AI Guides › Playbooks
By Nigel Guy · 6 min read
Most people hear "free premium Claude for teachers", forward the link to every teacher they know, and find out at the verification step that the offer was never for them. Others claim it, paste in a class list to see what happens, and break their school's data rules on day one. The offer is real, but it is narrow, and it has a data boundary that matters more than the free price.
The rule: check who you are, what you are claiming and what you are allowed to paste, in that order, before you run a single prompt.
On 14 July 2026 Anthropic launched Claude for Teachers: free access to premium Claude features for verified US K-12 educators. According to Anthropic's announcement and its support pages, it includes:
The free year is for sign-ups by 30 June 2027. Anthropic's pages do not say what happens after the year, so do not plan around a price you have not seen. Cost to you at time of writing: £0 for the first year. Anything after that, check the £ price in the checkout.
Treat the claim as a three-gate checklist. Stop at the first gate you fail.
| Question | Qualifies | Does not qualify |
|---|---|---|
| Where do you work? | A US K-12 school | Anywhere outside the US, including UK schools |
| Who are you? | Classroom teachers, instructional coaches, specialists, interventionists, librarians, counsellors and other certificated staff, per Anthropic's support page | Students, parents |
| Age | 18 or over | Under 18 |
This is the gate UK readers hit. Anthropic describes the offer as US-only, so if you teach in Britain, this specific offer is not yours. Do not try to get around that with a borrowed US email; verification is the point of the scheme. Skip to "What to skip".
Verification is through a school email. Anthropic's support pages name a partner, Goodstack, for confirming affiliation on the school and district setup route. The exact documents an individual needs beyond the school email are not fully set out in the pages I could read, and one secondary report mentions proof of employment. Treat that as unconfirmed and follow whatever the live flow asks for.
Schools and districts have a separate route with single sign-on and administrator controls, announced on 28 August 2026. If your district has set that up, ask your IT lead whether you should join it instead of claiming individually. That decision affects who can see your chats.
This is where the free price can cost you. Anthropic says your district, not Anthropic, decides whether identifiable student information may be used, and that teachers should not enter it without district authorisation. The product is for educators only; students should not use it directly.
The working rule is a traffic-light list:
| Colour | Content | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Green | Your own plans, public standards, texts you have the right to use, made-up examples | Paste freely |
| Amber | Class results with names removed | Only if your district policy allows it; strip names and IDs first |
| Red | Names, IDs, behaviour notes, IEP or medical detail | Do not paste unless your district has authorised it in writing |
Imagine a Year 7 maths teacher, call her Ms Okafor, in a US middle school. She passes Gate 1 with her school email. At Gate 3 she checks her district's AI policy, finds it silent on student data, and decides that means red, not green. Her first run is a green one: a lesson plan on ratios built from the standards connector, using no student information. Her second is amber: a spreadsheet of quiz scores with names deleted, run only after she has asked her principal.
Pick something green. Fill in the square brackets.
You are an experienced [GRADE_LEVEL] [SUBJECT] teacher and curriculum designer working in [US_STATE].
Goal: draft a [NUMBER_OF_MINUTES]-minute lesson on [TOPIC] that a colleague could teach tomorrow.
Context: my class has a range of readiness. Roughly [DESCRIBE_THE_RANGE_IN_GENERAL_TERMS_NO_NAMES]. Resources available: [RESOURCES].
Steps:
1. Use the standards connector to find the standards for [GRADE_LEVEL] [SUBJECT] in [US_STATE] that fit [TOPIC]. Name each one.
2. List the prerequisite skills students need and a two-question check for each.
3. Write the lesson: a hook, direct teaching, guided practice, independent practice, and an exit ticket.
4. Add one scaffold for students below the expected level and one extension for students above it.
Output: a table of the lesson timings, then the exit ticket and an answer key.
Constraints: no student names or personal details. If a standard cannot be found, say so rather than invent one. If any input above is missing, ask me before drafting.
Before answering, check that every standard you cite came from the connector and that the timings add up to [NUMBER_OF_MINUTES].
Fill in: grade, subject, state, topic, length, class range in general terms, and resources.