Extracts
The tenancy test, the sovereignty specification, and what a board cannot answer
August 2026Educave research · Extracts
The tenancy test
A tenant pays for access. An owner accumulates an asset. Most schools are paying owner prices on tenant terms, and the difference only becomes visible at the moment of exit, which is the moment it is least useful.
If the contract ends on Friday, mark hold or lose
| Hold | Lose | |
|---|---|---|
| 1The pupil record, in a format another system can read | ||
| 2Three years of parental communication history | ||
| 3The workflows and templates our staff built inside it | ||
| 4The evidence of which interventions worked, and for whom | ||
| 5The audit log of who accessed what, and when | ||
| 6Continuity of service for pupils during the following week |
The sovereignty specification
Five properties that can be verified rather than promised
- Boundary
- Institutional data stays inside a boundary the institution controls, and the boundary is written into the contract.
- Redaction
- Named pupils do not leave the boundary. Identifiers are substituted before any external model call and restored only for the accountable adult who receives the answer.
- Model choice
- The school chooses the model provider, consistent with agreements it already holds, and can change provider without rebuilding the estate.
- Role-scoped views
- A board sees aggregate patterns. Named-pupil records stay with the people who owe that child a duty of care.
- School-held log
- An audit log of every query, export and model call, held by the school. If the log sits with the supplier, the assurance sits with the supplier.
Five questions your board cannot answer
Put these on the next agenda and record who answers, and by when
| Answered | Not yet | |
|---|---|---|
| 1What do we spend on technology across all our schools, this year, to the nearest £10,000? | ||
| 2Which tools are actually used, by how many staff, how often? | ||
| 3What did any of it change for pupils, measured against a baseline that existed before we bought it? | ||
| 4Which of our improvement priorities is drifting, this week, and by how much? | ||
| 5Where does pupil data go when one of our tools calls an external model, and who holds the log? |
The follow-up that matters: ask when each answer will exist, who owns producing it, and what would have to be true for a governor to obtain it unprompted, in under a minute, without a supplier in the room.
Extracted from Education in the Age of the Builder, Educave Research Series 01. educave.ai · Free to copy, forward and use inside your institution, with attribution.