AI Connectors

AI connectors let the people at your school ask an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini — questions about your own school's data. Someone can ask "who was absent in 9B yesterday?" in the assistant they already use, and get an answer from Tawaasal.

Nothing is switched on by default. Until you enable it, nobody at your school can connect anything.

This guide is for school admins deciding whether to allow it and setting the rules. If you have decided and want to connect your own assistant, see Connect an AI assistant.

What an assistant can and cannot read

An assistant can only ever read. It cannot mark attendance, change a grade, send a message or alter anything at all.

You choose which of five categories it may read:

• Attendance
• Grades
• Merit Points
• Timetable
• Reports

Three things are never included, on any plan, whatever you switch on:

• Safeguarding concerns
• Wellbeing records
• Private messages

That is a property of the system rather than a setting, so there is no combination of options that exposes them.

Everyone sees only their own view

An assistant inherits exactly the permissions of the person who connected it. A teacher's assistant sees that teacher's classes. A guardian's assistant sees that guardian's children. Connecting an assistant never widens what somebody can reach.

Before you can enable it

AI connectors require a Professional or Enterprise plan. On other plans the section appears with an upgrade note and the switch cannot be turned on.

Turning it on

1. Go to Settings and open the Security tab.
2. Find AI Connectors.
3. Read the notice under Before You Enable AI Connectors. It explains where your school's data goes, and it is worth reading properly rather than scrolling past.
4. Tick I have read this and agree.
5. Switch on Enable AI Connectors.

The notice is the part that matters

Every question and its answer is sent to that assistant's provider — OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. Once it leaves Tawaasal it is outside our control, including how long the provider keeps it. Personal consumer accounts on these services may use conversations to train their models; business and education accounts on the same services generally do not. Check the provider's own terms for the accounts your staff actually use.

If the notice is ever updated, schools that accepted an earlier version keep working, but no new connections can be made until an admin reads and accepts the new one. You will see a banner telling you so.

Choosing who can connect

Under Who Can Connect an Assistant, pick the roles you allow. The options are School Admin, Teacher, Staff, Guardian and Student. New schools start with School Admin and Teacher.

Under Require MFA to Connect, pick the roles that must have multi-factor authentication set up before they can connect anything. School Admin starts in this list. Someone in a listed role who has not set up MFA is told to do that first.

Start narrow

You can widen this later without anybody reconnecting. Narrowing it takes effect immediately and stops existing connections, so it is easier to begin with fewer roles and add more once you have seen how it is used.

Choosing what it can read

Under Data Categories, switch each of the five categories on or off.

One thing to know: turning a category on does not extend it to connections that already exist. People who connected earlier keep the categories they consented to at the time, and have to reconnect to gain the new one. Turning a category off takes effect straight away.

Rate limits

Rate Limits caps how many questions a minute and an hour your school's assistants may ask. This exists so that one assistant looping on a question cannot slow the platform for everyone else.

Some schools will see these as fixed, marked Set by Tawaasal and cannot be changed here. That is deliberate and is managed by us.

Seeing what is connected

Assistants Connected Across the School lists every connection at your school: who connected it, which assistant, its status, the categories it was granted, when it was connected, and when it was last used.

Show past connections includes ones that have ended, with the reason they ended.

Stopping a connection

Select Revoke on any row. The assistant loses access immediately, and the person has to go through consent again if they want it back.

Revoking is the right response to a specific problem — a member of staff leaving, or an assistant nobody recognises. To stop everything at once, switch Enable AI Connectors off.

What happens when you change a setting

The difference matters, because one of these is reversible and the other is not:

• Switching connectors off, removing a role, or losing the plan feature suspends every affected connection. Assistants stop answering on their next question. If you put the setting back, they resume on their own and nobody reconnects.
• A person's account being deactivated, or moving to another school revokes their connections. That cannot be undone, because it is a fact about the account rather than about your settings.

How long a connection lasts

• A connection expires 90 days after it was made. The person reconnects to continue.
• A connection unused for 7 days expires on its own.

Both are deliberate. A connection nobody is using is a credential sitting there for no reason.

Questions people ask

Can the assistant change anything? No. Every connector question is read-only.

Can a teacher's assistant see another teacher's class? Only if that teacher could see it themselves in Tawaasal.

Does connecting an assistant send you our whole database? No. Each question fetches only what that question needs, and only within the categories you allowed and the person's own permissions.

Can I see what was asked? You can see that a connection was used and when. The questions themselves are held by the assistant's provider, in the person's own account there.