Digital Devices at St Catherine’s

St Catherine's is a 1:1 device school. All girls are provided with a managed, filtered device, and Microsoft Teams and OneNote are central to teaching and learning across the school.

We take a considered approach to the use of technology; it is there to support good teaching, not to drive it. Staff are expected to make resources available digitally, while recognising that handwriting and paper-based work remain an integral part of learning and examination preparation. The Microsoft ecosystem supports collaboration and resource-sharing both in the classroom and across departments. Teams is used widely for communication, planning and administration, so staff will find it integral to working life at the school, not just to lessons.

What is Digital Learning?

Digital learning at St Catherine’s goes beyond the basics of using computers. The integration of 1:1 devices has transformed how we teach and learn, opening up opportunities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Highlights of our approach include:

• Interactive digital resources: Multimedia-rich digital exercise books and content provide an engaging, creative, and dynamic learning experience which is accessible at all times.
• Real-time collaboration: Students work together on shared documents, whether in the classroom or across the globe, developing teamwork and communication skills.
• Beyond the classroom walls: Interactive learning adventures encourage curiosity, risk-taking, and exploration in ways that extend far beyond traditional lessons.

We equip our students with essential skills in Microsoft tools and digital citizenship, ensuring they are confident, capable, and responsible in their use of technology.

Stretch and challenge

Our digital provision supports every student in reaching their potential. By offering advanced tools and personalised learning opportunities, we encourage innovation, critical thinking, and creativity in every subject. The use of multimedia OneNote books plays a key role in supporting both extension activities and individualised support. These digital notebooks allow teachers to provide differentiated resources, such as video explanations, interactive exercises, and advanced research tasks, all within one accessible platform. Students can explore extension materials that deepen their understanding, while also receiving tailored support to consolidate their learning. This dynamic approach ensures every student can engage with content at a level that challenges and inspires them.

Digital Safety

In an increasingly connected world, it is essential that students are equipped to navigate the digital landscape safely and responsibly. At St Catherine’s, we take a proactive approach to teaching digital safety, ensuring that students develop the knowledge and skills needed to engage confidently and thoughtfully with technology while safeguarding their wellbeing.

From the earliest years, we embed the importance of online safety in our curriculum. Students learn how to engage critically with online sources, conduct effective research, and properly credit their references. Equally important, we teach them how to stay safe online and, perhaps most crucially, when to switch off and unplug. We address the unique challenges posed by social media through targeted programmes designed to help students reflect on their online presence and understand the implications of their digital actions. By the Sixth Form, our focus shifts to preparing students for their professional futures. Through our University Preparation course, Futures - Sixth, the St Catherine’s Ongoing Programme of Enrichment, students learn how to manage their professional online identity thoughtfully and constructively.

At every stage, our aim is to empower students to make informed, safe, and ethical choices in the digital world, ensuring they are prepared for the opportunities and challenges of life online.

AI Literacy at St Catherine's

Helping every girl understand, question and use AI confidently, critically and with integrity.

OUR APPROACH

An education about people, not technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming part of everyday life. It shapes the information we see, the tools we use and the workplaces our girls will one day enter. Learning to understand it, question it and use it wisely is therefore an important part of preparing young people for the future.

At St Catherine's, our starting point is not technology, it is education. The heart of which remains human: expert teaching, strong relationships and the satisfaction of working things out for herself. Those things matter just as much in an age of AI as they ever have.

We are ambitious about preparing girls for a world in which AI will play an increasing role. The most future-ready thing a school can do is not simply to hand pupils the latest tool. Tools change quickly. What lasts is the ability to think well, exercise good judgement, act with integrity and adapt with confidence. The girls who will thrive are those who can understand what AI is doing, question what it produces, and make good decisions about when and how to use it.

Our approach therefore puts the person first. We want a girl who meets confident, fluent AI-generated content and knows not to take it on trust: to ask whether it is accurate, to notice bias or a missing perspective, and to check it against reliable sources, because these tools can be confidently wrong. We want her to use them to strengthen her own thinking rather than replace it. Above all, we want her to understand that technology can support learning, but it is never a substitute for the judgement, curiosity, and independence that a great education develops.

This is AI literacy as we understand it. It is not a separate initiative bolted on to a St Catherine's education. It is an expression of it.

Everything we do in this area is guided by three simple principles. They help us embrace the opportunities AI offers while remaining true to what we value most.

Human AI is a tool, not an authority. Real relationships, expert teaching and a girl's own thinking remain at the centre of her education.

Safe Safeguarding and privacy come first. We use only tools we have assessed as appropriate for a school, and we teach girls to protect themselves online.

Ethical AI is used honestly and fairly: openly acknowledged, checked for accuracy and bias, and never a substitute for a girl's own work.

WHAT SHE LEARNS

Four things every girl learns to do

AI literacy is about far more than knowing how to use a tool. It is about judgement, ethics and the ability to question what we are told, with the person, not the technology, at the centre. At St Catherine's, this means four things we want every girl to learn as she moves through the school. They are not a single lesson or a passing mention. They are taught, practised and deepened year on year.

