GM. This is The Great Unlock, your weekly cheat sheet for the AI revolution. We filter out the noise, red pen fake news, and give out stickers to those deserving.

Today’s deep dive: a 1,123-company market, £6.5 billion in turnover, and a quiet confession buried in a government report — almost nobody can prove any of it actually moves a student’s learning.

Let’s unlock it.

This month the Department for Education published its Assessment of the Education Technology Market in England. On the surface, it reads like a success story. The UK has at least 1,123 EdTech companies. They turn over roughly £6.5 billion a year, employ tens of thousands of people, and pulled in £782 million in annual investment. The sector grew 8.8%. By every economic measure, EdTech in England is thriving.

Then, on the demand side, comes the sentence the press releases skipped: reliable evidence on how EdTech is actually used in schools — and whether it works — remains limited. The market built an ocean of product on top of a puddle of proof.

We are awash in tools. We are starved of evidence that they teach anyone anything.

1. The Mechanism: a market optimized for getting bought

A market this big with an evidence base this thin didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the system rewards adoption, not impact. Look at how schools actually choose tools. When the DfE asked teachers which sources they most trust to guide technology decisions, the top answers were advice from other teaching staff (38%) and other schools with strong tech experience (32%). Procurement runs on word-of-mouth and the trade-show floor.

Meanwhile suppliers flood that decision with marketing budgets and free trials. One founder of an educator-built tool described it as an “unfair battle” — drowned out by generalist tech giants who have “overloaded the markets.” Another noted that schools are so saturated with aggressive marketing that decision-makers simply shut down. The signal a buyer receives is loudness, not effectiveness.

And at the far end of the journey — Stage 8 of the report’s 8-stage implementation model — sits the step that would close the loop. Measuring and evaluating impact. The report’s verdict: it is “the most frequently neglected” stage in the entire process.

Read that again. The single step that would tell a school whether a tool worked is the one schools most often skip. The market never has to prove itself, because the buyer rarely checks.

2. The tools that get used aren’t the ones that teach

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The report cross-referenced real usage data across a large multi-academy trust. The most consistently used category of EdTech wasn’t a learning tool at all. It was management and administrative software — the systems that handle registration, behaviour tracking, and account provisioning. The digital infrastructure a school runs on, not the tools that teach through.

That’s not damning by itself; schools need operational plumbing. But it tells you where the deepest, most reliable engagement lives — in compliance and logistics — while the instructional tools show cyclical spikes around assessment windows and seasonal drop-offs the rest of the year. The system has wired itself for administration. Learning is the intermittent guest.

3. The structural problem: capital chases the story, not the need

Follow the money and the gap becomes a chasm. Personalised-learning tools attracted £187 million in investment — the third-highest in the sector — while contributing less than 1% of total market revenue. Investors are betting on an AI-personalization future that hasn’t shown up in school spending yet.

Now compare that to assistive and inclusive technology — tools for the students who need them most. Consistent real demand from schools. Serving a high-priority population. Investment received: £8.6 million, the lowest in the entire dataset.

£187 million chases a forecast. £8.6 million serves a child who needs a voice. That is the market telling you exactly what it values.

DFE / PUBLIC MARKET DATA, 2026

This is the deepest failure mode. A market optimizing for narrative over need will always overfund the speculative and underfund the essential, because the essential isn’t a growth story — it’s a responsibility. Left to its own incentives, EdTech funds the pitch deck, not the pupil.

4. The Great Unlock Thesis

We’ve said it every week: learning should be the constant, and time the variable. The EdTech market has quietly inverted something just as important. It made adoption the constant — the thing that always happens — and proof the variable — the thing that happens if anyone gets around to it.

Flip it back. The question that should gate every purchase isn’t “what can we buy” or “what’s everyone else using.” It’s the only question that’s ever mattered: what changed for the kid? A tool that can’t answer that — with evidence, not a login count — hasn’t earned a place in a classroom, no matter how much funding it raised or how slick the demo felt.

Before you renew a single subscription, ask these four:

1  Did it move a learning outcome we defined first?

Not one the vendor defined for us after the fact.

2  Can the vendor show depth of use, not login counts?

Quick logins and seasonal spikes are not learning.

3  Would we actually know if it failed?

If there’s no measurement plan, the answer is no.

4  Are we buying the tool, or the marketing?

Loudness is not evidence. Demos are not outcomes.

Not awash in tools. Honest about evidence.

Source: DfE / PUBLIC, “Assessment of the Education Technology Market in England,” June 2026. Market figures (1,123 companies; £6.5bn turnover; £782m investment; 8.8% growth) from The Data City analysis, February 2026. Usage findings from EdTech Impact data across a single large MAT; not representative of the wider system. Quotes drawn from the report’s stakeholder interviews. 

Pinned up this week: the numbers that make EdTech look unstoppable, and the ones that explain why “unstoppable” and “effective” aren’t the same word.

Not a thriving market. A loud one.

It’s the line in every renewal conversation. “Look at the usage — thousands of logins, adoption is way up.” It sounds like proof. It isn’t.

The report draws a hard distinction the marketing slides blur: an active contract means a school is paying for a tool. Usage means someone logged in. Neither means a student learned anything. A school can hold a contract a tool barely touches; a tool can rack up logins that are all quick check-ins and assessment-window spikes, then flatline for the rest of the year.

The tell: the report notes that providers “often share high overall user numbers to support contract renewals,” but those figures don’t distinguish quick logins from meaningful, ongoing use. The dashboard is engineered to survive the renewal meeting, not to measure learning.

“You assume teachers are using it, and actually, when you look at the usage, they’re not. And yet you’re paying for something that’s quite expensive.”

-MAT TECHNOLOGY LEAD, DFE / PUBLIC INTERVIEWS¹

A login is a door opening. It tells you someone walked in. It tells you nothing about whether anything happened in the room. Engagement metrics measure traffic; learning is about what changes on the way out.

Not engagement. Evidence.  

Most of this edition is about a market that avoids the mirror. So here’s someone who walked straight up to it.

A technology lead at one multi-academy trust, squeezed by tightening budgets, made a decision that sounds obvious and almost never happens: stop buying technology because it’s new, and start tracking three things instead — cost, usability, and demonstrable usage. Then actually look at what the data says.

What the data said was uncomfortable. Expensive subscriptions the trust had assumed were embedded in daily teaching turned out to be barely touched. “You assume teachers are using it,” the lead admitted, “and actually, when you look at the usage, they’re not.” That’s a hard thing to discover when you’re the one who approved the spend.

But here’s the part that earns the rosette. They didn’t stop at the convenient answer. Even with usage analytics in hand, the lead was honest about the limit of what logins can tell you: knowing whether a tool genuinely helps students hit learning objectives, they said, still “relies on the intuition of practitioners rather than hard data.” They named the gap instead of papering over it with a dashboard.

Why this matters: the failure across the whole £6.5bn market is the refusal to check. This leader checked, found bad news, said so out loud, and still acknowledged that even good usage data isn’t the same as proof of learning. That’s not cynicism. That’s the exact intellectual honesty the sector is missing.

Not louder dashboards. Truer questions.

The EdTech market isn’t broken because it’s small or underfunded. It’s wobbly because it grew enormous without ever being asked to prove it works. We don’t need fewer tools. We need better questions — and the nerve to ask them before we sign, not after.

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That's all the unlock for today. Tune in next week.

Stay awesome, you unlockers!

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