Use of AI

As we navigate a rapidly evolving digital world, we have adopted the Xavier Catholic Education Trust AI Policy to ensure that our use of technology remains purposeful, safe, and educationally enriching.

In line with our school motto, "Have faith… believe you can!", we want our students to embrace the opportunities of the future with confidence. Our approach to AI is rooted in our core values:

• Integrity & Respect: We are committed to the ethical use of AI. This means using technology in a discerning manner that promotes fairness and protects the rights of others. We expect students to use AI with honesty, ensuring that any work submitted is authentically their own and that AI is used to support—not replace—their learning.

• Aspire: We strive for educational enhancement, using AI as a tool to prepare students for the workplaces of tomorrow. We want our students to be "curious and creative," using AI to aid research and problem-solving while maintaining the high standards of "The SJB 7" learning behaviours.

• Love & Service: Our commitment to societal and environmental wellbeing means we use data and technology in ways that benefit our community and respect the environment. We prioritise the safety and emotional wellbeing of our students, ensuring robust privacy governance and technical security are always in place.

• Human Agency: At SJB, we believe in the "Student SJB 7" behaviour of "thinking for yourself." AI will be used to supplement not replace, high-quality teaching. All decisions will remain the responsibility of our staff, and we will empower students to critically evaluate AI outputs rather than dictating them.

AI throughout the curriculum

We are working hard to integrate the development of "AI Fluency" throughout our taught curriculum as we believe it is a vital skills for all students to learn and develop. AI Fluency is the ability to "think with AI", to engage it as a co-thinker while maintaining human judgement; to question AI's accuracy and bias, to integrate AI into learning with purpose, choosing the right tool at the right time; and thinking with AI whilst leading with human intelligence, creativity, ethics and empathy.

We have broken our teaching into 7 core elements:

• AI Basics
• AI Ethics and Security
• AI Tool Selection
• AI Prompt Engineering
• Workflow automation
• Evaluating AI output
• Data Sense

Over time, these skills will be woven into our curriculum ensuring that all students develop AI fluency. 

Currently students do not have access to generative AI tools like CoPilot and Gemini within the school network; all AI learning is teacher led. Over time, when we are confident these skills as fully mapped into the curriculum, and the basic learning is secure, we will move towards enabling CoPilot and Gemini for students in Year 9 and above so that older students can make use of a wider suite of AI tools that we are developing to support their learning.