Technology in Schools: The Questions That Matter Have Changed

A decade ago, judging a school’s technology was easy: count the screens. Interactive whiteboards, a tablet trolley, a computer suite with working printers — tick, tick, tick, excellent school.

That era is over. Devices are now table stakes — every school has them, and no parent should be impressed by their existence. Meanwhile the research and the culture have shifted: parents have watched a generation grow up on smartphones, read the debates about attention and anxiety, and seen AI arrive in their children’s homework overnight. The result is that the questions which actually distinguish schools have changed completely.

Here’s what to ask now — and what the answers tell you.

1. “What’s your AI policy?” — the new first question

Two years ago this question didn’t exist; today it’s the fastest culture test in education. Every school has had to decide what to do about AI tools that can write essays, solve maths problems and summarise any text in seconds. The answers fall into three camps:

• The ban — prohibited outright, enforced with detection software and penalties
• The integration — taught as a tool: when it’s allowed, how to use it well, how to verify its output, and what it means for academic honesty
• The shrug — “we’re keeping an eye on it,” which usually means no policy, inconsistent enforcement, and pupils navigating it alone

Ask which camp the school is in and how the policy shows up in actual teaching. Do pupils learn to interrogate AI output? Are assessments designed so that thinking, not just answers, is graded? A school with a thoughtful, specific answer has been doing hard thinking about the future of learning. A school that’s vague is behind — and your child will spend their exam years inside that gap.

2. “What’s your phone policy?” — the new second question

The smartphone backlash is the defining education debate of the mid-2020s, and schools have sorted themselves across a spectrum: complete bans with locked pouches, phones handed in at registration, phones allowed at break, or effectively no policy.

There’s no single right answer, but there is a wrong one: no answer at all. A school that has made a deliberate, enforceable decision — and can explain the reasoning — is a school that thinks seriously about attention, social development and pupil wellbeing. Ask the follow-up that matters: “What difference have you actually seen?” Schools that banned phones two years ago often have striking before-and-after observations about break-time conversation, and they’ll tell you eagerly.

3. “Where have you chosen not to use technology?”

This is the question that separates strategy from shopping. Any school can buy devices; thoughtful schools can tell you where screens lose to paper, where handwriting still matters, where they’ve pulled tech out because it wasn’t improving learning. Many strong schools deliberately keep junior classrooms low-tech and phase in devices as pupils mature — a position that would have seemed regressive five years ago and now looks prescient.

If the answer is “nowhere — we use tech everywhere,” you haven’t found a school with a technology strategy. You’ve found a school with a supplier.

4. “What does the homework platform actually do for parents?”

Here’s the unglamorous technology that affects your daily life most: the systems for homework, feedback and reporting. Good platforms mean you can see what was set, whether it’s been submitted, and how your child is progressing — without waiting for a termly report or a parents’ evening ambush. Ask for a demonstration. Ask how quickly staff respond to messages. For international families especially — managing a child’s education across time zones — the quality of the parent portal, online reporting and virtual parents’ evenings is not a detail; it’s your primary window into the school.

5. “Is computing a real subject here?”

There’s a difference between using technology and understanding it. Ask whether the school teaches a genuine computer science curriculum — programming, how systems work, how data is used — rather than stopping at digital literacy and office skills. Ask when it starts, whether it’s timetabled or club-only, and what the uptake looks like beyond the stereotype (many schools now run specific initiatives to get more girls into computing, and the good ones know their numbers).

6. “How do you teach children to survive the internet?”

Digital safeguarding has moved well beyond e-safety posters. Ask how the school teaches pupils about social media pressure, group-chat dynamics, image sharing, misinformation and online strangers — and how it handles incidents when they happen. Scenario-test it, as you would any pastoral question: “If a pupil’s image was being shared in a group chat, walk me through what happens.” A school with a rehearsed, humane, specific process has done this before and learned from it.

Red Flags to Notice on the Day

• Technology as showroom — gleaming devices on display for the tour that pupils apparently rarely touch
• No AI policy in 2026 — it’s the educational equivalent of having no safeguarding policy
• No phone policy, or one nobody enforces
• Devices billed as expensive extras — some schools require specific hardware purchased through them; add it to your true-cost calculations
• Every answer features the word “innovative” and none features the words “evidence” or “results”

The Bottom Line

The question is no longer “how much technology does this school have?” but “how deliberately does this school think?” The schools worth choosing can articulate what tech is for, where it stops, how they’re handling AI and phones, and what difference any of it makes to actual learning. The ones that can’t are just well-equipped.

These are exactly the questions open days are for — they’re answerable in a conversation, but invisible on a website. Register free with School Open Days to see upcoming open days — in-person, virtual and hybrid — at independent schools and colleges across the UK, all in one calendar, with reminders before booking closes. Go and ask about the AI policy. How the school answers will tell you how it thinks about everything else.