Any forward-thinking school keen to provide high-quality pedagogy and curriculum in the current landscape will be aware of the important contribution that digital technology can make.
Yet finding robust and insightful evidence has historically been a challenge, making it difficult to make evidence-based decisions.
It is little wonder that peers in the House of Lords debated this point last year – challenging the government to find evidence of the impact from the £900m a year spent on edtech (Tobin, 2023).
LEO Academy Trust
In 2019, LEO Academy Trust embarked upon a journey of digital transformation, investing significant time, money and human energy into an ambitious new future for their schools.
Every student and every member of staff was provided with their own Chromebook, in order to support teaching and learning and improve organisational efficiency.
The trust moved its workspace into the cloud and an ambition was set for classrooms to become blended, autonomous learning environments. A pedagogy-first vision for digital technology – PedTech (see Aubrey-Smith, 2021) – was set in place.
So what difference has this significant investment made? As Phil Hedger, CEO of LEO Academy Trust, explained: “Having embarked upon our digital journey across the trust four years ago, it was important to us to understand exactly what impact that investment had made. We wanted an independent, critical assessment so that we could learn from it and inform our strategic planning.”
The impact study
In December 2023, LEO Academy Trust published the results of an independent review of the impact of this digital investment. The 185-page report details a 12-month study drawing upon a team of 17 researchers, 606 documents, 154 observations, 65 interviews, 24 focus groups, thousands of survey responses, and hundreds of hours of professional discussion and reflection (Aubrey-Smith, 2023).
The report sets out detailed findings about impact of trust-wide digital technology use, along with key messages, insights and implications for school and system leaders. Key findings include the impact on teaching and learning, attainment outcomes and progress, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, inclusion, and equity, as well as drawing out the impact on recruitment and retention, teacher workload, financial efficiencies, environmental sustainability, attendance, behaviour, SEND, mobility, and MAT growth.
This report unpacks and dissects the ingredients which LEO have put in place, presenting a comprehensive analysis as a narrative, a series of findings (about successes as well as challenges), and a set of recommendations for the future – for the benefit of both the LEO community and others.
Globally, this is the first large scale and fully independent research to probe every aspect of trust provision to show the impact of digital technology.
Headline findings
Headlines from the research include that LEO’s approach to the use of digital technology has supported a number of positive outcomes:
- The attainment of children at LEO schools significantly outperformed national norms in national tests.
- The proportion of children achieving greater depth in national assessments in reading, writing and mathematics at LEO being more than triple the national average over the last three years.
- Digital tasks increasing classroom efficiency by 23%, allowing the repurposing of time for more targeted and inclusive learning – leading to the significant attainment gains as outlined above.
- The number of children on the SEN register requiring expensive intervention programmes has reduced by around a third because of embedded inclusive practice facilitated by digital technology.
- Attendance figures across LEO are higher than the national average, and net mobility at LEO is just 4% compared to an average of 20% to 48% across other London schools.
- Staff satisfaction is consistently 15% to 20% above national benchmarks with LEO seen as an employer of choice – leading to high levels of staff retention, high-quality candidate appointments, and significant recruitment cost savings.
- The reduction in worksheet printing and number of exercise books saves approximately 400 trees per year equating to a trust-wide saving of around £78 per-child, per-year (just over half the cost of the Chromebook provision).
- A consistent and sustained increase in number on roll with LEO schools being targeted as the school of choice by families.
Key takeaways for other schools
- Curriculum planning which sets out clear pedagogical intentions and uses digital tools to explicitly support those intentions (e.g. adaptive teaching, metacognition) – ensuring a pedagogy-first mindset.
- A focus on responsible learner autonomy so that children are able to independently access appropriate tools, resources and support without being limited by timetables or teacher capacity – creating greater capacity for learning.
- The importance of inclusive mindsets – where all children and adults (not just those with SEND) have consistent access to a wide range of accessibility features, and the agency to use them (e.g. subtitles, auto-translate, screen masks) – ensuring that all barriers to learning are actively removed.
- A digital skills progression framework which ensures that children from nursery upwards – and teachers – are explicitly taught to use, and become confident with, a specific set of features and functionality – making all of the above possible.
Final thoughts
LEO’s digital package (tools, training, subscriptions and support) equates to approximately £12 per-child, per-month. For this, LEO has embedded a transformational approach to teaching and learning across a trust that now includes 4,500 children and 600 staff across nine schools. The impact has been significant, sustained, and at-scale.
Dr Fiona Aubrey-Smith supports schools and trusts with professional learning, education research and strategic planning. She is the founder of One Life Learning, an associate lecturer at the Open University, a founding fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching, and sits on the board of a number of multi-academy and charitable trusts. Follow her on X (Twitter) @FionaAS. Find her previous articles and podcast/webinar appearances via www.headteacher.com/authors/dr-fiona-aubrey-smith
Further information & resources
- Aubrey-Smith: Forget edtech – we need to talk about ‘pedtech’, Headteacher Update, 2021: www.headteacher-update.com/content/best-practice/forget-edtech-we-need-to-talk-about-pedtech
- Aubrey-Smith: Changing learning, changing lives: What happens when edtech becomes pedtech? LEO Academy Trust, 2023: www.leoacademytrust.co.uk/pedtechimpactreport
- Tobin: Educational technology: Digital innovation and AI in schools, 2023: https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/educational-technology-digital-innovation-and-ai-in-schools