Educational Technology

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2023 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Kidron]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the role of educational technology (ed tech) being used in schools in relation to (1) the educational outcomes, (2) the social development, and (3) the privacy of schoolchildren.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests, particularly that of chair of the Digital Futures Commission, which published the Blueprint for Educational Data in 2022, as chair of 5Rights Foundation and adviser to the Institute for Ethics in AI in Oxford.

School is a place of learning and an environment where children build relationships, life choices are made and futures initiated. For most children, school is compulsory, so while they are there, the school is in loco parentis. I welcome the use of technology, whether for learning or management, but it is uniquely important that it meets the school’s multiple responsibilities for the children in its care.

The debate this afternoon asks us to consider the impact of edtech on learning, privacy and the social development of children. Each could fill a debate on its own, but in touching on all three, I wish to make the point that we need standards and oversight of all.

For more than a decade, Silicon Valley, with its ecosystem of industry-financed NGOs, academics and think tanks, has promised that edtech would transform education, claiming that personalised learning would supercharge children’s achievements and learning data would empower teachers, and even that tech might in some places replace teachers or reach students who might otherwise not be taught.

Meanwhile, many teachers and academics worry that the sector has provided little evidence for these claims. A recent review by the UCL’s Centre for Education Policy found that, of 25 of the most popular maths apps for children aged five, only one had been empirically evaluated for positive impacts on maths outcomes. Half of them did not include features known to support learning, such as feedback loops, and six of the 25 contained no mathematical content at all. If the UCL finding was extrapolated across the half a million apps labelled “education apps” in the app store, 480,000 would not be evaluated, a quarter of a million would provide no learning support and 120,000 would have no educational content at all. The lack of quality standards is not restricted to apps but is widely spread across all forms of edtech. Of course we should have tech in school, but it must be educationally sound.

Covid supercharged the adoption of edtech and, while we must not conflate remote learning with edtech in the classroom, the Covid moment offers two important insights. First, as forensically set out in the UNESCO publication An Ed-Tech Tragedy, the “unprecedented” dependence on technology worsened disparities and learning loss across the world—including in Kenya, Brazil, the United States and Britain. Unsurprisingly, in each country the privileged children with space, connectivity, their own device and an engaged adult had better outcomes than their peers. A more surprising finding was that, where there was no remote learning at all but children were supplied with printouts or teaching via TV or radio, the majority of students did better. The exact reasons are complex but, in short, teaching prepared by teachers for students whom they know, unmediated by the values and normative engineering practices of Silicon Valley, had better outcomes. UNESCO calls on us to ensure that the promises of edtech are supported by evidence.

Secondly, Covid embedded edtech in our schools. Sixty-four per cent of schools introduced, increased or upgraded their technology with no corresponding focus on pupil privacy. In 2021, LSE Professor Sonia Livingstone and barrister Louise Hooper for the Digital Futures Commission mapped the journey of pupil data on Google Classroom and Class Dojo. Their report showed children’s data leaking from school and homework assignments into the commercial world at eye-watering scale, readily available to advertisers and commercial players without children, parents or teachers even knowing.

It is worth noting that, in 2021, the Netherlands negotiated a contract that restricted the data that Google’s education products could share. In 2022, Helsingør in Denmark banned Google Workspace and Chromebooks altogether—the same year the French Ministry of Education urged schools to stop using free versions of both Google and Microsoft.

Children’s privacy is non-trivial. Data may include school attendance, visits to the nurse, immigration status, test results, disciplinary record, aptitude and personality tests, mental health records, biometric data, or the granular detail of how a child interacted with an educational product—whether they hesitated or misspelled. Between management platforms, multiple connected devices and programmes used for teaching, the data that can be collected on a child is almost infinite and the data protection breathtakingly poor. Pupil data has been made available to gambling firms and advertisers, and even been found to track their use of mental health services.

I turn briefly to the impact on social development. Child development is a multifaceted affair, in which not only the tech itself but the opportunity cost—that is, what the child is not doing—is of equal import. I was in Manchester last week, where a programme to bring professional dancers to nursery schools is being developed because children were arriving unable to play, look each other in the eye or move confidently. Although schools are not to blame if children come in overstimulated and undersocialised, in part because of the sedentary screen time of early years, it is absolutely crucial that school remains a place of movement, singing, playing, drawing, reading and class teaching, supported by tech but not replaced by it, not only in a handful of Manchester nurseries but throughout the school system, and, very importantly, during the teenage years. Decisions about edtech should be in the light of and in response to not simply learning but the whole child and their development needs.

In my final minutes, I will speak briefly about safety tech. Here, I record my gratitude to Ministers and officials in the Department for Education, past and present, who have made very significant progress on this issue this year.

Frankie Thomas was 15 when she accessed a story that promoted suicide on a school iPad that had not been connected to the school filtering system. Subsequently, she took her own life exactly as she had seen online. Since that time, her parents, Judy and Andy, have campaigned tirelessly to bring the governance of safety tech to our notice. They deserve much credit for the advances that have been made. However, we still do not have standards for safety tech in schools. Schools can buy, and are buying, in good faith, systems that fail to search for self-harm or have illegal content filters switched off and so on. Secondarily, while we have excellent new guidance, Ofsted inspections do not explicitly ask whether schools are reviewing and checking that their online safety systems are working, meaning that thousands of schools have not properly engaged with that guidance.

I gave the Minister notice of my questions and very much look forward to her response. Will the department introduce quality control for edtech, including peer review and certification that evidences that it is suitable to meet children’s educational and development needs? Will the department use the upcoming Data Protection and Digital Information Bill to introduce a data protection regime for schools, which is so urgently needed? Will the department introduce standard procurement contracts, such as the Netherlands has, recognising that a single school cannot negotiate performance and privacy standards with global companies? Will the department bring forward a requirement for minimum standards of filtering and monitoring so that safety systems are fit for purpose, and simultaneously ensure that Ofsted’s inspecting schools handbook explicitly requires an inspector to ask whether a school is regularly checking its safety tech?

I am deeply grateful to all noble Lords who have chosen to speak and look forward to their contributions. Education is an extremely precious contribution to child development and widely regarded as a public good. It must not be undermined by allowing an unregulated market to develop without regard for the learning, privacy and safety of children.