lived experience of the market, not of the barrier

i read the dfe's assessment of the edtech market in england. two things stopped me.

one · the board

the report convened an expert "lived experience board" to make sure the analysis was grounded in real-world experience. four experts, covering:

• edtech procurement
• local authority administration
• edtech consultancy
• ai
• ───────────────────────────

i have added the fifth bullet. it is empty because in the report it does not exist. nobody sat on that board because a piece of technology had failed them.

and i want to be fair here, because this is not nothing. putting the words "lived experience" into a government research method is a real move. it says somebody decided that knowledge you cannot get from a dataset belongs in the evidence. i agree with that, and i am glad to see it in print.

which is exactly why the empty bullet matters.

if lived experience is worth a seat at the table, the next question is whose. the people who buy the technology, or the people it was meant to reach?

procurement knowledge is real knowledge and the report is better for having it. but all four seats went to expertise about the market. none went to expertise about the barrier.

so the term got recognised and then handed to the wrong people.

two · the money

assistive and inclusive technologies: 80 companies, 588 people, £96m turnover, and the lowest investment of any vertical in the report at £8.6m.

that segment earns more than personalised learning. personalised learning took £187m in investment.

so the money is not following what reaches disabled learners. it is following what might.

the report notices this. its answer is to suggest third-sector partnerships "where commercial incentives are weaker".

which is a polite way of saying: the market will not fund this, so charity should.

i want to name what that does. it tells every school that inclusion is the bit you get donated rather than the bit you buy. it tells every founder building assistive tech that they are a good cause rather than a business. and it quietly sets the price of this work at somewhere near nothing.

the child

and across the eight-stage implementation journey, pupils appear once.

at stage 1, as people to survey. after that they are gone. the phrase "pupil voice" is not in the document. neither is the word "disability".

the only place a child's experience shows up with any force is a quote in a case study box, from a practitioner in a complex-needs setting:

that is the most important sentence in the report. it is in a box.

104 pages on whether the market is healthy. nothing on whether any of it reached a child.

al kingsley has already written on the report's methodology. that is not my lane and i won't repeat him. mine is the question of who it was all for.

the bit that lands on small schools

one more thing, because it lands hardest on the schools with the least room. the report is clear that digital maturity decides the quality of a school's decisions. schools with less digital maturity make reactive buying decisions. reactive means buying under pressure, on a smaller budget, with less confident staff, and with no structured framework to test the choice against.

so the schools with the least room to waste money are the ones most likely to waste it.

that is not a school failing. that is a market that sells to the confident and leaves everyone else to work it out alone.

the report also finds that the most common thing schools rely on when choosing a tool is advice from other teaching staff. thirty-eight per cent. that is a sector buying on hearsay because nobody has given it anything better to buy on.

what i think we do about it

nothing dramatic. three things, and none of them need permission:

ask the child. not a satisfaction survey. a structured look at whether the thing you bought actually got through, to that learner, on that device, in that lesson. it takes time you do not have. i know. it is still the only way to know.

measure at stage eight, not stage one. the needs assessment is the easy bit and every school does some version of it. the evaluation is the bit that gets dropped when term gets hard, and it is the bit that tells you the truth.

stop treating wcag as the finish line. the report asks suppliers to meet wcag compliance. good. wcag tells you the interface can be operated. it tells you nothing about whether a child understood it, used it, or was better off. a passed audit is not a reached child.

if nobody measures whether the tech reached the child, the child is not in the market.

source: assessment of the education technology market in england · dfe research report rr1638 · june 2026