Leading in Digital Times: Trusting Professional Judgement Closest to the Learning

Leading in Digital Times: Trusting Professional Judgement Closest to the Learning

by Cat Rushton, Director of ATT Institute

Every school leader knows the feeling. A new AI tool appears on a Monday, a teacher is using it by Wednesday, and by Friday a parent is asking where you stand. You don’t have an answer yet, and neither does your trust, because the DfE’s guidance hasn’t caught up and nobody has had time. 

At Academy Transformation Trust, we’ve stopped treating this as a temporary gap to be closed. It’s the permanent condition of leading in digital times, and it demands a different model of leadership. Our response is to trust professional judgement closest to the learning, and to build the principles and community that make that trust well-founded. 

 

The Old Playbook Has Run Out of Road 

For years, technology decisions in schools followed a familiar path. Technology was expensive and sat in the building, so organisations owned it and made careful, centralised choices about it. We made plenty of mistakes in that era, such as interactive whiteboards used as expensive wipe-boards, platforms with 10% of their functionality ever touched, and devices gathering dust. But those mistakes were slow and contained, and the organisation was in control. 

That control has gone. The device in a teacher’s or student’s pocket is now more powerful than much of what we can provide, and individuals adopt new technology far faster than an organisation can assess it, and faster still than regulators and advisory bodies can respond. The landscape changes faster than we can detect, understand and react to it. 

Traditional strategy, where leaders gather evidence, build a plan and cascade it, still has a place. But on digital questions it is simply too slow, and the plan can be running beautifully, its metrics glowing green, while the real action happens outside it. 

Intended Strategy Versus Enacted Strategy 

Every school has two digital strategies, and they are rarely the same. 

The intended strategy is what we deliberately choose: a new homework platform, the implementation (or de-implementation) of 1:1 devices, training staff to use AI in planning. It is planned, resourced and measured, though sometimes against success measures that are naïve about long-term impact on students and professionals. 

The enacted strategy is what actually happens, and it is shaped by emergent strategy: the department that adapts AI to its own subject, the platform one faculty quietly adopts, the way an individual teacher responds to AI-generated homework. None of this is in the plan, though much of it is sensible. 

We can’t stop emergent practice, and we shouldn’t want to. No organisation can be aware of every digital activity across every classroom, and none can roll out a technology wholesale across different contexts and expect uniform adoption and impact. So the question isn’t how to control emergence but how to guide it.

Why This Sector Can’t Just Copy What Others Do 

Three things make education different from other organisations facing the same pace of change. 

First, our core business is people. Other organisations sell groceries or build software, whereas we shape young people, and we are preparing them for a future none of us can predict. That raises the stakes on every decision, because the wrong tool can do lasting damage to learning, self-regulation and the development of social skills, and distracting, gamified tools are a particular risk. 

Second, our objectives are tangled. We want the productivity gains digital tools offer adults, yet what counts as efficiency for a professional is called cheating when a student does it. Even for staff, tools that lighten administrative load can erode professional judgement and let us outsource the most valuable, most human work we do. Schools often blur these purposes, and implementation gets fuzzy as a result. (We set out how we separate these purposes at ATT in Why We’re Not Trying to Be a “Digital-First” Trust.) 

Third, the loudest voices have something to sell. Big tech has the money to shape the narrative, and much of the “guidance” schools receive comes from those with the most to gain from our buying. That produces solutions in search of problems, and a long line of silver bullets. Combine that with lagging sector guidance and a landscape where nobody can foresee the consequences of today’s decisions, and you get a sector without shared norms or even shared language, so that professionals end up talking at cross purposes. 

Why control from the centre isn’t the answer 

The instinct in a large organisation is to respond with tighter central control: approve the tools, issue the policy, mandate the approach. We think that is a mistake, for a simple reason. Every school is different, and so is every classroom, teacher and student. A decision made centrally, far from the context, can’t see the nuance of a setting, and what works brilliantly in one school can fail in the next. 

