Is Edtech really improving outcomes for marginalised children?
The UK’s Department for Education (DfE) has put in place various measures to drive schools in England to adopt or widen their use of EdTech. This is reflected in its 2019 Edtech strategy as well as its efforts to prime the Edtech sector ‘pump’ by providing subsidised training (at a cost of £14 million) for the Google Suite for Education and Microsoft’s Office 365 for Education platforms. It also, at a cost of £6 million, created ‘EdTech demonstrator schools’ through which twenty schools got between £75,000 and £150,000 to fund their EdTech projects. So there’s been a good deal of money sloshing around. What’s been lacking is any solid evidence — beyond a tech utopian confidence that it will work — of the benefits of EdTech and a comprehensive assessment of the potential harms.
What is Edtech?
Edtech is a term used to describe digital and data-centric technologies used within an educational setting. While the term is fairly ubiquitous, it is often used as a catch-all for digital and data-centric technologies that purport to support a wide range of education-related activities. Below, we have had a go at roughly categorising EdTech in line with these activities. We have limited our classification efforts to apps and activities that are relevant in a (primary or secondary) school environment.
These aren’t hard and fast or even exclusive categories. For example, apps like Capture Education and Class Dojo can be classified as belonging to the Direct Teaching Support and the Surveillance for Performance Monitoring Purposes categories. Many of these apps are multi-purpose, which can make them more attractive to schools and teachers. In some cases, once they are embedded in teachers’ ways of working, their lack of compatibility with other apps and, often the difficulty of transferring data out of specific apps and platforms, can make it very difficult for schools to switch to alternatives.
Why are we concerned?
Unfettered profit-making opportunities + too little regulation = a dangerous mix
Organisations providing Edtech have attracted billions in venture capital (VC) because of their profit-making potential. It’s worth asking just how Edtech companies hope to, ultimately, turn a profit and provide a return on the VC investment that many of them have accepted. The two prominent business models we’ve identified involve the sale of application licences and the harvesting of data. A report by the Digital Futures Commission (DFC) and 5Rights Foundation, paints a grim picture when it comes to schools’ ability to track data collection by Edtech apps and implementing or enforcing robust data governance. Despite this, a 2022 DfE-commissioned assessment of the UK EdTech market which also considered schools’ attitudes and practice in relation to Edtech found that only “a few respondents … noted the need to ensure that [Edtech] products had high quality cyber security and data protection approaches”. Perhaps this reflects the relatively poor job DfE has done in alerting schools to the risks. As further evidence of this, the use of impact assessments weren’t cited as a consistent practice by any of the respondents in the DfE-commissioned report.
DfE’s poor track record when it comes to safeguarding children’s data suggests it is not well positioned to enforce legal and ethical standards of practice for EdTech companies or guide schools on how to do so. Let’s not forget that DfE was happy to demand that schools begin collecting nationality data as part of the school census which it then shared with the Home Office right up until it was forced to stop. Back in 2019, following complaints from Defend Digital Me and Liberty about the DfE’s administration of the National Pupil Database (NPD), the ICO finally launched an investigation into DfE’s data practices. At the end of its assessment, the ICO made 139 recommendations for improvement to DfE. More than half of these recommendations were related to issues deemed urgent or high risk by the ICO (only one of the 139 recommendations was about a low risk issue). But the lessons obviously weren’t learned because in 2022, the DfE was reprimanded by the ICO after it was revealed that gambling companies had gained indirect access to the very sensitive Learning Record System (which contains records of people as young as 14) as a result of DfE’s failure to fulfil its duties under GDPR.
The DfE’s data governance failings have had seemingly no impact on its tech utopian perspective with regard to any data-centric innovation, as evidenced by the 2020 A-level exam fiasco — which disproportionately impacted poorer children and left home-schooled students with no grades.
Across the UK we are seeing the introduction of intrusive data-centric technologies like facial recognition in school canteens and fingerprinting in school libraries (1.28 million children as of 2014), under the guise of efficiency or safety. Brilliant organisations like Defend Digital Me and Privacy International as well as campaigners such as Pippa King work tirelessly to safeguard children’s data. However, there is no proactive, coherent government-led effort to introduce effective governance to safeguard children’s digital rights in schools and by extension, their futures.
There’s a lack of evidence of the benefits of EdTech (but the potential harms are clear)
Stories about the harms and misuses of EdTech, e.g the surveillance of children in schools and beyond and the resulting intrusive interventions, continue to surface from within the UK and across the world. However, robust evidence of the benefits that Edtech has actually delivered in terms of children’s educational outcomes is a little thin on the ground. Instead, we hear more about the potential of EdTech to improve children’s learning and lighten teacher’s workloads or increase their effectiveness. Given the documented, real (not potential) harms, it seems reasonable to ask that assumptions about the benefits of Edtech be unpicked, tested and verified.
Inadequate funding and digital poverty mean many children can’t adequately access EdTech resources anyway
Even if a more convincing case for the benefits of EdTech is made, there remain unanswered questions about the capacity of the government to realise those benefits for all children, particularly in the context of the current cost of living crisis and the growing evidence of ‘digital poverty’. Currently we just don’t know exactly how much of taxpayers’ money DfE has invested in its EdTech programming. But we do know that a year after making a promise to provide disadvantaged children with the laptops they needed during lock-downs, the DfE failed to fulfil its commitment, leaving thousands of children without much-needed hardware. Anyone following the teacher strikes will be aware that school leaders were told to fund the meagre below-inflation pay rise awarded to teachers from their overall school budgets. This is against a backdrop of declining per-pupil investment (in the state sector) which is now half of the equivalent per-pupil spending in the private sector; thanks to more than a decade of austerity. In choosing to fund Edtech, DfE is neglecting proven, cost-effective methods that improve educational outcomes across the board whilst creating the conditions for increased inequality.
What are we doing about this?
In summary, we are concerned that the unregulated use of unproven Edtech will reproduce and potentially deepen existing inequalities, especially for those affected by both digital poverty and structural racism. Many children could be excluded from accessing the potential benefits of technology, whilst being subject to its misapplications, with inadequate scrutiny or accountability in place.
We think parents, guardians and a host of others within communities want to understand how children’s data is being used as well as how the apps their children interact with are selected and vetted. We want to:
- build community with people interested in understanding how Edtech is being used in our primary schools;
- help develop community research skills in both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis in order to better understand what is going on;
- shed light on what Edtech is being used in our schools, which companies are selling them and understand what they are doing with our children’s data;
- understand the extent and impact of digital exclusion on children living in economically deprived areas.
We’re hoping to achieve these aims by focusing on two areas in the cities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Birmingham. Alongside community organisers we’ll be working with parents, guardians and anyone who wants to understand how the growing use of Edtech is serving children.
Our hope is that together we can gain a better understanding of the EdTech landscape, build bonds and deepen our data skills along the way. If you are interested in joining us on this journey, please get in touch data-tech-black-communities AT protonmail.com
References for newspaper headlines in cover image:
Educational inequalities in England barely improve in two decades, study finds | Financial Times
Facial recognition cameras arrive in UK school canteens | Financial Times
UK ditches exam results generated by biased algorithm after student protests — The Verge
