BETT 2026

I’ve always been a BETT enthusiast, despite the usual litany of problems with big events such as the moving goalposts of corporate organisers, edu politics and the exhaustion that ensues after 3-4 days of traipsing to, from, and around Excel.

My bet for this year relates to LEGO who will be launching their LE Computer Science and AI, three weeks after a larger and more significant announcement. LEGO Smart Play, launched in partnership with Disney, is a new, smart brick platform that allows what users build to respond to movement, touch, and other interactions without relying on screens. According to LEGO this is bigger than the 1978 debut of Minifigure 48 years ago, of which they had sold four billion by 2020!

The new LEGO SMART Brick has a custom-made chip that’s smaller than a LEGO stud. Inside are accelerometers, sensors, a sound sensor, light detection and even a miniature speaker powered by an onboard synthesiser. Each SMART Brick has wireless charging and is designed to be part of the infrastructure of any build rather than a gadget like a Minifigure. However, the new kit includes both LEGO SMART Minifigures (Star Wars) and LEGO SMART Tags – the two pair and can trigger responses during use.

LEGO’s corporate spiel claims that, ‘The launch of LEGO SMART Play brings creativity, technology, and storytelling together… all without a screen’. The pushback between screens, play and analogue has really heated up in the last 18 months with many countries who were previously huge edtech advocates (like Denmark) shifting towards far less use of digital in learning. 

The LEGO strapline is similar to that used by UK edtech Night Zookeeper when it launched in 2011. However, despite many awards and two animated TV series, NZ’s revenue is modest and it has never been profitable. 

So where is the BETT connection? According to Tom Hall (VP and General Manager, LEGO Education International), ‘our teams share a lot on the tech side and many of the components in Smart Play have been piloted on the LE tech stack’. In effect the two products were developed in tandem and share plenty of underlying code. 

While they are different products for different markets (retail and edu) the fact that LEGO launched LEGO SMART Bricks  and SMART Tags at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas shows that these products are far more important and have had far more money and corporate support than anything you will see at BETT.

Does this matter? I think it does, as for many of the big corporate players (think Google , Microsoft, LEGO, etc) edtech is a small and marginally profitable category. While they attend BETT regularly, often with large stands, the relative spend and corporate attention are tiny compared to what they do at CES. 

BETT is also far worse value for trade attendees with their notional ticket price of £590 (after all BETT is a trade show). That’s US$800/£450 more than a full price CES standard exhibits pass. CES is the world’s premier tech event and no amount of spin by Hyve or BETT’s media team can put BETT within a million miles of it. It’s not just CES’s 148,000 attendees (55,000 from overseas) compared to BETT’s 40,000ish (a likely overestimate). Last year Hyve acquired the ASU/GSV Summit , the premier event for edtech companies and investors, but this will set you back at least US$3000/$4000 (£2225/£2970) depending if you are an attendee or an entrepreneur.

If you have limited time, bandwidth and money where are you going to go? BETT will spin that it’s the edtech equivalent of CES, but it just isn’t, nor is it as focused on the business of education and investing as is ASU/GSV. The bottom line is that while BETT is important in edtech, in the UK it’s a tiny market that is at best about one half the size of the tutoring sector. Yes, it’s great to see LEGO’s LE Computer Science and AI along with senior figures like Tom Hall at BETT, but for savvy edtech watchers and investors, my advice is save your dosh and get to either CES in January 2027 or ASU/GSV 2026 (in just 11 weeks).