Usually very little, and almost nothing if they are on their own phone, on their own data, in their own account. What changes the answer is not the app. It is three things: whose account they are signed in to, whose device it is, and whose network they are on. Get those three straight and you can tell, in about two minutes, what the school can actually see.
Checked at source on October 7, 2026.
A note on which question this is. If your child uses their school email to sign in to ChatGPT, that is a school account, and the answer is different: I have written that one separately in can my school see my ChatGPT history. This page is about the other case, the one parents ask about far more often and find far less written about: your teen's own personal account, the one the school did not give them.
Which account is your teen actually signed in to?
The account decides almost everything, because the account is where the history lives.
A school account is one the school created and can administer: a school email address, a district Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 login. Anything your teen types while signed in to that account sits in a system the school's administrator can reach. That is not surveillance, it is how administered accounts work, and it is the same for the staff.
A personal account is one your child made with a personal email. The school has no administrative route into it. A school administrator cannot open your teen's personal ChatGPT account, read their personal Gmail, or pull a transcript of what they said to a chatbot in it. There is no button for that, because there is no relationship between the school's console and your child's account.
The first thing to establish, then, is not what the school monitors. It is which address your teen signed up with.
What can the school see on a school-managed device?
On a device the school owns and manages, assume activity in the browser is visible, whichever account is signed in.
This is the part parents most often get wrong. A personal account protects the account. It does not protect the screen. If your child signs in to a personal Google or Microsoft account on a school laptop or Chromebook, the management sits underneath, on the device, and it does not care which account is on top.
Google says so plainly. When Chrome is managed, it tells the user: "your administrator can set up or restrict certain features, install extensions, monitor activity, and control how you use Chrome" (Google Chrome Help, checked October 7, 2026). The practical consequence is that a managed Chromebook can carry monitoring software that reads what is on the page regardless of whose login produced it.
In England, that is not optional. The Department for Education's filtering and monitoring standards (last updated September 16, 2026) require filtering and monitoring to cover "all school or college-managed devices, including those taken off-site". Off-site includes your kitchen table. A school laptop at home is still a school laptop.
In the US the duty sits with the district rather than with one national standard, so the question to ask is the same but the answer varies: ask your district what monitoring software is installed on the device it issued, and whether it runs outside school hours.
What can the school see on your teen's own phone or laptop?
On a personal device that the school has not enrolled in its management system, the honest answer is nothing beyond what crosses the school's network.
If the school has asked your child to enrol their own phone, which some sixth forms and high schools do for email or exam apps, that enrolment is narrower than parents fear and worth reading at source. Microsoft publishes the list for Intune, the management system a great many schools use. Its documentation, last updated April 9, 2026, puts the following under what an organization can never see: "Calling and web browsing history", "Email and text messages", "Contacts", "Calendar", "Passwords", "Pictures, including what's in the photos app or camera roll", and "Content of user-created documents" (Microsoft Learn, checked October 7, 2026).
What it can always see is inventory: device owner, name, serial number, model, manufacturer, operating system and version. On a personal device it sees only the managed school or work apps, not the rest. Location is listed as corporate-owned devices only.
So an enrolled personal phone tells the school what kind of phone it is, not what your child said on it.
What can the school see on its own Wi-Fi?
On the school network, the school can see which sites were reached and can block them, whether or not the device belongs to it.
Filtering and monitoring are duties, not habits. The DfE standards require filtering for "guests who have access to the school internet", and require that "devices that are not school or college-managed should be on a separate virtual network". So a personal phone on the school's guest Wi-Fi is filtered, and the traffic is logged at the network. Whether anyone reads the detail of a chatbot conversation is a different question, and in most schools the honest answer is that the monitoring system raises a flag on certain words and nobody reads the rest.
The simplest consequence for a teenager: mobile data is not the school's network. If they are on 4G or 5G, on their own device, in their own account, the school sees nothing.
