Walk around Haileybury on an ordinary day and the technology is easy to miss. That is deliberate. Devices here do their job quietly, in service of teaching, and good teaching always comes first.
Technology has stopped being a separate subject in modern life. It is woven through how people work, learn, decide and communicate, so it needs to be woven through a child's education in the same way, deliberately and with care rather than by accident. The children who flourish will be those who can direct technology towards their own purposes rather than being directed by it, and that takes habits most people are never actually taught: the executive functions that let you plan, focus and finish, the oracy to explain your thinking out loud, the reading stamina to go deep, and the digital fluency to make the tools serve all three.
Attention has become the scarcest resource a young person owns, and a school that hands out devices without protecting attention does a child no favours. Your child will spend their adult life surrounded by technology designed to capture their attention, and school is where they learn to keep it.
We choose technology for what it does for learning, never for novelty, and we are happy to say no to anything that does not earn its place. Four strands guide our approach: executive functions, oracy, reading and digital fluency.
We are also a founding member of the National PedTech Partnership, working alongside researchers and schools across the country to shape how technology is understood and used in British education. What happens in our classrooms informs practice well beyond them. Dr Fiona Aubrey-Smith's independent review highlighted how Haileybury’s role in digital education puts us "as part of a wider system leadership role".
Everything we do begins with clear intent: we want our pupils to develop a love of learning and to be prepared for their exciting futures in any field they choose. We aim to develop the whole person, fostering values and encouraging positive social contribution while cultivating core skills and capacities in all areas. From this intent flows our adaptive and responsive pedagogy, which is continually refined to ensure it remains closely aligned with our objectives and the needs of our pupils. Only then do we select the tools and strategies we use; these are chosen to serve our pedagogy and intent, not to drive them.
We believe that outstanding outcomes are the natural byproduct of exceptional teaching and learning, rather than the sole or immediate aim. This is why we focus across the school on four key strands: executive functions, oracy, reading, and digital fluency.
Intent leads, pedagogy follows, and tools support, ensuring that teaching and learning remains purposeful, coherent, and focused on long-term success for all pupils.
We also hold that learning should be comprehensible, should show pupils their own progress and should be compelling, and when those conditions meet, the result looks a great deal like joy. Technology, used well, makes more room for that joy and for the human business of teaching. Used badly, it crowds them out, which is why we embraced it on our terms rather than on the technology's.
Walk around Haileybury on an ordinary Tuesday and you might struggle to spot the technology, which is entirely deliberate. We are both an Apple Distinguished School and a Google Reference School, a combination very few schools in the world can claim, and yet devices here do their job quietly, in service of teaching. What you will notice instead is the teaching itself, with teachers untethered from the front of the room and working among their pupils rather than presenting at them, and pupils taking growing ownership of their own learning as they build the habits of independent scholars.
Four strands run through all of it: executive functions, oracy, reading and digital fluency. Our management software removes games and personal messaging during the school day, so attention stays where it belongs and pupils can give their whole minds to learning.
Every pupil in Removes follows our Digital Innovations course, designed and taught at Haileybury, and one of the first bespoke AI curricula in the country. It began with a question rather than a tool. When we surveyed our own pupils, more than half admitted to being tempted to submit work they had not fully written, nearly double the figure of a year before, and what the data showed was that the temptation followed the task they had been set rather than the technology in front of them. So instead of banning the tools we redesigned the tasks and built a course that puts the thinking back where it belongs.
The journey runs from how AI actually works, through study and revision skills and practical fluency, to truth and the media, the ethics of a technology that raises hard questions, the shape AI is giving to society, and finally the pupils' own wellbeing and futures. Along the way interactive labs let pupils play with the machinery rather than simply hear about it, and every lesson is mapped to the OECD and EU AI Literacy framework, so the course functions as a coherent education rather than a scattering of tips. A good deal of it was requested by the pupils themselves, who asked to explore AI companions and relationships, what algorithms do to their mental health, deepfakes, bias, the environmental cost of AI and what it means for the jobs they might one day want, and we built units to answer them.
The skills and habits developed on the course do not stay in the classroom either: in each of the last two cohorts more than ninety-five per cent of pupils could name a concrete way they had already applied the course in another subject, every single pupil rated their confidence in using these skills at or above the midpoint, and a quarter asked for more on ethics, misinformation and the dangers of AI, which is exactly the appetite we hoped to build. One pupil summed it up at the end of the year: "I have been questioning more stuff I see on the internet as I am more aware of how AI can be used to create misinformation unintentionally or intentionally." It is, at heart, a course about being a clear-eyed human in a world of clever machines.
Technology earns its place in individual subjects too, quietly and on the teacher's terms. Latin pupils have worked through the story of Oedipus as an interactive detective case, and across the school teachers design tasks where the technology carries the routine so that the pupil carries the thinking.
Dr Fiona Aubrey-Smith's independent review put it simply: "This is where Haileybury's pathfinding approach is striking." Her report describes Haileybury as playing "a wider system leadership role" in digital education, which is why other schools come to us to learn how it is done, and we are glad to show them. We are a founding member of the National PedTech Partnership, working alongside researchers and schools across the country to shape how technology is understood and used in British education, and this year we were shortlisted for the Tes Schools Award for Best Use of Technology and for Edufuturists Independent School of the Year.
