No, not if the laptop belongs to the school and your child signs in with the school's account. Google says so plainly: "If a child is on both a school Chromebook and school Google Account, parents can't add controls." What you can control is a Chromebook you own, with an account you created. Everything else is a question for the school, whose own filtering may not cover AI chat.
That is the whole answer, and it is worth knowing before you spend an evening in a settings menu looking for something that is not there. The rest of this is how to work out which situation you are actually in, what you can do in each one, and the two emails that do more than any switch.
Which Chromebook are you actually dealing with?
There are three, and they look identical on the kitchen table. Which one you have decides everything that follows.
One: the school's laptop, the school's account. The school bought it, enrolled it and issued it, and your child signs in with the address the school gave them. This is the case Google's own guide to learning on a school-managed Chromebook covers, read on October 6, 2026, and its answer is the sentence at the top of this article. The same page adds: "When your child uses a school Chromebook, the school may restrict some services, like websites and apps." You are not in that arrangement. Nobody is hiding anything from you; the account was built for an institution to manage.
Two: your laptop, your child's supervised account, with the school account added inside it. This is the good case, and it depends on one choice made during setup. Google's page on adding a school account for a Family Link user states the line most parents never see: "If you add a school account as a new user on your Chromebook's sign-in screen, Family Link parental controls will not apply to that user account." Add it the other way, as a second account inside the profile you supervise, and the same page says "Screen time limits, downtimes, and other parental controls apply whenever a child is signed in to a Chromebook with their Family Link account."
Three: your laptop, but the school account was added as its own user. You own the machine and control nothing on half of it. This is case two done the wrong way round, and it is the commonest mistake I see described by parents, usually because the laptop was set up in a hurry on the first day of term.
A Chromebook has two owners and you are only ever one of them. Whoever enrolled the laptop sets the rules for everyone who signs in to it. Whoever created the account sets the rules that travel with that account to any laptop. You can only put parental controls where you own both halves: your account, on your device.
Two minutes tells you which one you have. Open the laptop and look at the sign-in screen before anyone types a password, and count the accounts on it. Then, signed in, type chrome://management into the address bar. Google's page on checking whether Chrome is managed describes what that page shows and what a managed setup allows: "your administrator can set up or restrict certain features, install extensions, monitor activity, and control how you use Chrome." If the laptop reports that it is managed by an organization, the organization is the school, and the settings conversation is finished before it starts.
If it turns out to be yours, the step-by-step for the account side sits in my guide to blocking AI apps on Android, including the separate Gemini switch that is not in the app list.
What can I actually control on a Chromebook I own?
A reasonable amount, and all of it through Family Link rather than through anything on the laptop itself. Google's page on managing a child's account on Chromebook, read on October 6, 2026, covers choosing which websites your child can reach in Chrome, which apps they can use, whether they can grant site permissions to websites, and their Google activity controls. Screen time limits and downtimes come with the supervised account, and a block you set on a phone carries across to a Chromebook signed in with the same account.
Three things that are not settings, and matter more on a school-issued device than on a phone:
- The hours. You cannot set a downtime on the school's account, but you can decide that the school laptop lives in the kitchen after nine o'clock. A physical rule is the only control that works on a device you do not administer.
- The home network. Your router filters every device in the house, including one you cannot touch. It will not see inside an encrypted AI conversation, but it will block a site at the door.
- The second profile. If your child has a personal Chromebook account as well as the school one, that is the half you can supervise, and the half most of their own time is spent on.
And one honest caution from the same Google page: a school account can carry "some features or services that your child was previously unable to access using the Family Link supervised account." Signing in with the school's address can hand back exactly what you switched off.
What does the school control, and what is it required to do?
More than you, and it has duties you can hold it to.
The AI question moved under the school's control in August, and almost no parent was told. Google's admin notice of August 4, 2026 says that from August 10, 2026 Gemini in Classroom would be available to "K-12 and higher education students of all ages", and that "Access to the Gemini tab in Classroom is On by default for teachers and students of all ages." An administrator can turn it off, including for one year group at a time. The notice does not mention parents.
What a school account can reach also depends on an age label a person in the district office applies. Google's guidance on controlling access to Google services by age, last updated on October 1, 2026, says administrators designate users' age level in the Admin console, that in primary and secondary education "All users not designated as 18 and over get an age-restricted experience", and that "Students designated as under 18 years of age can access Gemini features in Google Classroom if enabled by an administrator." So two children of the same age in two districts can meet a different amount of AI, because of a checkbox. What that assistant is rated for, and what it does with what a child types, is a separate question I have worked through in the guide to Gemini for families.
The school's side is not optional, though, and this is the part worth quoting back to them. In England, the Department for Education's filtering and monitoring standards for schools and colleges, published on March 23, 2022 and last updated on September 16, 2026, say that "Filtering and monitoring systems should apply to all: school or college-managed devices, including those taken off-site". The same standards put strategic responsibility on governing bodies, give the designated safeguarding lead the lead on safeguarding concerns, and require that filtering and monitoring provision "is reviewed at least once every academic year".
Read that last requirement again, because it is your opening. If the school has to review what it filters every year, then somebody there has a date, a document and a name attached to it, and you are entitled to ask what the review said about AI chat. US parents have a weaker version of the same lever: there is no identical federal standard, but a district that filters to qualify for federal internet funding has a policy, and a policy has an author.
