Making the most of technology in education Lessons from school systems around the world

Education is our most powerful tool to improve and shape the lives of young people, but our school systems around the world face huge problems. These problems vary from country to country - from vastly unequal access or crises in teacher recruitment, to the growing costs of modernisation or stalling social mobility - and should leave us with some concern about the future. With our concern should come a degree of optimism. While the challenges our school systems face are big, technology - designed, used and implemented effectively - is providing an increasingly sophisticated set of tools to help us address them. We can find inspiring examples of the benefits for teachers and learners, often with dramatic improvements across a range of measures from attainment or attendance, to parental engagement or teacher workload. However, examples of technology achieving impact at scale and impacting on school systems as a whole (beyond the particular context of a small number of schools) are rarer than we might think. And while we can find extraordinarily clever pieces of software and hardware, often EdTech is too far-removed from the immediate concerns and context of teachers and learners in the classroom. There remains a marked gap between the excitement surrounding a technology-enabled school-system of the future and the reality of technology in most classrooms today. This report examines nine examples - three in Italy, three in the rest of Europe, and three in the rest of the world - of inspiring practice where technology is impacting on large numbers of teachers and learners. Drawing lessons from shared problems and successful approaches from across these examples, this report provides recommendations for making the most of technology in school systems. These recommendations are grouped in three sections. The first relates to scale. How can we ensure that the benefits of investment in technology are felt more widely, and that the exciting practice seen in exceptional schools can be felt elsewhere? The second relates to schools. How can we gain buy-in from schools to wider programmes of change? And how can school leaders support their school community to make the most of change in their school? The third relates to philanthropic foundations. Foundations emerge from many of our case studies as playing a vital role in supporting innovation and brokering complex relationships within our school systems. We explore how foundations can use their resources and status outside government to support innovation and EdTech.