Ready for the world of tomorrow.
The world of work our pupils will enter is changing faster than at any point in living memory. Artificial intelligence now performs much of the analytical work that schools have traditionally assessed and that once launched a career, so employers are prising what machines cannot supply: judgement, character, the ability to communicate, and the confidence to stand up and lead. Grades still open doors, but the people who walk through them will be those who can take responsibility for an idea, argue for it in a room, hear it challenged and make it better.
Three capacities are becoming more valuable rather than less, and they are the ones we have built this strand of the school around.
A young person rarely acquires those qualities by accident, so at Haileybury they are learned by doing real things with real consequences, working alongside leading professionals across the world.
Leadership and enterprise here are taught, practised and lived, rather than left to chance or reserved for the few, and at Haileybury character is built over years. We measure leadership by pupils’ ability to challenge ideas, discuss them orally and transfer what they have learned beyond the classroom, an emphasis Dr Fiona Aubrey-Smith’s independent impact report picked out for its attention on “core human skills such as oracy, collaboration and innovation”. Those are precisely the skills a changing workplace rewards, and they sit naturally alongside our values of courage, curiosity, integrity, kindness, respect and service, which are the point of leadership rather than an accessory to it.
We also hold a simple conviction about relevance. A real decision, made by a real person with incomplete information and something at stake, is the one thing a school cannot manufacture, and it is the thing our pupils most need to see. So rather than inventing tidy problems for them to solve, we bring the world experts who make those decisions into school and put our pupils in the room while it happens.
In 2027 we launch The Odyssey, a curriculum built as a hero’s journey across nine chapters, each asking a little more of every pupil than the last. Nine skills are taught, practised and revisited until collaboration, communication and problem solving become habits rather than happy accidents. Pupils pitch ideas in our Dragons’ Den, negotiate in conferences and defend their thinking in viva voce examinations, where ideas are tested by live questioning, and the journey peaks with an extended project each pupil designs, builds and presents. By Sixth Form, standing up and being accountable for your ideas feels perfectly normal.
In January 2027 that journey reaches its destination with our Programme of Leadership and Enterprise, which we believe is unlike anything else on offer in a British school. Lower Sixth pupils work in teams of four alongside a senior professional, an Old Haileyburian, a leading professional in industries such as law, banking, finance, accounting, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, technology start-ups, AI, sustainability entrepreneurship, space, defence, and architecture.
In the programme our pupils are invited into a live decision that person is working through right now: a pricing call, a new site, which of two directions to back, a new strategic direction for the company. Our pupils are engaging in real world work experience, learning from the best.
Over ten weeks the team learns the organisation, reads what the mentor shares, researches comparable cases from other sectors and contributes work the mentor can actually use, with the frontier AI tools they have learned to handle well elsewhere in the school. At the mid-point the mentor presses hard on the team’s thinking, which is the session that matters most. In week ten the pupils pitch the option they would take, name the option they would rule out, and then defend that recommendation under questioning from the mentor and other professionals.
During this time our pupils learn what it means to hold a meeting, make action points, and to be accountable for decisions. The reflect and build a case study that describes what actually happened in the room: what they did, what they observed about how an experienced person decides, what they contributed and where they fell short, and what each of them now thinks differently about.
Pupils leave Haileybury at eighteen having sat inside a real decision alongside people who make them for a living, defended a recommendation to their faces, and carried away a signed case study that says so. Our pupils know what they are capable of because they have already done it, being the person in the room who can stand up, take responsibility for an idea and see it through.
For Haileybury, the next two years are the busiest yet. The first cycle of the programme runs from January to March 2027. From there the Network grows to three cycles a year, an annual gathering where pupils present their case studies and mentors meet, a published selection of case studies as a window into how senior people really decide, and decisions drawn from across the Haileybury family of schools. If you lead an organisation and have a decision on your desk that you could share with four bright seventeen-year-olds, we would very much like to hear from you.
The programme will end with the Haileybury Enterprise Portfolio, a case study written by the pupils and signed off by their mentor. It will tell universities and employers something grades cannot: this pupil has worked in situations where decisions carry consequences, and held their own.
All of it is rooted in our values of courage, curiosity, integrity, kindness, respect and service. Pupils leave Haileybury ready for a changing world, knowing what they are capable of, because they have already done it.
