The DfE has mapped why EdTech adoption fails. The answer is rarely the technology itself.
The DfE has mapped why EdTech adoption fails. The answer is rarely the technology itself. Interviews with schools, suppliers and experts behind the government’s new market assessment identify an eight-stage adoption journey and four system-level constraints that determine whether a tool succeeds in a classroom. The findings echo years of independent evaluation research that the sector has been slow to act on.
The implementation section of the DfE’s updated EdTech market assessment, published this month, is arguably its most useful contribution to a question the sector has struggled to answer convincingly: why do good tools so often fail to deliver in real classrooms? The research, conducted by the consultancy PUBLIC and drawing on interviews with 58 stakeholders including 20 schools and 24 EdTech suppliers, breaks the adoption process into eight common stages and identifies four system-level constraints that cut across all of them. Strategic capability gaps affect the earliest stages of adoption, i