What I See in Schools
I spent years as a director of digital strategy in further education, and I now work on AI strategy with schools, trusts and districts, which means I have sat on the side of this that parents never see.
Here is what is actually true in most buildings. Filtering and monitoring were bought to catch websites. AI arrived as a conversation inside an app, and in a lot of schools nobody has yet checked whether the system treats a chat the way it treats a web page. When I ask, the honest answer is often "I would have to find out", and that is a perfectly good answer from a person with twelve other jobs.
The pattern I see most often is not a school making a bad call. It is a real call, made in a meeting, with reasons, and then never told to a single parent. The school thinks it has decided. The parent thinks nobody has.
That is my reading rather than a finding from research, and I would say the same thing at a parents' evening. But it changes where an evening is best spent. The settings at home are worth twenty minutes. The question to the school is worth an hour of somebody's attention, and it is almost never asked.
What should I ask the school?
Four questions. Keep them specific, because a question about "AI" gets a policy and a question about a switch gets an answer.
- Is Gemini in Google Classroom switched on for my child's year group, and who made that decision?
- When was the filtering and monitoring review last done, and did it look at AI chat as well as websites?
- When my child brings the school device home, is it still managed and still monitored?
- If my child types something worrying into a school tool, who sees it and what happens next?
Question two is the one I would push hardest on. Question three is the one most parents assume they know the answer to and do not. What a school can and cannot see is worth reading before you ask either.
If what comes back troubles you, the request that tends to work is narrow rather than general, and what you can actually ask for is a shorter list than most parents expect.
How does this change by age?
Under 8. If the school has issued a device to a child this young, ask question one above today, and ask whether anything on it can be typed into or talked to. Keep the laptop in a shared room and treat it as a two-person activity. At this age the setting you cannot change matters less than the fact that you are sitting next to them.
You could say: "This one's the school's computer, so we use it at the table."
8 to 12. Do the sign-in check together rather than behind their back. Let them show you which account they use for what. This is also the age to separate the two worlds out loud: the school laptop is for school, and their own account is where your rules live.
You could say: "Show me which one you sign in with for homework. I want to understand how it works before I decide anything."
13 to 15. Controls are losing most of their power here, and a teenager with a school account has more AI than you can switch off. Shift your effort to knowing what they use and why. Ask what the last three things they asked it were; a general question gets a shrug, a specific one usually gets the screen turned toward you.
You could say: "I'm not going to try to block the school laptop. I do want to know what you use the AI in it for."
16 to 18. Treat the device as theirs to manage and the habit as the thing worth protecting. The useful conversation is about which parts of their work they will not hand over, not about which app is allowed.
You could say: "Which bits of that essay are actually yours?"
What none of this can guarantee
Three limits, plainly.
It will not keep AI off the school's kit, and that is where a surprising share of it happens. The Center for Democracy & Technology surveyed 1,030 US students in grades 9 to 12, along with teachers and parents, with fieldwork run between June and August 2025, and published the results in October 2025 as Hand in Hand: Schools' Embrace of AI Connected to Increased Risks to Students. Of the students who have back-and-forth conversations with AI systems for personal reasons rather than for schoolwork, "nearly one-third (31 percent) say that they do so using a device, tool, or software provided by their school." That is a share of the students having those conversations, not of all students, and it describes where the conversation happens rather than why.
My reading of that number, rather than the report's: the school device is not the safe one and the personal one is not the risky one. For a third of those children, the school's laptop is the private one, because it is the one their parents cannot see.
Monitoring is not the same as protection, and parents are often the last to know it exists. The same study found that among the teachers whose schools conduct student activity monitoring, 90 percent said the monitoring is done on school-issued devices. Monitoring tells a school what happened. It does not stop it happening, and it is not a parental control you can configure.
And it does not reach a signed-out browser. Nothing stops a child opening a chatbot's website without logging in to anything, on any machine, which is why the conversation is the only layer that covers what the other two miss.
One boundary worth stating. Where the school's rule and anything here disagree, the school's rule wins on the school's device, and a platform's own minimum age wins over both. If your child has typed something into a school tool that worries you about their safety or their state of mind, that is not a settings problem: tell the school's designated safeguarding lead or counselor the same day, in writing, and speak to your pediatrician or GP. None of them promises confidentiality, and all of them are better than a chatbot.
What I would do tonight
Twenty minutes, in this order. Look at the sign-in screen and count the accounts. Type chrome://management on the laptop your child uses for homework and find out who manages it. If it turns out to be yours to manage, open Family Link and set the hours and the sites. If it turns out to be the school's, send the four questions above to your child's head of year or principal, and send question two first.
Then decide the house rule that no setting can give you: where the school laptop sleeps.
If your child's school has not told parents what AI is switched on, or cannot say when it last reviewed whether its monitoring covers AI chat, that is the gap I help schools close: a readiness review of what is enabled, what the policy says and what families are told. It is worth forwarding. I also write a Sunday newsletter that keeps parents and teachers current on this without the panic, and parents are very welcome.
Dan Fitzpatrick is a former secondary teacher, assistant headteacher and director of digital strategy who now helps schools and families make sense of AI.
