How much EdTech gets bought without any evidence it works? Kristy Evers has a view on this. It's not a comfortable one for the industry.

Kristy Evers works at ImpactEd, an organisation built around the principle that procurement decisions in education should be grounded in evidence. She sits at the point where commercial reality meets the demand for genuine accountability.

IN THIS EPISODE

• What good evidence for EdTech procurement actually looks like — and why so little of it exists

• How schools make buying decisions in the absence of robust impact data

• What ImpactEd's work reveals about the gap between claimed and measured outcomes

• What EdTech suppliers could do to make it easier for schools to buy well

Episode 6 closes THE IMPLEMENTERS block. Episode 7 begins THE INTERROGATORS.

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Everway (formerly Texthelp) is the largest assistive technology provider in the world — thirty years, hundreds of millions of users. Paddy McGrath wants to stop calling it assistive technology, and stop calling it accessibility. He'll explain why.

Patrick (Paddy) McGrath is Director of Education at Everway, the global accessibility-technology company behind Read&Write and a suite of tools used in schools across more than 100 countries. He's spent the last decade arguing that the industry's language — 'SEND', 'assistive', even 'accessibility' — is quietly undermining the thing it's trying to build: genuinely inclusive classrooms.

IN THIS EPISODE

· Why schools often buy Everway's tools for 25 exam-access students and stop there — and the commercial conversation about extending to the other 1,075

· RTB (reason to buy) versus RTB (reason to broaden) — what happens when a school names a narrow reason to purchase and then doesn't deploy further

· Usage versus outcomes: why 20% adoption is research-defined success for some tools, and why that's still a hard conversation with a senior leadership team

· The cross-platform reality of multi-academy trusts — five devices, three operating systems, one single sign-on, and who's responsible for which gap

· Why built-in OS accessibility is not inclusion — text-to-speech designed for visual impairment is not the same tool as text-to-speech for dyslexia

· The bus-kneeling analogy — why accessibility you have to ask for isn't accessibility, and what genuine inclusion looks like by comparison

· It's never budget, always culture — why inclusion failure is a senior-leadership-team problem that can't be solved by more money

· Practical redesign without redesign — the Google Docs font change a teacher can make in thirty seconds that transforms a dyslexic pupil's experience

· How the Everway (formerly Texthelp) rebrand was handled commercially, and what happens to a name-change at global scale when schools still search the old name

· Paddy's own 'I hated school' story — the tech-labs teacher who let him build anything, the football-on-sports-day kid who didn't fit, and the engagement question nobody thought to measure

· The Teacher Advisory Panel model — paid teachers on a theory-of-change roadmap, not a marketing focus group

· The Abington Academy (Cavendish Education) report Everway didn't commission, didn't fund and didn't influence — and why that kind of impartial evidence is worth more than any case study Everway could write itself

· Measuring something as intangible as a barrier being removed — and why Everway is going through the DfE/Chartered College EdTech Evidence Port rather than writing their own metrics

Episode 5 continues THE IMPLEMENTERS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk

Al Kingsley has been on every side of the EdTech table: supplier, MAT chair, alternative-provision chair, SEND board chair, BESA EdTech chair. Which means when he tells you why your pitch doesn't land, he isn't guessing.

Al Kingsley MBE is CEO of NetSupport — the classroom management, safeguarding and remote-management company that has been building infrastructure for schools since 1989. He chairs multi-academy trusts across several English regions, has chaired alternative provision, sits on the DfE regional schools advisory board and chairs the county SEND board. He's also the author of five books on EdTech and school governance, and was named an EdTech Digest 2026 Global Leader two days before this recording.

IN THIS EPISODE

· Why NetSupport has deliberately kept AI out of its safeguarding product — the 'whoop whoop' problem and why context beats pattern-matching

· The three skills every EdTech company selling into schools eventually needs — and why it's usually the third one they under-hire for

· How a MAT risk register actually reads from the inside: recruitment and retention, reputational damage, cyber security, estate condition — and why none of it is sexy

· Why classroom tools should be built to be invisible — the toolbar colour-change example for children who won't raise their hand

· Cognitive offloading: the phrase that now gets dropped into every AI conversation whether it fits or not

· Selling concepts, not features — the BETT-stand anecdote where more toolbar features won deals but lost the classroom

· Pitching to a school vs pitching to a MAT — why the messaging has to shift when the buyer is aggregating 20 schools' data rather than one

· Why the current assessment system is the real problem, not AI — the viva and doctorate comparison, and what project-based and problem-based learning is actually exposing

· Microsoft and Google in the room when the digital strategy gets written — and why Al is prepared to be blunt about whose interests that serves

· The British Council session before BETT — North Africa and Middle East school-system leaders running initiatives the UK could learn from

· Alternative provision, county lines, and why the pupil referral unit had higher engagement online during the pandemic

· The Year 6–7 transition 'cloud' zone — how one of his secondary schools takes the primary-teacher nurture model seriously for pupils who aren't ready to leave it behind

Episode 4 opens THE IMPLEMENTERS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk