Hi David
I think there is a brilliant initiative here with significant upside. The opportunity to facilitate the development, identification and scaling of the best innovative products in tech Ed should undoubtedly be pursued. However, it's possible the paper spends too much time arguing against the bogie of national policy, without sufficiently explaining how we mitigate against the down-side of innovation.
The question is, in these innovate hot-spots, how many students might be disadvantaged because they have been using new edtech products which are inadequate, which do not succeed in percolating to the top? As a rather extreme analogy, we would not allow hospitals to innovate in heart surgery, for example by using organs from different animals, because of the unacceptable consequences. Should we allow experimentation in schools, with the risk that some products are sub optimal or worse? If there are ways of managing this, I wasn’t sure it came across clearly enough in the paper.
How much failure is necessary to create success? You say we might “wait three to five years for 1000 flowers to bloom”, that “widespread adoption might take place when 300 schools are using a system” but what about all of the common failure within this process?. After all the private set sector is based on creative destruction. The weaker products go to the wall. But we have here more than dissatisfied consumers, we have children and teachers who spent valuable time on products that are not only less than the best, but they may also be a very poor use of time.
Who are the innovators and what are their motives? Your model is based on “hundreds or thousands of solution providers”. You refer to an example, based on a teacher, whose motivation and integrity we can rely on. But who else will be introducing these products to schools? Are they all teachers, or perhaps private companies, or not for profit? Allowing private companies into the market can change the dynamic considerably, as we see in other public sectors, time and time again.
These problems all come back to the quality of the initial products. To encourage unbridled innovation with all types of providers could lead to deep troughs before the high peaks. Is there a gatekeeper to control entry to the market i.e. to assure some base level of product quality and supplier integrity? Is this the reason to restrict experimentation to certain academies and city projects? If so, would they ensure that products which are suggested to schools are of sufficiently high quality and the suppliers have been vetted against agreed standards? If this is the case, can I suggest it’s made more overt?
I hope that’s helpful
Regards
Patrick