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Home DfE’s new EdTech Leadership group & how to prevent groundhog day

DfE’s new EdTech Leadership group & how to prevent groundhog day

Recently I saw a tweet from Professor Peter Twinning about the DfE’s new EdTech Leadership Group (also known variously as the EdTech Expert Group).

I have met several people on the list and had the pleasure of chatting briefly to Caroline Wright at BESA’s recent event to launch the DfE’s new EdTech Innovation Fund.

Some high-level thinking about edtech is no bad thing but equally I think semantics matter and I’d argue (as I have for ages) that this is about is education, not edtech. This may seem like splitting hairs, but so much of the piffle I hear from founders and at industry events seems to focus on the theoretical possibilities of technology rather than the realities of education (pedagogically and from a basic business point of view).

Now we have a new group of leaders/experts and the first thing I wondered is are they being paid? I hope so, as there’s a real opportunity cost to the organisations they represent and if their time isn’t valuable then their contribution is likely to be the same. If I were cynical, this convocation could be a political sop where the DfE have appointed people to satisfy them and their organisations by giving them a seat at the table, with no real intention of listening or acting on their advice. It would be easy to feel this way after what happened to ETAG (the Education Action Technology Group convened by the DfE and the old Department for Business Innovation and Skills in 2014, a nice summary of whose work can be found at https://bit.ly/2KjVw7a).

ETAG had a similarly-sized and august group but their report’s 19 recommendations seem to have been largely ignored or forgotten by the DfE and what is now BISE. This bodes poorly for the new group. At the launch of the DfE’s £4.6m EdTech Innovation fund the audience laughed out loud when someone asked Deborah McCann, Head of Edtech and Jen Halmshaw, Head of Edtech Delivery, why they seemed to be ignoring 30 years of their own (e.g. ETAG) and others’ research into education and technology? I doubt I was the only person feeling a sense of schadenfreude at the laughter and the reply that Churchill used to describe as terminological inexactitude.

Below is a list of the members of both the new group and at the end ETAG, which makes for various interesting comparisons. There has already been much hue and cry on social media (“jarring”, etc), that the Leadership Group has a serious gender imbalance; it does (77% male) but so did ETAG (70%) although no-one seemed to think this was an issue at the time nor did it seem to impact on the quality of their findings and recommendations. Perhaps this was because the women on ETAG were all highly-experienced educators (as were the majority of their male counterparts). While the imbalance in the new group is greater, 5 of the 6 women are again experienced educators vs less than half the men. So there is an imbalance, not just gender but also experience. While there is plenty of edu talent there also seems to be a lack of women with substantive commercial and operational experience in education and technology, skills I think are important in the mix.

The new group of 28 is as follows:

Person Role(s)
Baron Christopher Holmes

(Chair)

Chancellor of BPP University & owner Chedserve Ltd, Executive Chairman Ignite Consulting Ltd, consultant to Burberry and trustee of the Burberry Foundation
Caroline Wright (Co-Chair) BESA, Director General
Dominic Norish United Learning, Chief Operating Officer
Mufti Hamid Patel CBE Chair of and Accounting Officer at Star Academies
Lauren Thorpe ARK, Head of Data and Systems & former Principal Compass School Southwark
Cat Scutt Chartered College of Teaching, Director of Education and Research & former Head of Learning Technology & Innovation GDST & former English teacher
Matthew Purves OFSTED, Deputy Director Schools
David Corke Association of Colleges, Director of Education & Skills Policy
Duncan Baldwin Association of School and College Leaders, Deputy Director of Policy & former deputy Headteacher Filsham Valley School
Stephen Fraser Education Endowment Foundation, Deputy Chief Executive & former senior bureaucrat Victorian Education Department
Matthew Hood Ambition Institute, Chief Education Officer & former Headteacher Heysham High School
James Bowen NAHT Edge, Director & former Head Teacher Mill Rythe Junior School
Ian Phillips Independent Schools Council, Chair Digital Strategy Group, Assistant Head (Director of Computing & ICT) Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys School
Scott Barker London Academy of Excellence, Head Master
Debra Gray Grimsby Institute of Further & Higher Education, Principal and Deputy Chief Executive & former lecturer & Program Leader & Manager Dearne Valley College
Mark Lehain Parents & Teachers for Excellence and formerHead Teacher Bedford Free School
Nic Newman Emerge Education, Partner
Chris Hayman Amazon Web Services, Head of UK & Ireland Public Services
Chris Rothwell Microsoft, UK Director of Education
Chris McFall Apple, National Education Development Manager
Dean Stokes Google, Education Adoption Lead EMEA & former Learning Technologies Manager Maltings Academy
Ty Goddard Education Foundation Ltd, Co-Founder
Paul Feldman JISC, Chief Executive
Joysy Johns NESTA, Director of Education (Innovation Lab)
Michael Forshaw Edtech Impact & Innovate My School, Founder and CEO & former ICT Projects Manager Cardinal Heenan Catholic High School
Professor Beck Francis UCL, Director Institute of Education
Professor Rose Luckin UCL Knowledge Lab, EDUCATE Director of Research & Professor for Learner Centered Design
Professor Peter Twining Open University, Professor of Education (Futures)

SchoolsWeek quote a DfE spokesperson as saying, “Candidates were chosen based on experience, knowledge and influence”. How is influence calculated? For example, there are representatives from a union (NATHE Edge) and an FE lobby group (Association of Colleges) but no-one from the pre-school sector, the England & Wales Teachers’ Pension Scheme (with £500bn liability, an issue already having a damaging impact on schools’ ability to invest in edtech, training and teachers). So there are great contributors like Peter Twinning, Caroline Wright, Dom Norish and Michael Forshaw but the gaps mean imbalance, a lack of scope and may reflect the partisanship and collective amnesia that saw ETAG’s report sidelined.

