Survey Says... Your EdTech Might Be Rubbish!

The recent Juniper Education / YouGov “Unveiling Teachers’ Perspectives on EdTech in Schools: A Comprehensive Exploration” white paper brings some interesting findings to light.

I don’t put much stock in supplier EdTech surveys but this one was run by YouGov so I took a deeper look.

I’ve picked out a few points that I felt were important:

The Data:

The total sample size was 1004 primary and secondary school teachers. Fieldwork was undertaken by YouGov between the 14th - 25th of April 2023. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all teachers in the UK

💸 Poor Value-for-Money

It’s well known that schools are particularly price sensitive, but price and value are two different things and perception is critical here. 

Only 13% of teachers agreed that their EdTech providers offer good value

It’s easy to read this as a commentary on pricing, but I see it as an implementation issue - teachers aren’t experiencing satisfactory returns on their investment in EdTech solutions.

The positioning, implementation, and on-going support you offer to schools is just as important as the product itself. Lowering your price is just a race to the bottom and that doesn’t benefit anyone in the long-run.

A huge number of companies don’t have a structured onboarding process. It’s pretty standard that a school signs the contract, gains access, and gets 60 minutes of online training. Then they’re off on their own. “Call or email us if you have a problem.”

Schools are not the most technological able or confident places, so deep down, we all known that this isn’t going to be enough.

The survey bears this point out in the data

• 53% of teachers say that a significant portion of their school’s EdTech is unused or unused to its full potential.

• Only 19% said EdTech providers offer good support and training. 😬 That’s bad.

This gap in on-going implementation stage is not only an issue to how you’re perceived - it has a knock on impact to your churn. To give you some benchmarks, well implemented back-office platforms have <5% annual churn. Classroom solutions <10%.

However, a lot of companies trend at 2x this and that’s tens, if not hundreds, of thousands in lost revenue.

If you’re in this boat, £ for £, Customer Success if one of the best investments you can make right now.

• 👉 Serendipitously, if you’re looking to bolster your Customer Success Team, a former reportee of mine is open to new roles - Tamsin. I’m not about to turn into a recruiter, no no no! Having built Customer Success teams, I know how difficult it can be to find those proactive, problem solvers who bring new ideas to the table. I can personally recommend Tamsin so if you’re looking, it might save you some time / recruiter fees.

😡 Overpromising AND Underdelivering

Almost a third of teachers (30%) reported that their EdTech providers had overpromised and underdelivered. Talk about a 2 for 1 deal!

This one doesn’t surprise me because I see so many companies making outlandish statements or just falling victim to their own hubris.

Every EdTech company has those lighthouse, super-user, evangelist accounts who wax lyrical about how good the solution is.

BUT… these are almost always a small minority of your customer base, and often, they’re also your earliest users. They’ve received a level of support, training, and guidance over the years that you just can’t offer to other schools.

If you did you’d probably go out of business because it just isn’t scaleable or profitable.

📚 The Workload Problem

The stat that made much of the education news earlier this year is that a big portion of teachers reported that there’s no time-saving, workload alleviating benefits from the EdTech going into their schools.

What?! But EdTech saves time, the supplier said so on their marketing brochure.

Sorry, the teaching population don’t agree and it comes down to 3 reasons:

• Complicated functionality

• Time-consuming setup processes

• Inadequate training

You can see just how powerful good implementation processes are now as a good process can help resolve all 3 of these issues.

Many companies get themselves into a ‘feature race,’ rushing to offer more and more functionality in the hope that these new features will lead to more sales.

Very little time and resource is dedicated to improving usability, and every new feature added only worsens usability / simplicity. More complicated > Harder to use > Less impactful.

56% of teachers reported that new EdTech solutions are not designed with the classroom teacher in mind. I think that’s a fair assessment. When schools buy, teachers are rarely involved in the procurement decision, so their feedback and insights aren’t easily captured by sales teams.

Sales teams tend to report back features that will ‘sell’ which sways the product development process which is creating a blindspot. You’ve really got to go hunt down those classroom insights.

Running NPS survey is a good, easy way to start improving your feedback pipeline, supported by your Customer Success department and the relationships they can build.

🎯 What can you do about all this?

Here’s the good news. It’s straightforward to really outperform the average EdTech company here by just doing a few things.

1. If you can’t prove it, don’t say it! Don’t make marketing statements or promises you can’t back up with evidence. This will better align expectations from the outset.

2. Seek out the bad news first. Unhappy and poorly implemented schools are a goldmine of insights. These are broadly more representative of the average school than your evangelist users or schools are, so if you can get it right for them, you can get it right for everyone.

3. Invest in onboarding. This will not only maximise a school’s time-to-value and overall sentiment towards you, but it will also improve your retention and lead to a big financial uplift. (I wrote a deep dive on this here)

🧐 What Do Schools Want More Of?

Despite the rather negative points I’ve pulled, the report summarises that UK teachers’ appetite for EdTech remains strong, and rather than wanting less, they actually want more.

The critical factor is that they want more focused and more targeted EdTech.

As a supplier, the key going forward is how you segment the school market and become more focused. With increased competition and school users becoming more sophisticated, I think the time of broad ‘catch all’ platforms is coming to an end.

It won’t be enough to be average in a number of areas. You have to be excellent in a few because schools are different. Different goals. Different challenges. Different cultures.

To roll this one up, here’s the list of what categories of products schools want more of:

• Out-of-class teaching workload (e.g., marking, reports) - 54%

• In-classroom teaching and learning (e.g., online resources and digital assessments) - 48%

• Assessment - 27%

• Wellbeing (staff and children) - 25%

• Homework, at-home, or flipped learning - 22%

• Staff development - 19%

• Parent communications (e.g., email, website, apps) - 18%

As always, thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Best, Jay

ps. Thankyou to everyone who spotted recent typos / spelling mistakes in some of my posts. I’m currently spending a lot of time in Japan, learning Japanese - not only is Japanese tricky, but I’m also finding out about native Language Attrition for the first time which is contributing to my mistakes.

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