How Haileybury — Australia’s largest independent school — partnered with Antares to deploy Hailey, a secure AI platform built on QBot inside Microsoft 365.
10 hrs
150+
135yrs
100%
Saved per teacher / week
Staff with AI capability
Of educational excellence
Tenant-secure deployment
A Purposeful Partnership
BACKGROUND
Haileybury, Australia’s largest independent school and recently ranked the nation’s leading co-educational school, partnered with Antares to design and deploy Hailey — a secure, internal AI platform built on QBot and embedded within its Microsoft 365 environment.
The objective was clear: harness AI to reduce administrative burden, improve access to policies, strengthen curriculum differentiation, and enhance staff capability — all without compromising privacy, governance, or trust.
Starting with a tightly governed policy assistant and expanding into a full secure AI environment within Microsoft Teams, Hailey has become a trusted digital assistant, supporting both academic and corporate services teams.
“Our ambition always comes back to our Magenta Principles, and embracing AI leads us to have more engaged staff who have greater capacity to deliver better outcomes for our students.”
Anna Sever — Deputy Principal, Haileybury
ABOUT HAILEYBURY
Innovation Embedded in DNA
Founded almost 135 years ago by an entrepreneur, Haileybury has innovation embedded in its DNA. Today it operates four campuses in Melbourne, runs Haileybury Pangea — an online school servicing Victoria and the Northern Territory — manages Haileybury Rendall School in Darwin (home to the largest Indigenous boarding house in Australia), and delivers international programmes across Asia and beyond.
Despite its scale, Haileybury remains deeply values driven. It embraces new technologies early — but only where they are safe, purposeful, and aligned to its core principle that every student and every staff member matter, every day. For Haileybury, AI represents the next frontier — not to replace teachers, but to give them back time, clarity, and capacity to focus on high-value work.
A values-driven approach to AI
Despite its scale, Haileybury remains deeply values-driven. It embraces new technologies early — but only where they are safe, purposeful, and aligned to its core principle that every student and every staff member matters, every day. For Haileybury, AI represents the next frontier — not to replace teachers, but to give them back time, clarity, and capacity to focus on high-value work.
THE CHALLENGE
Harness AI Without Compromising Safety, Governance or Staff Workload
As generative AI tools entered the mainstream, Haileybury recognised both the opportunity and the risk. Leadership knew AI could significantly reduce workload and unlock new approaches to teaching — but only if it could be implemented safely and responsibly.
- A large, complex and highly regulated policy environment
- Manual searching across multiple PDF and intranet sources
- Privacy concerns around student and staff data in public AI tools
- Uncertainty around where data is processed and stored
- Growing administrative burden on teachers
- Varying levels of AI literacy across staff
- The need to build community trust with students and parents
- Need for a solution capable of evolving with AI development
“When you’re a big school, one of the things that is a real pain point is the number of policies. Getting your head around all of those policies and ‘how does that apply to me’ — that is very, very hard to do in a way that is easy for people to understand and apply.”
Michelle Dennis — Head of Digital, Haileybury
THE SOLUTION
Hailey – A Secure Enterprise AI Platform Built on QBot
Working in close partnership, Haileybury and Antares designed and deployed Hailey as a secure, enterprise-grade AI capability embedded directly within the school’s Microsoft environment.
Rather than introducing another standalone system, Hailey operates inside Microsoft Teams and the school’s existing Microsoft 365 ecosystem, allowing staff to interact with AI using tools they already use every day. This ensured rapid adoption while maintaining strict governance over how data is accessed, processed and used.
“What was important to us about Hailey was that it wasn’t going to be a new platform — it was going to sit inside the environment that our staff are already comfortable with.”
Steven Burns — Risk and Compliance Director, Haileybury
Hailey acts as a single intelligent interface across Haileybury’s operational and academic knowledge, enabling staff to ask natural language questions, generate content, and access policies, procedures and institutional guidance instantly.
Through this platform, staff can draft and refine communications, generate differentiated curriculum resources, develop assessments and feedback frameworks, synthesise reports and meeting notes, and create accessible learning materials such as automated alt-text. By consolidating these capabilities into one governed environment, Hailey supports both academic and corporate teams in completing everyday tasks more efficiently.
Importantly, Hailey operates entirely within Haileybury’s Microsoft tenancy, ensuring that sensitive student and staff information remains inside the organisation’s-controlled environment. This architecture enables practical AI use while maintaining the strict privacy, security and governance requirements expected within a school environment.
Because the platform sits inside familiar workflows, staff can engage with AI in a way that feels practical rather than experimental, integrating it naturally into daily work across teaching, administration and leadership teams.
Tangible Gains in Time, Confidence and Capability
Hailey has delivered measurable impact across Haileybury — as a daily operational tool, not a theoretical initiative. The most immediate benefit has been workload reduction, with teachers reclaiming hours previously spent on policy searches, drafting communications, and formatting resources.
Whole-of-school policy library indexed and searchable
Single AI interface replaces manual navigation of static PDFs and cross-referencing multiple policy versions.
Up to 10 hours saved per teacher, per week
Tasks that once required extended after-hours effort can now be completed in minutes through structured prompts.
Secure Microsoft 365 tenancy deployment
Faster curriculum differentiation
Rapid generation of differentiated learning materials across year levels and ability groups.
Stronger AI literacy across 150+ staff
Improved AI capability across academic and corporate teams, with ongoing professional learning embedded.
Accessibility improvements
The Road Ahead
A Strategic, Evolving Capability
“Looking at the way that I used to research and design my own information, it could take me two or three days to find the right source. Now I can do that in less than half an hour. Close to 10 hours a week minimum that I’m saving on creating documents, synthesising material, and research.”
Samuel Cavnoudias — Head of Year 12, Haileybury
Haileybury sees Hailey as a strategic, evolving capability — not a finished project. The next phase focuses on deepening integration, expanding practical impact, and maintaining disciplined governance.
What’s Next
1. Unified front door to institutional knowledge — enabling seamless staff access across Canvas and other operational platforms without needing to remember where documents are stored.
2. Tailored AI personas for specific roles — as adoption matures, departments are identifying specialised needs. The next evolution introduces role-specific AI personas, all within a single secure platform.
3. Ongoing professional learning and ethical governance — AI capability at Haileybury is an ongoing discipline, ensuring staff capability, community dialogue, and governance frameworks evolve alongside the technology.
“We wanted to work with someone where we could continually work together to make it better and adapt as our knowledge about AI changes, but also as the technology itself evolves.”
Michelle Dennis — Head of Digital, Haileybury