01	Understand She learns what AI actually is: where it appears, how it produces its responses, and why confident, fluent answers can still be wrong.
02	Question She learns to check what AI produces against reliable sources, and to recognise bias, stereotypes, misinformation, manipulated images and missing perspectives. Every output is a starting point, never a finished answer.
03	Use with integrity She learns to use approved tools honestly: protecting privacy, being open about when AI has helped, and keeping her work her own. She learns to turn to AI in ways that support her own effort rather than replace it, because the work of thinking something through is where real learning happens.
04	Apply She learns to put these capabilities to work: directing AI well, judging when it helps and when it does not, and drawing on the creativity, communication and judgement that will let her shape her own future with confidence.

 

AI supports learning. It does not replace the thinking. The question we teach every girl to carry is simple: is this helping me think more deeply, or doing the thinking for me?

HOW SHE LEARNS IT

Woven through every subject

This is the heart of our approach. AI literacy is not a single course or a one-off assembly. As AI now affects every subject, we teach it where girls will actually encounter it.

A historian learns to question AI on the reliability of sources and the interpretation of evidence. A scientist examines how data and bias shape what a model produces. A writer weighs authenticity and her own voice. An artist considers the work behind a generated image and the rights of its creators. The skill is the same throughout; what changes is the context. That is what makes it meaningful and helps girls apply it in different situations.

Our Future Ready personal development and careers programme carries much of this wider work. Through it, and through lectures and conversation with their teachers and one another, girls explore the broader questions AI raises: misinformation, deepfakes, privacy and its place in a young person's life. They also learn to use it as a study tool, drawing on it to support their own effort rather than replace it. The aim is that, as girls become more capable users of these technologies, they also grow in judgement, responsibility and confidence.

THE RIGHT PACE

Building judgement stage by stage

What is right for an eleven-year-old is not what is right for a sixth former. We build deliberately, establishing a girl's own habits of thinking, reading, research and writing first, then developing confident, critical use of AI as she matures. The independence comes before the tool, because it is what makes wise use of the tool possible.

YEARS 7-8 Learning about AI Girls learn what AI is and how it can mislead: misinformation, bias, privacy and healthy boundaries. They build the independent thinking that confident, critical use will later rest upon.

YEARS 9-11 Supported, purposeful use Girls begin to use approved tools, only where a teacher permits, for genuine learning support such as practice, explanation or planning. Never to produce work they present as their own.

THE SIXTH FORM Work-ready judgement Girls develop the judgement that university and employers now expect: directing these tools well, understanding their limits, and applying AI thoughtfully within their chosen subjects.

THE BOUNDARIES WE SET

Clear boundaries, held for the right reasons

Good AI education is defined as much by what we choose not to do as by what we choose to do. The lines we hold are not about resisting technology. They reflect how seriously we take the purpose of education.

A girl's own work is always her own: AI never stands in for it, and it has no place in assessments. Younger pupils build their independence before tools are introduced. Only tools we have assessed as safe are used for schoolwork, and personal data is never entered into them. Teachers and real relationships remain at the centre of learning. These commitments give us the confidence to embrace the opportunities AI offers without compromising a girl's thinking, safety or integrity.

We want every girl to use AI with confidence and to question it with judgement, and to know that the thinking is always hers to do.

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE

What our alumnae tell us

This is not a guess about the future. Our alumnae are already working with AI across law, medicine, technology, engineering, science, finance and the creative industries. We asked them, knowing what they know now, what they would most want a girl at St Catherine's to learn about AI. Their answers confirmed the approach we take, and they were strikingly consistent.

Critical thinking is more important than ever. When everyone has access to information through tools like these, being able to make the right decision is the most important job of all. A St Catherine's alumna, on what matters most at work

Above all they talked about judgement: knowing what good looks like, sense-checking everything, and never trusting AI blindly. They described it as a tool to be used alongside you, never instead of you, one that cannot replace skill, experience or original thought. And they were clear that the distinctively human capabilities, relationships, communication, creativity and the judgement to decide when not to use AI at all, are exactly what the technology cannot replace and what now matters most in their careers.

In a world where some graduate jobs are at risk because of AI, it is really important to understand what skills AI cannot replace: people skills, building relationships. Those are the skills relevant to nearly every job and industry. A St Catherine's alumna

Those are precisely the qualities we want every St Catherine's girl to leave with. AI raises their value; it does not diminish it.

IN PARTNERSHIP

Confident young women, ready for what comes

When families tell us what they want for their girls here, the answer is consistent: girls who can use AI sensibly and safely, who are not left behind by it, and who keep their ability to think for themselves. That is precisely what we set out to develop, and we are glad to pursue it alongside the families who share it.

We keep families informed as our approach develops, and we welcome the insight of the many parents who work with AI themselves. Our aim is not to produce girls who can operate the latest tool, because tools change. It is to see young women of confidence, character and compassion leave us able to think for themselves, judge wisely and act with integrity, ready to take their place in a world shaped by AI and to help shape it for the better.