Perhaps we need to set up a shadow group of experts – here is my list.

Issue Organisation People
Edu research Education Data Labs

 

researchED

Laura James

Natasha Plaiste

Hélène Galdin-O’Shea

Successful edtech company (don’t win awards but are scaling and profitable) Twinkl

Busuu

MATR

Whizz Education

Susie Seaton

Kirsten Campbell-Howes

Tom Hooper

Junaid Mubeen

Big beasts in UK edu Capita SIMS

Moodle

Philippa Wilding

Martin Dougimas

Edtech founders Teacher Tapp

Edapt

Teach Will Save Us

Maths Circle

Black Bullion

Night Zookeeper

Carfax Education

Schola 6

Bright Little Labs

Enjoy Education

Zzish

Oddizzi

Satchel

Laura McInerney

John Roberts

Bethany Koby-Hirschmann

Bruno Ready

Vivi Friedgut

Paul Hutson

Matthew Goldie-Scott

Joe Francis

Sophie Deen

Kate Shand

Charles Wiles

JennyCooke

Namish Gohil

Data experts Assembly

Arbor

Wonde

Open Data Institute

Josh Perry

James Wetherill

Peter Dabrowska

Jenni Tennison

An economist Moneyweek

BBC/FT

Merryn Somerset-Webb

Tim Harford

Successful edtech exits TWIG

Thomas Telford School

Kahoot

Anthony Bounchier

Sir Kevin Satchwell

Jamie Brooker

People with serious international edu experience Alibaba

Former board member Thompson Reuters, ex- Pearson & former academic

Lego Education

Wiley/Knewton

Hodder

Jack Ma

Dr Peter Warwick

 

Tom Hall

Lucas Moffitt

Lis Tribe

Successful UK tech entrepreneurs interested in education Rated People, CEO

Decoded, founder

Celia Francis

Kathryn Parsons

Everyone else worthy of a slot Pi-Top

Our Dream School

Harvard Initiative for Teaching & Learning (HILT)

Amazing educator

TmrwDigital

Wreckin College

Michaela Free School

Maritime Academy Trust

Future of Learning Fund

MindCet

Edith Kay School

The PIE

Ambition Institute

Langley Park Education Trust

Teacher/consultant

Open University Council

Graham Brown Martin

Dr Stephen Harris

Jamie Goldstein

 

Rachel Whitfield

Carla Aerts

Donna Irving

Katharine Birbalsingh

Tiffany Beck

Julia Moffett

Avi warshavsky

Bukky Yusuf

Amy Baker

Peps Mccrea

Andrea Carr

Jodie Lopez

Ruth Giradet

It’s a dream team and I’ve had to leave out lots of amazing people to keep it to around 60! I could wrangle maybe 20 of these for a few meetings over a year, but how many would have the time and capacity to do justice to this project and in any case why would they bother if it’s just going to be another DfE/BISE echo chamber like ETAG?

Notes:

ETAG members

  • Professor Stephen Heppell (Chair), Bournemouth University
  • Mark Chambers, Naace
  • Ian Fordham, The Education Foundation
  • James Penny, European Electronique
  • Maren Deepwell, ALT
  • Professor Diana Laurillard, UCL Institute of Education
  • Stephen Wright, Federation of Awarding Bodies
  • Phil Richards, Jisc
  • David Hughes, NIACE
  • Bryan Mathers, City & Guilds
  • Bob Harrison, Education adviser Toshiba
  • David Brown, Ofsted National Lead ICT
  • Professor Peter Twining, Open University
  • Pauline Odulinski, Education Training Foundation
  • Professor Angela McFarlane, College of Teachers
  • Karen Price, E-Skills UK
  • Niel McLean, E-Skills UK
  • Geoff Mulgan, Nesta
  • Oliver Quinlan, Nesta
  • Dominic Savage, BESA
  • Dawn Hallybone, Oakdale Junior School
  • Lizzie Noel, New Schools Network
  • Gary Spracklen, IPACA
  • Ben Rowland, Agilis Arch

 

Jun 14, 2019Richard Taylor
3 years ago Education, UncategorizedBESA, DfE EdTech Leadership Group, edtech, edtech innovation fund, ETAG, NESTA0
Richard Taylor
My thoughts about the DfE's new £4.6m EdTech Innovation FundWho I'd like to hear from (& it's not the usual suspects)

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