Interviews with UK Multi-academy Trust Leaders

Executive Summary

The following field notes are drawn from interviews with UK MAT leaders. The semi-structured interviews focused on evidencing edtech and data fragmentation across teaching, learning, and governance. The goal of the research was to better understand the lived experience of what schools need (and don't want) from edtech. 

Increasingly, it is said that school need more evidence. However, none of the respondents could point to a measurable outcome from an edtech deployment. One reason for this is that evidence is scattered across systems that do not speak to each another. Further, the fragmentation of data causes more administration, blindspots, and missed interventions for leadership and educators to help learners. More broadly, this can be conceptualised as a fragmentation problem with many surface-level symptoms for teachers, learners, and boards. For example, the time-intensive task of synthesising external communications about policy changes was an area identified where technology can liberate busy leaders who prefer to prioritise more impactful work.