Teachmate’s CEO, Dr Jon Chippindall, along with other leading organisations from the tech sector, recently joined Ministers Stephen Morgan MP and Feryal Clark MP to officially lend their support to the DfE’s Generative AI: product safety expectations.
Teachmate was involved in reviewing the development of the Safety Standards and complies with all the standards presented for teacher-facing AI platforms. We believe the standards are comprehensive, and proportionate to the risks they seek to mitigate without stifling the development of impactful AI tools for education.
The product safety expectations are broken down across the following 7 strands:
- Filtering
- Monitoring and reporting
- Security
- Privacy and data protection
- Intellectual property
- Design and testing
- Governance
Here’s how Teachmate complies with the standards:
| Strand | How Teachmate complies |
| Filtering | These safety expectations are only relevant for pupil-facing platforms. As Teachmate is teacher-facing service they do not apply. However Teachmate uses AI models with filters that combat specific categories of harmful content, as well as additional 2nd-pass filters to ensure high educational relevance. |
| Monitoring and reporting | These safety expectations are only relevant for pupil-facing platforms. As Teachmate is teacher-facing service they do not apply. However we log outputs from the platform as part of the “my content” history section, which includes detailed internal performance metrics. |
| Security | Since Teachmate is exclusively a teacher-facing platform, purposeful acts of jailbreaking are unlikely. That said, Teachmate uses a variety of technical processes to protect against the jailbreaking and reprogramming of the platform’s functions. School administrators are assigned elevated permission levels over platform users and can assign/unassign licences and hence access to the platform. Teachmate is Cyber Essentials Certified. |
| Privacy and data protection | Teachmate’s privacy notice covering all the information required is visible here: https://teachmateai.com/privacy-policy Additional information relating to the completion of DPIAs, schools duties as data controllers, protection legislation and model training (which Teachmate does not undertaken) can be found here: https://teachmateai.com/data-processing-agreement https://teachmateai.com/data-protection We can provide further information on request. |
| Intellectual property | Teachmate does not collect, store, or share any user date for commercial purposes such as model training (including fine-tuning), product improvement, and product development. The end user of the AI tool owns the IP of the AI generated content (in this instance, the teacher). |
| Design and testing | Teachmate has a rigorous testing and user acceptance process for our generative AI tools, so we can ensure that we provide high-quality results to educators. This testing is performed by teachers and specialist user groups, so we only roll out tools that have been signed off with a quality assurance stage. As generative AI models change over time, we monitor output quality and revisit tools on a regular basis to maintain high standards. |
| Governance | Formal mechanisms for lodging complaints are detailed here: https://teachmateai.com/privacy-policy We conduct periodic risk assessments of AI model changes, new feature launches and tool additions, considering both risks to teachers/pupils and technical considerations. |