Clarity and Coherence: The Two Tests of a Digital Strategy

Most school digital strategies fail before the first tool is procured. The reason is rarely technical. It is almost always a failure to meet two simpler demands: clarity and coherence.

Two qualities decide whether a digital strategy is worth having, and most digital strategies have neither.

The first is clarity. Clarity about the why. What is this school for? What does it value? What does it want for its pupils, and how does it teach them?

The second is coherence. The parts have to fit. The technology a school chooses is never neutral. It carries implicit choices about what it enables and what it sidelines. It needs to serve the teaching the school actually wants to do, rather than running on a parallel track of its own.

These sound straightforward, but they are not. Walk into any meeting on digital strategy and you will hear the same things: compatibility, licences, procurement timelines, which platform talks to which system, or how next term’s INSET needs to make room for the new tool that will finally transform everything the last one didn’t.

All necessary. None of it educational. None of it about why.

Those conversations have a way of running ahead of the bigger ones. Schools start with the tool and then ask what to do with it. By the time anyone thinks to ask whether it serves what they are trying to achieve, the contract has been signed and the licence renewals are diarised for the next five years.

The trouble runs deeper than poor sequencing. Most schools treat digital strategy as a separate workstream from school improvement. When digital strategy is not a leadership responsibility, there is always something that is more pressing. Safeguarding. Recruitment. Inspection readiness. So digital gets relegated, with decisions made in parallel with the real business of the school by people who are usually not the ones doing the teaching.

This is where most digital strategies fail without anyone quite noticing. They look perfectly reasonable on paper. The trouble is that they are disconnected from the only thing that justifies their existence.

So, what is that then?

A good digital strategy is simply a teaching and learning strategy with the technology made explicit. And, in a school, nothing is more important than teaching and learning.

When leaders treat digital as an afterthought, they are treating part of their teaching and learning strategy as an afterthought. They simply have not realised it. The conversation about technology turns out to be a conversation about pedagogy in disguise.

Confident prioritisation is the visible outcome of two invisible things: clarity about what the school is for, and coherence between that purpose and the tools chosen to serve it.

So where should the conversation actually start?

The shift is small but substantial. Always begin with values, aims, and objectives. Then move to pedagogy. Then, and only then, to technology.

Three questions sit at the heart of this. They are the questions clarity demands.

• What are we trying to achieve, and how does technology help us get there?
• What is our educational philosophy, and how does technology support it?
• What are our pedagogical principles, and how does technology amplify them?

These are the questions a digital strategy has to answer before procurement, before IT roadmaps, before training plans, before the rollout schedule. They also make every subsequent decision easier.

When you start there, two things happen.

The first is that procurement gets easier. The criteria almost write themselves. You stop asking “which is the best tool?” and start asking “which tool best serves this aim?” These are different questions altogether. The first leads to demos and sales pitches. The second leads to clarity and coherence.

The second is that you find yourself saying no more often, and with more confidence. Most leaders find the EdTech market overwhelming because they are evaluating everything against a moving target. State your values and your pedagogy clearly and the target stops moving. You know what fits and what does not.

This is where most schools want to be: confident in their decisions about technology, capable of declining the new shiny thing without anxiety, able to spend time and money on the small number of things that genuinely serve their pupils.

The market is noisy. It will always be noisy. There is no way to keep up with all of it, and trying to is exhausting. But you do not have to keep up. You just have to be clear about what you are for. Once you know that, the noise becomes much easier to filter. Most things on offer are simply not for your school, and that is fine. Nothing works everywhere and everything works somewhere. The handful that work in your setting become obvious.

The technology people are offering solutions without knowing your problem, and they have the marketing budget to make that feel reasonable. Define the problem first. The solution becomes obvious.

Confident prioritisation is the visible outcome of two invisible things. Clarity about what the school is for. Coherence between that purpose and the tools chosen to serve it. Get those right and the technology decisions take care of themselves.

This argument took shape when I was asked, on a panel at the Schools and Academies Show, what schools most often get wrong when starting on digital strategy.

If any of it has resonated and you’d like help thinking through your school’s digital strategy, I’d be glad to talk. This is the work I do with schools and trusts. The simplest place to start is the free Digital Strategy Maturity Assessment, a tool that gives you a quick read on where your school sits today. Or get in touch directly.

Photo by Abid Patel