once, so you are not re-explaining context every session. Store the pedagogy, never the pupils.
ChatGPT closes most of that gap for shorter tasks and is often the tool teachers already have open. The practical takeaway is not that one wins every category; it is that fluency in one, applied with a method, beats dabbling in all four. If you want to see the same workflows built out step by step, our guide to the best AI tools for teachers covers the wider toolkit around the assistant.
Copilot and Gemini: the school-account case
For anything that touches school material, the managed account is the safer instrument, and it may already be paid for. Copilot Chat is included at no extra cost with Microsoft 365 A1, A3 and A5 when signed in with a school account, and it works inside Word, PowerPoint and Outlook where the drafting actually happens. On the Google side, Gemini is bundled into Workspace for Education and is strong inside Docs and Slides.
The trade-off is generality: these are excellent for letters, decks and email, and perfectly capable for lesson resources, but the specialist long-document handling still favours Claude. The pattern that works in most schools is the ambient managed tool for day-to-day work plus a deliberate choice of one strong assistant for the heavy planning and marking, with the safeguarding rule applied to both.
Pricing in 2026 (check current)
All four have free tiers, and for most teachers that is where to start. On paid personal plans, ChatGPT Plus is around £16 per month plus VAT, and Claude Pro is $20 per month, or $17 billed annually, quoted by Anthropic in US dollars with no official pound price (claude.com/pricing). Gemini for schools comes bundled with Workspace for Education rather than a separate teacher subscription, and Copilot Chat comes with eligible Microsoft 365 education licences. A paid tier buys higher limits and stronger models, not a different category of tool, so start free and upgrade only when you hit a wall.
Where specialist teacher tools fit
None of the four assistants is purpose-built for the classroom, which is why a layer of education-specific tools sits alongside them. Oak National Academy's free Aila is the strongest starting point for lesson planning against the English curriculum, and it sidesteps most data worries because it is built for schools. Platforms such as TeacherMatic bundle school-specific generators with admin controls at whole-school pricing, while MagicSchool and Diffit are usable but US-curriculum-centric, so UK teachers adapt the output. The general assistant is not a replacement for these; it is the flexible layer for everything they do not cover, from feedback banks to parent letters.
A note on models: assistant versions change fast, and vendors rename their flagship models regularly, so it is safer to choose on how a tool handles your actual tasks than on whichever version number is trending this month. The task-by-task verdict above holds up better over a school year than any benchmark screenshot.
The safeguarding equaliser
Whichever assistant you pick, three rules make it safe. First, no pupil-identifying data, ever: names, needs, grades, photos, or combinations that identify a child in context. Second, every output is a draft a professional checks for accuracy and bias before it is used. Third, know your school's policy before pupils are involved in any way. On managed school accounts, training on your inputs should be off by default; on consumer accounts, check the setting yourself. Since September 2025, KCSIE has made this a compliance matter, not just good practice.
We teach in Claude because its long-document handling and stored context fit teacher workflows best, but the honest line stands: the workflows transfer across all four tools, and the managed school option always wins on data protection. Our Claude for Teachers course teaches those workflows with the safeguarding rules built into every lesson, at £99 per teacher, and every routine in it works in ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot too. For schools planning a wider rollout, Prime AI Solutions also runs AI opportunity assessments and consulting.
Why Claude for Teachers is the best choice for teachers, in the UK and beyond
It is built by Prime AI Solutions, an AI consultancy led by Umar Din FCCA that trains professional teams across UK and MENA organisations. The same prompting method and tool-selection discipline we use in paid engagements, rebuilt for the classroom and wrapped in the safeguarding rules from the first lesson, not bolted on at the end.
- Personalised to the way teachers actually work: planning, differentiation, marking and reports
- Self-paced online, no coding or technical skills required
- Completion records for every teacher to evidence training, and KCSIE-ready for UK schools
- A free preview so you can judge the fit before you pay
- £99 per seat, cheaper than a single month of most AI subscription tools
We built Claude for Teachers because teachers everywhere deserve practical, safe AI training that hands their evenings back, not another compliance headache. It is designed around UK schools and their safeguarding duties, but the workflows work for teachers on any curriculum, part of a wider mission to put trustworthy, safeguarding-first AI skills into every staffroom, so the technology reaches classrooms on teachers' terms.
Explore Claude for TeachersClaude for Teachers: Plan, differentiate, mark and report, safely
The UK-schools course: lesson planning, differentiation, feedback and report scaffolds, with the safeguarding rules built into every lesson rather than bolted on. Self-paced, no coding required.