We have now had this conversation with enough schools to spot the pattern. You walk in ready to talk about your clever model and your lovely interface, and the first question is about where the data lives. Every time. If your pitch opens with model quality, you are answering something nobody in the room asked.
Where does it live, and who else gets to touch it
The word cloud is not an answer. Schools want a country, a legal entity, and the list of subprocessors sitting behind that entity. Dutch education has been round this track before. The sector spent years negotiating collectively with the big platform vendors over exactly these terms, and school boards have not forgotten how that felt. They have learned to read a subprocessor list properly. If you cannot produce one, the meeting is effectively over and everyone is just being polite.
Schools read the contract before they try the model.
Does the model learn from our pupils
Plenty of vendors get artfully vague here, because the honest answer gets complicated the moment you are reselling someone else's model. What a school needs is a flat no. In the contract. Covering you and every model provider underneath you. Anything softer gets heard as a yes with extra paperwork, and they are right to hear it that way.
Who carries the can when it gets something wrong
AI in a classroom will produce nonsense at some point. Everyone in the room knows this. What they are actually testing is whether you know it too, and whether you built for it. A higher accuracy percentage is not the answer. The answer is a teacher who can see what was generated, change it, and overrule it, in a product that treats being corrected as a normal Tuesday rather than an error state. Schools trust software that expects to be checked.
And when we want out
Procurement asks this one and product people hate it. Can we export everything, in a format a human can use, and is it genuinely deleted afterwards. It is a fair question and it is cheap to answer well. Easy to leave means less frightening to join. Vendors who make the exit painful are telling schools something about their own confidence, and schools hear it.
So we built PrivateEdGPT around the answers
These five questions shaped the product, not the FAQ page. European models, European hosting, no training on school data, teacher in the loop by default, export built in from the start. None of this is a feature a child will ever care about. It is the reason an administrator lets the thing through the door in the first place, which turns out to be a precondition for any child seeing it at all.
Take these with you
- 1Schools read the contract before they try the model.
- 2A vague answer on training data is heard as a yes.
- 3Build to be overruled by a teacher, not to be right more often.
- 4Make leaving easy and joining gets easier.
