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:

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.

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