Gemini Just Went On by Default in Classroom. Not in the UK.
Google made Gemini in Classroom on-by-default for under-18s worldwide from 10 August 2026, but supervised UK accounts remain excluded, leaving admins with divergent settings to manage.
What changed
From 10 August 2026 on the web (17 August on mobile), Google expanded Gemini in Classroom to users of all ages, according to a Google Workspace Updates post. Where a school has already switched on Gemini in Classroom for its domain, the assistant is now on by default for every age group, including students under 18, unless an administrator had previously switched it off for that cohort — in which case the old setting sticks.
That second clause matters more than the headline. Google is not flipping a global switch from off to on. It is changing what "on" means once a school has already opted in at the domain level: default access now extends downward to younger students automatically, rather than requiring a second, separate decision.
The UK carve-out
Here is the wrinkle most back-to-school coverage has skipped past. Gemini's consumer app has long been unavailable to supervised (under-18, parent-managed) accounts across the UK, EU and Switzerland — a restriction Google has maintained since it first opened Gemini to teens in 2024. Gemini in Classroom, delivered through Workspace for Education rather than the consumer app, sits in a different product track with different rules, and Google's own documentation confirms it is available to K-12 students of all ages through the education edition.
The result is a patchwork that UK IT leads now have to reconcile by hand: a Google account that is a supervised personal account may be blocked from Gemini entirely, while the same student's school Workspace account may have Gemini switched on by default from this month. Two accounts, two rulebooks, one child.
The safest assumption for any UK admin right now is that nothing changed automatically in your favour — check the organisational unit settings yourself, don't rely on the default.
Why the default matters more than the feature
Admins can still create separate organisational units for under-18s and disable Gemini for that group specifically, and existing opt-outs are preserved. But defaults do the heavy lifting in any large system. Most district and MAT (multi-academy trust) technology teams do not revisit console settings they haven't touched in a year, which is exactly the population most likely to discover, weeks into term, that a setting they never actively chose has quietly taken effect for their youngest users.
This lands in the same month schools are meant to be finalising the new KCSIE 2026 AI safeguarding duties, and follows a summer in which England added AI literacy to the curriculum with barely one in seven teachers reporting they feel ready to teach it. A platform-level default shift, arriving with no requirement for schools to actively re-confirm it, adds one more moving part to an already crowded compliance list — and it is the kind of change that is easy to miss because it happens inside a settings panel, not a policy document.
What this is not
It is worth being precise about what Google has and hasn't done. This is not Gemini becoming available to accounts that were previously blocked by age; UK supervised accounts remain shut out of the consumer app, and Google has not said that is changing. It is not a new safeguarding framework either — Google points to existing content policies, stricter under-18 filtering, and a no-training-on-chats promise for education accounts, none of which is new to this release. What has changed is narrower and more procedural: the on/off default for an assistant already permitted in a school's domain has shifted to include younger age bands automatically.
That narrowness is precisely why it is easy to overlook, and precisely why it is worth a five-minute check by whoever runs your Google Admin console.
What to do
- Check your Google Admin console under Classroom app settings today, not at the next scheduled IT review — confirm what age groups currently have Gemini in Classroom enabled and whether that matches your intended policy.
- If your school previously disabled Gemini for under-18s, verify the setting held; Google says it should have, but a manual check costs little.
- Separate your Workspace for Education policy from any assumptions carried over from consumer Gemini rules — they are different products with different age gates, particularly in the UK.
- Loop this into your KCSIE 2026 AI safeguarding documentation as a dated change, so the record shows the school reviewed the default rather than inherited it.
What to watch
Whether Google extends the current UK supervised-account block on the consumer Gemini app, or narrows the gap between the two product tracks, will determine whether this patchwork settles or widens. Any DfE or ICO guidance referencing default AI settings in Google Workspace for Education is also worth tracking, given how directly this intersects with existing safeguarding duties.