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2 minute read
Every EdTech product arrives with a promise. Far fewer arrive with an honest account of what happens once the pilot ends, the champion moves on, and the tool has to work across twenty very different schools. The gap between the two — between how education technology is sold and what actually happens when it reaches classrooms — is what B2Education Unpacked exists to examine.
We closed our first series with the person who lives on the other side of that gap. Jo Stone is PedTech Lead at Discovery Schools Trust, responsible for education technology across roughly 8,000 pupils in 20 primary, secondary and special schools. She is the one who decides what to buy, gets teachers to use it, and has to prove it made a difference. We called the episode “The Reckoning”, because after a series spent talking to the people who build, sell and critique EdTech, Jo is the one who has to make it work.
For school and trust leaders, little of what she says will be a revelation — you live it. What the conversation offers is a peer setting out, plainly, what good looks like from the inside. A few things stood out.
Start with the problem, not the product. Jo’s first move is never the tool; it’s the curriculum. What are we trying to solve — accessibility, assessment, SEND support — and only then, what enables it? Technology, as she puts it, is an enabler, not the driver. The trusts that get stung are the ones seduced by the demo before they’ve asked what it’s actually for.
Adoption is the real bottleneck, not the technology. You can buy the best platform in the world, but if teachers don’t use it, it’s worthless. Jo’s trust builds in dedicated teacher development time and runs continuous CPD rather than a one-off training box-tick, leaning on the truth every supplier forgets — teachers buy from teachers. Sixty per cent adoption is the figure often cited across the sector as the mark of a strong rollout; most tools never get near it.
Give it a year, and judge it honestly. Budgets are tight and boards want results, so the temptation is to judge a tool in a term. Jo’s view is that a platform needs a good year to embed — and when something isn’t working, it’s rarely a bad product, it’s the wrong fit or the wrong support. That distinction matters to every supplier who has ever lost a renewal and never understood why.
And a warning on AI. Jo is an advocate for AI, but her sharpest point is about transparency: suppliers quietly layering AI into existing platforms and forgetting to tell the school. Every time that happens, a trust has to reopen its due diligence, its safeguarding, its data policies and its conversations with parents. Her wider frustration — that England still has no digital teaching-and-learning standards, where Ireland, Wales and Scotland do — is one the whole sector should be listening to.
None of this is anti-supplier. Quite the opposite: it is a blueprint for the companies willing to do the unglamorous work of implementation properly. That is the point of the podcast — not the pedagogy, but the commercial reality of selling into schools, told straight, from both sides of the table.
It is why Series Two keeps a trust leader in the room. Alongside founders, investors and platform builders, we again close with a multi-academy trust CEO on the decisions that determine what gets renewed and what is quietly dropped. If Series One asked what happens when EdTech reaches schools, Series Two asks what actually works — and who is paying for what doesn’t.
I will be exploring exactly that in Birmingham. At the EdTech Summit I am chairing the procurement panel, Evidence Over Marketing: Navigating EdTech Procurement, and recording a live B2Education Unpacked special across the two days. If separating genuine impact from a good pitch is your world, it is a conversation worth being in the room for.
Jo’s episode, “The Reckoning”, airs on Thursday 10 September 2026. Listen to B2Education Unpacked — The Education Growth Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube, or find every episode at seventhsibling.co.uk/podcast/series-one.
B2Education Unpacked — The Education Growth Podcast is the official podcast partner of the Schools & Academies Show, Birmingham NEC, 18–19 November 2026.