The table I would keep on the fridge
| Account | Device | Network | What the school can see |
|---|---|---|---|
| School account | School device | School Wi-Fi | Effectively all of it: the account history, the screen, the sites |
| School account | Personal device | Home Wi-Fi | The account history, including documents, email and chat in that account |
| Personal account | School device | Any network | The screen and the sites, through device monitoring, even off-site |
| Personal account | Personal device, enrolled for school email | School Wi-Fi | Sites reached on the network, plus device inventory. Not browsing history, messages, photos or documents |
| Personal account | Personal device, not enrolled | School Wi-Fi | Sites reached on the network only |
| Personal account | Personal device, not enrolled | Mobile data or home Wi-Fi | Nothing |
The verdict in one line: the school sees the account it gave out and the device it owns. Everything else it only sees as traffic.
What I See in Schools
The gap that causes trouble is almost never technical. It is that nobody told the family which of these three things applied.
When I work with schools, I ask whether parents have ever been told, in writing, what is monitored on the device their child was issued, and whether that monitoring runs at home. The answer is usually that it is in a policy somewhere, which means no. Meanwhile the student assumes a personal login makes them invisible, the parent assumes the school is watching nothing, and the school assumes everyone read the acceptable use agreement in September.
The other thing I see: parents asking the question because of something else. Very often "can the school see this?" really means "I found something and I do not know what to do". If that is where you are, the conversation matters more than the settings, and it goes better if your child does not think it started with surveillance.
How to check this in two minutes
Do it with your teenager, not about them. It is their account, and the point is that they understand it too.
- Count the accounts. Open the browser profile menu and the device settings. Write down every email address signed in. School addresses end in the school or district domain.
- Ask the device who owns it. On a Chromebook or Chrome browser, type
chrome://managementin the address bar. It will name the organization managing it, or say it is not managed. On a Windows laptop, look in Settings for "Access work or school". On an iPhone or iPad, look in Settings for a "VPN & Device Management" entry. - Check which account each app uses. Open the AI apps your teen actually uses and look at the profile. A school address in ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot means a school account, whatever device it is on.
- Note the network. If homework happens on the school's Wi-Fi, the sites are logged there. If it happens on home Wi-Fi or mobile data, they are not.
- Write the one sentence it comes to. For most families it is: "On the school laptop, assume it is seen. On your own phone in your own account, assume it is not."
If step two says the laptop is managed by the school, the follow-up questions are in can you put parental controls on a school Chromebook.
How does this change by age?
Under 11. Ownership is rare and the question is mostly hypothetical: Ofcom's children's media research, published May 21, 2026, found 56% of 10-year-olds owning a smartphone. At this age the device is usually yours, so the controls are yours too.
11 to 13. The year the picture changes: the same Ofcom research found 83% of 11-year-olds with their own phone, and starting secondary school as the tipping point. This is the age to explain the three-part rule rather than to install anything, because it is the first time your child will have a personal account and a school account side by side.
14 to 18. Ofcom found 56% of 8 to 17-year-olds using generative AI, rising to 66% of 16 and 17-year-olds, and 11% of 8 to 17s using it as a social companion. At this age the useful move is not more monitoring. It is making sure your teen knows which of their accounts is administered, because they will otherwise find out the hard way, usually in a safeguarding meeting.
What none of this can guarantee
Nothing here tells you what your child is actually saying to an AI, and it is not supposed to. A personal account on a personal device is private from the school and from you, which is the correct design for a sixteen-year-old and an uncomfortable one for a parent.
Monitoring systems also miss things. They flag words, not meaning, and a child in difficulty rarely types the word the system is waiting for. If you are worried about your child's state of mind rather than their browsing, that is a conversation with the school's designated safeguarding lead or counselor and with your GP or pediatrician, today, not a settings change.
And none of this is static. Google's own documentation on search history and personalisation for under-18 users notes that some of those settings are "now expected to launch in these locales in 2027" for the UK, the EEA, Switzerland and Nigeria (Google Workspace Admin knowledge base, checked October 7, 2026). What a school can switch on for a 15-year-old in Ohio and in Oldham is not the same thing this year.
What I would do tonight
Fifteen minutes. Sit down with your teenager and do the five checks above together, out loud. Write the one sentence at the end of it on a bit of paper and leave it where the homework happens.
Then send the school two questions in writing: what monitoring is installed on the device you issued my child, and does it run at home? Those two questions, asked by one parent, usually get a clearer answer than any policy page.
If your child's school cannot say what is monitored, when it last checked that the monitoring covers AI chat, or what families have been told, 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.
