Claude for Teachers is now free for U.S. schools and districts, with full enterprise controls and FERPA coverage
Anthropic opens a free Enterprise tier of Claude for Teachers to U.S. K-12 schools and districts, with SSO, FERPA terms, and one year free if enrolled by 30 June 2027.
On 28 August 2026, Anthropic extended Claude for Teachers beyond individual educators and made it available to U.S. schools and districts as a free Enterprise offering. Qualifying organisations that enrol by 30 June 2027 get a full year at no cost.
This matters because it changes who controls the product in a school setting. Previously, individual teachers could sign up and verify themselves, but there was no central governance layer for district administrators. That gap drew criticism from district leaders who pointed out, reasonably enough, that if an AI product encourages workflows involving protected student information, governance needs to come before access. The 28 August update puts that governance in place.
What schools and districts actually get
A school or district administrator signs up at claude.ai/k12districts, confirms they are authorised to act on behalf of the organisation, verifies the school’s email domain with a DNS record, and accepts three agreements in one go: the US K-12 Terms of Service, the US K-12 Public Sector Addendum, and the US K-12 Data Processing Agreement. From that point, the organisation is live.
Every member of staff on the verified domain then gets access to the full Enterprise product: Claude on web, desktop, and mobile, plus Claude Code, Cowork, and Claude Design. They also get the K-12 teaching plugin, the Learning Commons connector (which gives Claude access to adopted academic standards in all 50 states, plus the underlying skills and learning progressions), and nine edtech connectors at launch: ASSISTments, Brisk Teaching, Canva Education, Coteach, Diffit, Eedi, MagicSchool, Snorkl, and TeachFX.
Usage limits match those of an individual Claude for Teachers account. Overage billing is off by default and only turns on if an administrator explicitly opts in.
Two new teaching skills also ship alongside this update: a lesson-preparation skill that helps teachers plan for the key moments of an upcoming lesson, and a check-for-understanding skill that generates short standards-aligned assessments, available for maths at launch. Both were co-developed with Learning Commons, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s standards infrastructure.
What administrators can control
Administrators get a proper Enterprise admin console. They can add and remove staff, assign roles, set policies, choose which features, models, and connectors are enabled across the organisation, and see adoption data at school and district level.
Single sign-on and automatic account creation mean staff do not need to go through an individual sign-up process. Domain capture handles the transition for teachers who already verified with the school’s email domain on a personal account: they move into the centrally managed organisation automatically.
Once a district verifies its domain, new personal Claude accounts cannot be created using a district email address. That is a meaningful control for administrators who want to ensure all usage sits under the agreed terms rather than on individual free-tier accounts.
The privacy and compliance picture
Anthropic’s K-12 Data Processing Agreement aligns with FERPA. Student data is not used for model training. If a district leaves, Anthropic returns the district’s data on request and deletes its copies within 30 days, except where the law requires retention. Subprocessor changes come with 15 days’ advance notice and the right to object. Annual third-party audits, penetration testing, and SOC 2 certification are in place, along with AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.2 or better in transit.
The product also includes a FERPA-configured setting to process student data. Importantly, Anthropic is explicit that whether and how identifiable student information may be used is determined by the school or district’s own policies, not by Anthropic. That is a sensible framing that puts policy decisions where they belong.
Anthropic is also working with the American Federation of Teachers to align its terms and privacy practices with the AFT’s developing standards for AI in education, and a pilot with Detroit Public Schools Community District is running from autumn 2026 to study the impact on educator wellbeing and practice.
Who this is for
The product covers classroom teachers, instructional coaches, specialists, interventionists, librarians, counsellors, and other certified staff who verify with a school email address. It is not designed for students; Claude for Teachers is squarely aimed at educators and school staff.
Individual teachers who signed up before 28 August 2026 remain covered by the existing free individual tier. The school and district offering is an additional route in, not a replacement.
What this means for you
If you are a district administrator, the governance question that made earlier individual sign-ups awkward has been addressed. You can now bring your entire staff under a single, auditable set of terms, with controls you manage centrally, at no cost for the first year. The enrolment deadline of 30 June 2027 gives you time to go through procurement, legal review, and the standard DPA process without rushing.
If you are a teacher whose district has not yet signed up, you can still verify individually and get the same core product. The district route adds central management and the student data DPA; the underlying teaching tools are the same either way.
If you are evaluating AI tools for education against competitors, Claude for Teachers now sits in broadly similar territory to ChatGPT for Teachers (which launched in November 2025 with comparable FERPA commitments and admin controls), as well as products from Google and Khan Academy. The differentiators worth examining are the Learning Commons integration for standards alignment, the specific teaching skills, and the breadth of edtech connectors available at launch.
The Claude for K-12 Academy has also been updated with free AI-fluency courses, guides, and classroom workflows for teachers, coaches, and district teams, which is a practical starting point if your organisation is at the early stages of working out how to use any of this well.