School administration and parent communication prompts

The problem: four drafts of a circular, and the deadline is still wrong

Three o'clock on a Friday, and the discipline team needs the circular for next week's outing to go home before dismissal. The teacher responsible pulls up last year's version, changes the date, the venue and the fee, prints it and sends it out. At seven that evening a parent messages: the reply slip deadline is still last year's date.

Teachers have started using AI for this, and the first attempt usually looks like this:

Write me a Primary 6 outing circular.

The sentences are fluent but the document is not a Hong Kong school circular. No reference number, no reply slip, a greeting reading "Dear Parents" in the wrong register, and a closing line about looking forward to creating wonderful memories together. The teacher rewrites the whole thing and concludes that AI is not much use here.

The prompt was simply too short. Same job, with audience, format and verification added:

Role: you are a Hong Kong primary school discipline team teacher who writes circulars to parents.
Task: write a circular for the Primary 6 autumn outing, with a reply slip.
Output format: the circular body (250 words maximum), a separate reply slip section, and a list headed "information to verify".
Constraints: formal and concise Hong Kong English, no sentimental phrasing. Render every date, time, venue, fee and deadline as a placeholder and add it to the verification list — do not fill any of them in yourself.

This time the teacher fills five blanks, checks a five-line list, and is finished in seven minutes.

Why this works

Administrative writing has one defining property: the format is harder than the content. A circular says about five things. What is hard is the greeting, the reference number, the reply slip layout, the exact degree of formality, and whether a sentence could be misread by a parent. Those are precisely what a general model does not know, because it has never read your school's documents.

Think of it as a capable writer on their first day at work. If nobody shows them what a school circular looks like, they write the version they have seen elsewhere. There are two fixes — in the short term a format description inside the prompt, and in the long term a school knowledge base that has actually read your templates. See the school knowledge base and knowledge bases and RAG.

The second principle is about safety. Pasting real personal data into a general-purpose AI is the most common and most serious mistake in administrative use. A pupil's name, 6A, a student number, a parent's phone number, an SEN assessment result — once any of these goes into a consumer tool with no no-training terms, no encryption at rest and no audit trail, the school has lost control of that data. Placeholders are not an inconvenience; they are the condition that makes AI safe to use here. AI handles the words, identities stay in school systems. The six data protection principles under the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance are what principals and school management committees will cite.

Template 1: a circular

Role: you are a teacher in the [team name] of a Hong Kong [primary/secondary] school who writes circulars to parents.
Task: write a circular about [matter], with a reply slip.
Output:
1. Circular body, 250 words maximum, covering in order — purpose, date, time and venue, what students need to bring or know, fees, what parents need to do.
2. A separate reply slip with a parent signature line and a return date.
3. A list headed "information to verify" naming every placeholder used in the body and the slip.
Constraints: formal and concise Hong Kong English with the school's standard salutation; no sentimental or promotional sentences. Render every date, time, venue, amount, deadline and staff name as a [square-bracket placeholder] and never fill one in or guess it. Include no student names, classes or student numbers.
Background: [one or two sentences on the nature of the matter and what parents need to do]

Template 2: a letter to parents about an individual situation

This is the most sensitive category. The key is to describe behaviour rather than a person, and to enter no identifying data at all.

Role: you are a Hong Kong secondary school class teacher writing to a parent about a student's situation. The purpose is to invite a meeting, not to lay blame.
Task: write a letter setting out what the school has observed, the support already provided, and what you would like to discuss with the parent.
Output format: letter body of no more than 300 words in three paragraphs — observations, what the school has done, an invitation to meet with two time options. Add one line headed "information to verify in this letter".
Constraints: respectful tone, no blame, no diagnosis and no judgement of the student's ability or character. Refer to the student only as [the student]; use placeholders for all dates, times, venues and staff names. Do not suggest any outside service or organisation, as that follows school procedure. If you are unsure of a school procedure, write "verify against school procedure" rather than describing a process yourself.
Situation (no names): [describe behaviour, for example "five late arrivals in three weeks, two missed homework submissions, noticeably reduced class participation"]

Template 3: meeting minutes

Role: you are an assistant who turns rough notes into formal minutes.
Task: below are scattered notes from a [panel/committee] meeting. Produce formal minutes.
Output:
1. A meeting details block (date, time, venue, attendance) rendered as placeholders.
2. "Matters discussed", following the agenda, two or three sentences per item, recording only what was actually said.
3. "Decisions and follow-up" as a three-column table — decision, responsible role, deadline.
4. A list headed "unclear in the notes" naming everything you could not determine.
Constraints: do not complete the meaning of an ambiguous sentence and do not write a conclusion for a discussion that did not reach one; put anything uncertain in section 4. Identify people by role (panel head, class teacher) rather than by name. Hong Kong English, neutral register.
Notes: [paste notes with names and student details removed first]

Template 4: a parents' evening script

Role: you are the [subject] panel head in a Hong Kong secondary school, speaking to Secondary 1 parents about how the subject is organised this year.
Task: write an eight-minute script.
Output format: the full script (about 900 words) in four parts — this year's learning focus, homework and assessment arrangements, how parents can support at home, and a lead-in to questions. Add three lines of "speaker notes" flagging where to slow down and where to read the room.
Constraints: spoken but professional Hong Kong English, no stacking of educational jargon, and one plain-language gloss whenever a technical term appears. Promise nothing the school has not confirmed. Render every date, weighting and number of assessments as a placeholder and list them for verification at the end. Name no student and no member of staff.
Background: [this year's focus, and the three questions parents most often ask]

Common mistakes

1. Pasting real data into a general-purpose tool. Usually a whole attendance record or mark sheet, unaltered. Fix: strip names, classes, student numbers and contact details first, work with placeholders or codes, and match them back up inside school systems.
2. No word limit and no register specified. The default output is long and enthusiastic, so the circular reads like a leaflet. Fix: put the word ceiling and the register in the constraints line, and say explicitly that sentimental phrasing is unwanted.
3. Letting the model fill in dates and fees. It will, and the results look entirely plausible. Fix: every verifiable field becomes a placeholder and goes on a checklist. This step cannot be skipped.
4. Letting the model complete the conclusions in minutes. Notes saying "general feeling was agreement" become "the meeting resolved". Fix: state explicitly that no conclusion may be written where none was reached, and route uncertainty into the "unclear in the notes" list.

Going further

• Bilingual circulars: generate the Chinese version with template 1, then run a second, separate request translating the finalised Chinese, with a constraint to keep the same level of formality, copy proper nouns and amounts across verbatim, and not reorganise the paragraphs. Do not ask for both versions in one go, or the two will drift apart.
• Incident notifications: change template 1's register to "concise, facts first, no speculation" and add an output item listing the three questions parents are most likely to ask with suggested replies, so the general office answers the phone consistently.
• Communication about students with SEN: add one constraint to template 2 forbidding any diagnostic or labelling language and limiting the letter to observable behaviour and the specific support the school provides.
• Field trip circulars for General Studies or Science: add a line of learning purpose to the background, and the draft will say the visit supports this term's learning focus, which parents accept far more readily.
• Improving minutes over time: paste last meeting's approved minutes into the prompt as a format example. The model will follow your panel's sectioning habits more accurately than any description in the constraints line can achieve.

Where to go next

The value here is not saved typing. It is turning "correct format, appropriate register, verify the facts" into something that happens every single time. Placeholders are the foundation: they let you use AI while personal data never leaves the school.

To have AI quote your school's own circular templates and policy wording directly, see grounded prompts with citations. For the wider set of administrative work that can move to AI, see reducing teacher administrative workload.