Claude Projects: Primary Teachers, Reclaim Your Time
Before we begin. let me explain what I mean by Claude. I have first hand experience of being in a room, mentioning Claude and being met with blank faces. It is another LLM, the same concept as ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. Made by Anthropic, an AI company set up as the antithesis of OpenAI, Claude is arguably the best LLM out there at the moment (but these things change all the time.) On an entry level, you interact with it as you would any other chat bot. Below, however, I explain how you can make the experience a little more bespoke!
Also, I talk about Primary school teachers. I’m British, it’s a habit. If you are in North America, swap ‘Primary’ with ‘Elementary.’ Also I use Year 1-6 instead of Grades K-5. They are just one number out.
Let’s Begin.
Here’s a Sunday evening you’ll recognise.
You are staring down the barrel of another school week and you realise that you need to still update your planning.
It’s 2026, so you hop on to AI. You open Claude to help you plan Monday’s Maths lesson. You type: “Can you help me plan a lesson on column addition?”
Claude asks: What year group? What level are your pupils at? What curriculum do you follow? What’s their prior learning?
You answer all of it. Claude produces something useful. You edit it. It’s good.
Wednesday evening. You open Claude again — this time to draft a parent email about a pupil’s reading progress.
Claude has forgotten everything. You’re starting from zero.
This is what Philip Alcock calls, the Blank Slate Tax — the invisible time cost of re-introducing yourself to an AI tool every single session. For a busy class teacher, it adds up fast. A minute here, three minutes there, multiplied across every task, every week.
There’s a fix. It takes ten minutes to set up. You only do it once.
What a Claude Project actually is
A Claude Project is a saved workspace inside Claude.ai. Think of it like the staffroom drawer labelled Year 4 Class Teacher. Every time you pull it open, your curriculum plan is there. Your class notes are there. Claude already knows who you are and what you need.
You set it up once. Claude doesn’t forget what’s in it overnight.
Without a Project, every conversation starts completely blank. With a Project, every conversation starts fully briefed.
The difference — in terms of output quality and time spent — is significant.
The three things your Project needs
Think of setting up a Project like briefing a new teaching assistant on their first day. There are three things they need before they can help you properly — and a Claude Project works exactly the same way:
1. Project Instructions This is Claude’s first-day briefing. A short note telling it who you are: your year group, your curriculum, your most common tasks, and how you want it to respond. It loads automatically into every chat you open inside the Project. You write it once. You never type it again.
2. Project Knowledge These are the documents you hand your new assistant on day one — your medium-term plan, a curriculum overview, an anonymised class list with brief notes. Claude reads these before every response, without you pasting them in each time. Upload one or two to start. You can always add more.
3. Your go-to prompts Two or three copy-paste starting points for your most time-consuming tasks. Not complex. Not clever. Just well-structured enough to get you a useful first draft on the first attempt, rather than the third.
That’s the whole system.
The three tasks this Project is built around
I’ve spoken to enough primary teachers to know which tasks eat the most time. Three come up consistently:
Weekly lesson planning. Not because teachers don’t know how to plan — they do — but because putting it into a document, with differentiation for three groups, takes time that could be spent on something else.
Pupil report comments. Every teacher has the knowledge. The bottleneck is converting that knowledge into written language, one pupil at a time, for every subject, at a pace that doesn’t destroy your evenings.
Differentiated activities. Creating three or more versions of the same task — scaffolded for SEND, standard for expected, extended for greater depth — is genuinely time-consuming. It’s also exactly the kind of mechanical writing work that AI does well.
The Project below is built around these three tasks. It’s not trying to replace your professional judgement. It’s trying to remove the parts of these tasks that don’t require it.
What the Project Instructions look like
Here’s the core of the system. This is what you paste into your Project’s Instructions field, edited to match your own context:
You are a teaching assistant for a primary school class teacher in the UK.
About me: - I teach [Year X] — pupils are approximately [age] years old - My school follows [the England National Curriculum / CfE / Curriculum for Wales] - My class has [approximate number] pupils, including children with SEND, EAL learners, and higher attainers
My three most common tasks: 1. Writing weekly lesson plans 2. Writing end-of-year and interim pupil report comments 3. Creating differentiated activities for mixed-ability groups
How I want you to respond: - Be practical and specific — I don’t need theory, I need usable content - When writing report comments, use third person - When planning lessons, always include: objective, main activity, differentiation - Always ask me to check any output before I use it with pupils or parents
What NOT to do: - Do not write in an overly corporate or formal tone - Do not invent pupil data or assessment outcomes
Notice the last section — What NOT to do. This is the most underused part of any set of Project Instructions. Constraints often shape output better than permissions. Telling Claude not to invent data isn’t obvious — but once you’ve seen Claude confidently fabricate a pupil’s reading age, you understand why it’s worth including.
The three prompts
Once your Project is set up, these are your go-to starting points.
For a lesson plan:
Write me a lesson plan for: [Subject], [Topic], [Year group], [Lesson length]. Include: learning objective, starter activity, main activity, differentiation for SEND / EAL / higher attainers, and a plenary. The class’s prior learning is: [brief description].
For a report comment:
Write a report comment based on these notes: [subject], [pupil initial or made-up name], [3–5 bullet points about the pupil’s progress and next steps]. Tone: warm and encouraging, for parents. Length: 3–5 sentences. Third person.
For a differentiated activity:
I need three versions of this activity: [describe the task]. Year group: [X]. Create: (1) a scaffolded version for SEND / lower confidence pupils, (2) a standard version, (3) an extended challenge for greater depth. Keep the learning objective the same across all three.
They’re not complicated. They don’t need to be. The Project Instructions do the heavy lifting — these prompts just tell Claude what you need today.
*Side note - you can enhance your lesson planning further by adding a lesson planning Skill. I will explain this in another post soon!
What to upload (and what not to)
A few documents go a long way:
Your medium-term plan for the current term
A curriculum overview for your year group
An anonymised class list with brief notes on SEND, EAL, and higher attainers
One important note: anonymise before you upload. Don’t upload full pupil names, dates of birth, or sensitive SEND information. Initials or made-up names are fine. Claude doesn’t need real names to be useful — it needs context.
The honest version
Claude is a first draft, not a finished product.
A report comment it produces will need your eyes on it before it goes home. A lesson plan it writes will need your knowledge of the actual children in your room. A differentiated task it creates will need your judgement about whether the scaffolding is right for your specific SEND pupils.
None of that goes away. What goes away is the blank page. The mechanical first pass. The Sunday evening spent staring at a planning template wondering where to start.
Use Claude to do the structural work. Then make it yours.
Getting started today
Go to claude.ai and sign in (free account is fine)
Find ‘Projects’ in the left sidebar and click ‘New Project’
Name it something like Year 4 Class Teacher or My Teaching Assistant
Paste the Project Instructions above (edited for your context) into the Project Instructions field
Open a new conversation inside the Project and ask: “Who am I and what do I teach?”
If Claude can answer that question accurately, your Project is working.
Everything else follows from there.
The full step-by-step setup guide — including a printable version with all prompts formatted for easy use — is available to download HERE. Share it with a colleague who’d find it useful.