We believe technology is at its best when it makes room for what is most human: attention, self-awareness, character and empathy.
Haileybury pupils learn to use artificial intelligence with confidence, judgement and a healthy dose of scepticism, because the tools are remarkable, but the minds using them matter more.
Every parent is asking the same question at the moment, usually late in the evening and often with a slightly furrowed brow.
What does AI mean for my child's education?
This is a really important question, and one that we’ve been exploring at Haileybury for a long time. Artificial intelligence is reshaping whole professions, and many of the entry-level tasks that once launched a career are now being completed by machines, so the young people of today who will thrive in the future will be those who can use these tools with judgement and still do their own thinking.
A child who can use AI well holds an advantage that will only grow, and a child who leans on it to do the thinking is quietly handing that advantage away, which is really the whole of it. Whether AI helps a child think or thinks for them depends almost entirely on the task they are set, which is why a school's choices about AI are among the most consequential choices it now makes, and why we make ours with such care.
What this means for pupils at Haileybury is fluency without dependence. They will learn how these tools actually work and precisely when to distrust them, they will wrestle with the ethics of a technology that raises hard questions, and they will leave able to use AI confidently in a world where everyone else will be using it too. The thinking, throughout, stays theirs.
Our pupils will meet artificial intelligence everywhere they go, and a school that ignores it fails them just as surely as a school that surrenders to it. We chose a third path, which is to embrace it on our terms rather than on the technology's, and to build the whole of our approach around a key idea: the task is the variable. Set the right task and AI becomes a remarkable partner to a child's thinking, and set the wrong one and it becomes a substitute for it, so we’ve designed the task.
From their first term in Lower School 1, to their last in Upper Sixth, pupils build real fluency with AI while wrestling with the questions it raises. They pull apart deepfakes and build their own tests for truth, research with tools such as Gemini Notebook and Gemini, and learn precisely when to distrust them. Through our digital leaders programme they help decide how the school itself uses these technologies, so they have a hand in shaping AI at Haileybury as well as learning about it.
We are proud to have been one of the first schools in the UK to launch a bespoke AI curriculum for our pupils. Our Digital Innovations course in Removes (Year 9) teaches every pupil how AI actually works alongside truth and media, ethics, and their own wellbeing.
Because AI is embedded rather than bolted on, it turns up wherever the thinking is hardest. Sixth Form philosophers have spent a session in conversation with a chatbot built specifically to test the limits of machine friendship, then argued about whether such a thing should exist at all. Our enrichment programme has taken on AI companions and what happens to people who fall for them. Arts Week put the death of art at the hands of AI on trial, with a prosecution and a defence. Sixth Formers examine the ethics of AI in the workplace and draft the regulation they believe should exist, then defend it under questioning.
Our teachers are trained as carefully as our pupils. Every member of staff takes part in continuing training that goes well beyond which buttons to press, from whole-staff sessions on what AI means for a pupil's own will and effort, to a practical guide to using AI well in the classroom. Behind all of that sits the less glamorous work that makes the principles real: a staff AI policy and a companion policy written for pupils, a guide for parents, an acceptable use policy audited against Keeping Children Safe in Education, and a full review of our AI governance against the National Governance Association's toolkit. Every platform is checked for safety, privacy and bias before anyone is allowed near it.
All of our hard work has led to national and international recognition. Haileybury holds the Gold AI Quality Mark from the Good Future Foundation, awarded with a near-perfect 44 out of 45 across the nine areas assessed, which places us amongst an elite number of schools worldwide. The assessors called our work "a confident, research-driven approach to AI that is both ambitious and grounded", and described what our pupils experience as "a rich and coherent learning experience that goes well beyond tool use".
Dr Fiona Aubrey-Smith's independent review of the school, Pathfinding Excellence, Pathfinding Futures, devotes an entire chapter to what she calls our pathfinding approach to artificial intelligence. We have been asked to share that approach on stages from BETT in London to ISTE in the United States, and our AI curriculum has been written up as a case study for HMC.
Our Director of Digital Innovation and Enterprise, Tom Wade, was named AI Pioneer of the Year at the 2026 Edufuturists Awards and named Google AI Empowered Educator 2026.
We are proud of our approach and we are prouder of the confidence our pupils carry into a world full of AI.
Technology will keep changing, and so will we, because principles that cannot survive a new model release were never principles at all. We will keep revisiting how we teach and govern AI as the technology moves, keep saying no to anything that does not earn its place, and keep sharing what we learn with others around the world.
For your child, the future means leaving Haileybury at eighteen having built, audited and defended an AI project of their own, knowing how the machines work, when to trust them and when to do the thinking yourself, and carrying that judgement into a world where everyone will be using AI and rather fewer will be using it well. We are proud of the recognition, and prouder still of that confidence.
A confident, research-driven approach to AI that is both ambitious and grounded.
Good Future Foundation assessor
