Next week, digital, AI and data leaders from across the school sector will come together for the Confederation of School Trusts’ Data and Digital Transformation conference at a critical moment for education.
We are living through a period of profound technology change which is affecting society in ways that we cannot wholly anticipate. The rapid progress of AI and the increasing need to understand what is and isn’t working across our school system means that strong digital foundations and data capability and leadership are becoming integral to trust leadership. Across our system, these capabilities are no longer confined to specialist roles and are increasingly woven into how we manage information, drive improvement and shape the experiences of children and adults in our schools.
This creates both opportunity and responsibility and is why last year we launched our guiding principles for digital transformation to support leaders in this work. What those principles, and the themes of our conference next week, recognises is that we are not simply purchasing and implementing technology anymore – we need to go further and redesign our assumptions about the role of technology and relay some of the digital foundations which support how it works for us.
An increasingly complex landscape
Our community began with just a focus on data, but it became clear that the challenge the sector was facing is not a lack of data, but a lack of coherence. As all school leaders will recognise, information sits across multiple systems, rarely coming together in a way that enables timely, confidence, decision making. This fragmentation is not by design – it reflects how our digital ecosystem has evolved, and it has required data leaders to become data brokers and system designers and integrators. And as trusts have grown, this challenge has become greater.
At the same time, rapid growth of AI tools brings new possibilities alongside legitimate concerns. Questions of transparency, accountability and trust form a growing part of due diligence and decision making, central to how we lead responsibility in a system working with young people and sensitive data.
A shared set of principles
Our guiding principles emphasise:
- Strong foundations: ensuring secure, interoperable, and scalable infrastructure with clear data governance
- Clarity of purpose: anchoring digital strategy in educational values, not technology for its own sake
- Pedagogy-first thinking: aligning technology decisions with how pupils learn best
- Curiosity with caution: embracing innovation while rigorously evaluating evidence and risk
- Capacity building: investing in people, skills and collaboration across the sector
Together they offer something powerful – a way to move together as a community beyond reactive, technology lead decision making towards deliberate, system-wide digital transformation which properly serves education and learning.
A collective responsibility
The decisions we make in the coming few years – setting our expectations around data standards and interoperability, around governance and good use of AI, and how we work together as a sector to improve digital capability – will shape our school system for a generation of teachers and learners.
The challenge, and the opportunity, is collective and next week we will continue to discuss how we take our guiding principles and turn them into practical approaches to leading well through this change.
- Lauren Thorpe is Chief Transformation Officer at United Learning, and Chair of CST's Data and digital transformation professional community.