To be clear, this isn’t a model in which everything is decided locally. Our infrastructure, data protection, cybersecurity and safeguarding systems remain centrally managed, because consistency, security and scale matter there. What we trust to schools is professional judgement about how digital tools are used in teaching, learning and leadership, which is where context matters most. 

There is no easy answer to the questions we all face. When do we say yes to a tool and when no? When do we pilot, and how do we judge success? When do we discourage the use of a tool, and when do we trust teachers to decide? What we can say is that technology use is, at heart, a behavioural science. The interface between human and technology is different for every individual, so a school doesn’t have one interface to manage but hundreds. 

Our Answer: Distributed Leadership, Anchored in Shared Principles 

At ATT, our response is to put professional judgement in the hands of the people closest to the learning, and to equip them to make those decisions well. That rests on two commitments. 

The first is distributed leadership. Leaders, teachers and colleagues in every school are the ones who understand their pupils, their staff and their context, so they are best placed to decide what is right for their setting. A trust of our size can’t, and shouldn’t, try to make those judgements for them. 

The second is digital principles that start from our vision and values, because distribution without direction is just drift. Our digital principles give every colleague a common language and a shared way of reasoning, rooted in our ATT2030 mission. They don’t dictate answers; instead, they help people navigate situations nobody has anticipated, while staying true to what we stand for as an organisation. 

This is how we hold together two things that are usually in tension: local contextualisation and organisational integrity. An ATT academy in one community can make a different choice from an ATT academy in another, and both can be unmistakably ATT. 

Trust, in our model, is not the absence of accountability or a hands-off approach. It is earned and supported: through shared principles that set the direction, through professional development that builds the quality of judgement, and through a digital leadership community where decisions are examined openly. We trust professionals because we invest in making that trust well-founded. 

Who Decides the Principles? 

It’s a fair question: whose values do they represent, and who decides? 

Our answer is that principles like these can’t be handed down from the top or borrowed from elsewhere. They need to be co-constructed by informed leaders who can craft language that is specific enough to guide professionals through complexity, yet open enough to allow informed local adaptation. At ATT, that work happened in our digital leadership community, where leaders from across the Trust came together to develop the principles collaboratively. 

Writing the Principles is the Easy Part 

The harder test comes when the principles go back into individual academies and meet real decisions, real pressures and real people. A set of principles that lives in a document is not a strategy, and it only works if leaders know how to use it. 

That was the thinking behind how we launched them. The principles sit within a central information architecture alongside guidance for the safe and responsible use of digital tools and AI, and supporting training materials. We introduced all of it on a professional development day where every member of staff received training relevant to their role, focused on productivity, planning and preparation, or pedagogy using digital tools. Senior leaders had a distinct session, with each academy’s full SLT together considering their current context, including their deliberate strategy and the digital practice emerging organically across their school. 

But a launch is only a beginning, which is why our digital leadership community didn’t stop once the principles were written. It has evolved into something more ambitious: a space to explore the role of digital leadership itself, and a place where real decisions can be unpicked, considered and grappled with in relation to the principles. Leaders bring the live dilemmas from their own settings, and together we examine how the principles are, or aren’t, shaping the choices being made. 

This does two things for us. For the Trust, it builds a genuine understanding of how the principles are guiding decision-making in practice: where they give clarity, where they are stretched, and where the language needs to develop. For leaders, it offers the chance to learn from each other’s reasoning and become more effective digital decision-makers in their own settings. 

It also builds on our belief that professional development should always remain central to our model. If we are asking colleagues across the Trust to be the decision-makers, our job is to help them become the best decision-makers they can be: informed, critical, willing to learn, and willing to change their minds as the evidence does. Distributed leadership isn’t something we declare and then step back from; it is something we have to keep building, together. 

We don’t claim this is the final answer. In a landscape that shifts continually, no one can. What we are confident of is the direction: in digital times, leading well means trusting and equipping the people closest to learning, and anchoring them in a clear sense of purpose.