An equity-focused approach to EdTech

When we think about equity in education, there is often an emphasis on fair distribution of digital resources. Through a broader justice lens, equity must also address issues of recognition and participation, ensuring that all young people are able to take part fully and meaningfully in education. This includes attending to whose knowledge, identities and experiences are valued within schools, and how educational systems can reproduce or challenge patterns of exclusion (Fraser, 2008). Schools are not solely responsible for addressing inequities, rather they are active participants in a wider social and political system, with a role in challenging the structural, cultural, and technical conditions that produce inequities in the first place.

Debates about edtech should be embedded within broader conversations about educational purpose, citizenship, and justice, ensuring that technology supports a more reflective and equitable vision of schooling.What does it mean to be an educated person in contemporary times and what role should technology play in that vision? This would include questions of what it means to be digitally literate and how to support autonomous young people who are orientated towards recognising and responsibility for justice. These debates would also recognise the “hidden curriculum”, or the implicit values and norms, communicated through schooling practices, and how technology can reinforce or challenge these dynamics.

We should privilege underlying pedagogical goals and design technology accordingly. This might mean designing technology that rejects the efficiency logic apparent in many products. They should not be positioned as shortcuts, nor as a customer relationship (i.e. a transaction between student and teacher, or student and student). As part of this, technology should be positioned within a rich understanding of the varied and unequitable environments of school classrooms and how they “work”, what teachers need to support their students, or how such technologies might fit into existing or desirable school practices. The technology should design out distractions, rather than asking teachers to manage digital behaviours or asking students to demonstrate greater self-regulation.

We should centre and support the expertise and needs of teachers and education staff in design and use of technology, supporting autonomy in teaching practice and decision-making. Educators are not “implementers” of digital systems; they play a crucial role in contributing to our understanding of how those systems function in practice. Our approach affirms the importance of professional autonomy in teaching, where educators have the capacity to choose edtech in ways that align with their professional judgement and the needs of their learners, rather than being constrained by overly standardised or prescriptive technologies. 

Schools and classrooms are already highly unequal places. This manifests in numerous ways, including differences in access to technology, and the varied needs and life experiences of different students. An equity-focused approach needs to acknowledge and take seriously this variety in student experiences and perspectives. For example, what is it like to be digitally excluded, to have EAL or SEND? How do experiences in and outside of school, and home-school relations differ? Such considerations need to be accounted for in policy, in design and in practice, with recognition that technology very rarely compensates for these inequities, and can often make them worse.

An equity-focused approach is one that “troubles the tech,” critically attending to the logics, values, bias and imperfections of technology; designing with attention to possible bias and universalism, and explicitly challenging deterministic ideas that technology is straightforwardly beneficial. Technology is not taken as given, or seen it as fixed; it is built by humans, it is fallible and can be changed. We call for an approach that allows the education community to interrogate the very premise of the technology on offer to schools and decide if the tech we have is what we want, or if we want something different.

An equity-focused approach to technology employs research evidence in the broadest sense, rather than relying on assumptions or commercial claims (or privileging RCTs). Highly varied school environments mean that there is a range of evidence schools need: no one technology will have the same impact in different classrooms. There is a need to include other stakeholder knowledge including school leaders, teachers, students and parents/carers. Centring teacher knowledge, expertise and understanding of what really happens in the classroom is a particularly important part of that process. We call for better ways to capture and use these understandings from all schools and all teachers, many of whom are under the most pressure and are the least likely to be part of these conversations.

Our approach calls for strengthening schools’ capacity to make informed decisions about technology. This requires ensuring schools are adequately resourced with reliable infrastructure and appropriate funding, but it also involves recognising the significant influence of governance and accountability structures on school-level decision-making. Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) and Local Authorities (LAs) play a key role in shaping technology strategies, while external accountability systems such as Ofsted and exam boards can either enable or constrain schools’ autonomy in this area. We need to strengthen coordination between national policy, governance bodies, and accountability frameworks to ensure that schools can make context-sensitive, pedagogically-informed decisions about technology use.

There is a need to rethink the market logic that underpins technology use in education. In particular, we call to reduce the power of Big Tech and to reorientate the market to encourage the design of technology that reflects educational (not commercial) logics. Strategies to achieve this include stronger regulation of large technology providers and clearer accountability mechanisms for all edtech companies, ensuring they are responsible for the social and educational impacts of their products. It also involves developing market conditions that actively incentivise the creation of edtech that is aligned with the priorities of the education community, rather than simply those that are most profitable or scalable.