When I asked a group of Year 11 pupils about technology in their school, the request I remember best from this year’s school reviews was for more handwriting practice.
They have a point. They have GCSEs to sit on paper in a few months. They use technology every day and like much of it. They also know exactly what their learning needs, and until that afternoon nobody had asked them.
That conversation has stayed with me because it sums up what I find again and again when I audit schools’ IT functions: the technology is rarely the problem.
Schools usually ask for a review of their technology because something feels wrong. Staff grumble, devices sit unused, a platform nobody likes has been renewed again. The natural assumption is that the fault lies in the kit: old laptops, a slow network, the wrong system.
In the schools and trusts I worked with this year, the devices and the networks were mostly fine. What actually stood in the way was a handful of other things: who made the decisions, who was asked, and who held the knowledge.
This continues to matter now. Schools are making their first big decisions about AI: which tools to allow, which to pay for, what to tell staff and students. Many are making them the way they once bought iPads, with the purchase arriving before anyone has agreed what it is for. If the people problem stays unsolved, AI will run into the same walls.
The sensible objection
There is a reasonable objection to all this. Heads and deputies are not technical. Most could not tell you how the network is configured or what the device management system does, and they would be the first to say so. To be fair, they don’t need to know. So it seems sensible to leave technology decisions with the people who understand technology.
That reasoning is exactly how the pattern I saw comes about.
We tend to treat technology as a procurement question: what to buy, from whom, at what price. However, most of it is a question of leading teaching and learning. What will this do in a lesson? Which pupils will it help, and which might it leave behind? How will we know whether it is working? Those questions belong to the people who lead teaching. IT can tell you how a system works and what it will cost to run. What it is for in a lesson is a different question.
Three findings came up often enough to make this point.
Decisions made in IT and shared afterwards
In some schools, big choices about platforms and devices are made inside the IT function and shared with senior leaders once they are settled. Proposals travelling the other way, from teachers who want to try something, can wait a long time for an answer, because nobody is quite sure who is responsible for them.
Devices before direction
iPads before strategy will sound familiar to many readers. A school buys a device for every pupil, the devices arrive, and the conversation about what they are for begins afterwards, usually in the staffroom. Teachers learn by trial and error, and use varies more by department than by need.
The same thing is now happening with AI. Licences are bought and policies written before anyone has agreed what the school wants AI to do for learning.
Knowledge held by very few people
Essential systems could be run confidently by a single member of staff. In a surprising number of schools, the systems those schools depend on every day had exactly one person who understood them. That works until that person is ill, on leave or offered a better job.
This is what happens when leaders stay out of technology decisions. Nobody decides who else should know how each system works, so each one ends up understood only by whoever set it up. The school finds out when that person leaves.
The IT team is not the villain
None of this is a criticism of IT staff. The ones I met were capable and committed, and most described themselves as stretched. They made decisions because somebody had to and nobody else did.
They also made them on the grounds they know best: reliability, security, cost, and how much support a system will need. Those are good grounds. They are also half of the decision. The other half is pedagogy, which is not their job, and which nobody else will bring into the decision-making process unless it is done deliberately.
So the answer to the objection is that heads and senior leaders do not need to become technical. But they do need to know enough about what technology can and cannot do for learning to ask good questions. Then they can bring the half of the decision IT cannot.
A teaching leader in every technology decision
The practical step is simple to state. Put a teaching leader in every technology decision.
That might be the deputy head for teaching and learning, a head of department, or an experienced teacher with time set aside for it. This may depend on the size of the school. Their job in the room is to ask the teaching questions before the order goes out. What problem in learning does this solve? Who has tried it with a real class? What will we stop doing to make time for it? How will we know, in a term, whether it helped?
This does not need to be costly. The budget could stay pretty much the same; what changes is who is in the meeting.
It is also where I start when I review a school’s technology. I talk to leaders, teachers, the IT team and pupils separately, then compare what each group says. The gaps between those conversations usually show where a teaching leader is missing from the room.
This matters for AI too, by the way, because those decisions are being made this year, in most schools, at speed. A school that chooses its AI tools with a teaching leader in the room will ask what each one is for before it signs. A school that leaves the choice to procurement is likely to find itself, in two or three years, reviewing a set of licences nobody quite knows how to use.
Which brings me back to those Year 11 pupils. Nobody had asked them what their learning needed, and when someone did, they knew straight away. The same is true of the teachers in their school, and in most schools. The people closest to learning usually know what it needs. They just need to be in the room when the decisions are made.
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