What’s New in Microsoft Teams for Education

Microsoft Teams for Education has continued to settle into daily school life as a central space for teaching, learning and communication. Since the new version launch in 2023, to increase performance and flexibility, the platform has strengthened how it connects with the wider Microsoft 365 suite – with a clear focus on making Teams easier to organise, easier to recap and more practical to use at scale.

Let’s take a look at some of the key improvements that have been rolled out over the last year.

Why Class Teams is a vital classroom tool

For teaching, learning and communication

The core fundamentals of Class Teams still make it an essential component of a school’s digital toolkit. Class teams keep conversation, resources and tasks in one location, which helps teachers and students stay organised across multiple classes. The Posts area supports announcements and everyday questions, while Files keeps shared editing straightforward for group work and collaborative planning. 

The Assignments feature continues to provide a clear pathway from task setting to submission and feedback, with grades and comments kept alongside the learning materials that support ongoing work.

As Teams continues to evolve, the real benefit is how these familiar tools become more efficient and easier to manage across departments, year groups and trusts.

Curriculum organisation is getting smarter

Classwork adds structure, and AI reduces repetitive setup

The Classwork channel in Class Teams continues to evolve as a practical method of organising learning into modules that align more closely with schemes of work. It helps students see what they are doing now, what comes next, and how resources link together, without having to navigate across multiple posts and files. For staff, the ability to reuse content across classes reduces repeated setup and supports consistency within departments and trusts.

One of the most relevant – and perhaps inevitable – shifts last year was the move towards AI-supported planning inside education workflows. Microsoft has begun introducing AI-generated lesson planning within Classwork, designed to help teachers draft a lesson outline from class details and a short description, with the option to ground the outline in relevant files and education standards. Meanwhile, AI-generated learning activities are beginning to be introduced, including flashcards created from teacher-provided content, giving staff a faster route from teaching material to structured practice tasks without leaving Teams.

Chats and channels are easier to keep on top of

Threads, scheduling and shared context reduce noise

In busy school environments, the challenge is often managing the sheer volume of fragmented information circulating on the platform. Teams has introduced improvements aimed at helping staff and students find the right conversation, keep related discussions together, and reduce repeated questions.

Threads in channels bring clearer structure to department communication by keeping replies grouped to the specific post they relate to, rather than flattening everything into one stream. Scheduled channel messages also give staff more control over timing; useful for planned reminders, homework prompts, staff updates or trust-wide comms that need to land during working hours.

Teams has also improved the small but important details that make day-to-day collaboration smoother. Forwarded messages can now include a link back to the original chat or channel, which helps reduce context loss when information is shared between teams. Loop components and pages can be brought into channels to keep working documents and planning artefacts closer to the conversation, and chat notes allow groups to keep lightweight shared notes that are visible to chat members only.

Copilot and in-context AI support are becoming genuinely useful

Summaries, drafting support and faster access to context with appropriate oversight

AI in Teams has shifted from novelty to everyday utility over the last year, with features designed to reduce time spent searching, recapping and drafting. Copilot in Teams now supports message generation and surfaces insights drawn from chat, channel history and calendar content, helping staff quickly reorient themselves when returning to a conversation or preparing for upcoming work.

A growing focus has been placed on summarisation. File summaries shared directly in chat provide immediate context without needing to open documents, while thread summaries help staff catch up in busy channels by highlighting key points in a more digestible format. For schools and trusts, this is most effective when there are clear expectations that AI supports, rather than replaces, professional judgement, alongside appropriate licensing and policy controls for different roles.

Event delivery and organiser controls continue to improve

More flexible access, better post-session review and improved session management

Teams has also seen steady refinement in how larger sessions and structured communications are delivered, which is particularly relevant for virtual briefings, safeguarding updates, training sessions, meetings and trust-wide communications. Improved dial-in options make it easier for attendees to join when they are away from a desk, while enhanced production tools give organisers greater control over what participants see and when.

Post-session review has become more flexible through intelligent recap features that work across different event formats. Audio recaps allow transcripts to be converted into podcast-style summaries, giving staff the option to catch up while travelling or between sites. Alongside, practical organiser controls help sessions run more smoothly. Screen capture restrictions support confidentiality, countdown timers help keep sessions on schedule, and real-time microphone indicators reduce audio issues during live delivery. Individually, these are small changes, but together they make a noticeable difference when running frequent events across multiple teams.

Accessibility and inclusion remain central strengths

More ways for every learner and colleague to participate

Teams continues to build on its accessibility toolkit with updates that support more inclusive participation. Real-Time Text in meetings and calls provides instant, character-by-character text transmission, which can be valuable for accessibility needs and for situations where audio is unreliable. Updates to captions and Real-Time Text behaviour also improve privacy when transcription is turned off, limiting how much dialogue is retained on screen.

Alongside this key feature, enhanced spell check in chat reduces everyday friction for staff and students, particularly in multilingual environments. Such improvements sit well alongside existing accessibility features such as Immersive Reader and live captions, helping schools support a wider range of learners within the same platform.