On July 29, the DfE confirmed hackers stole 607,000 records from its help desk and Turing Scheme portal. Names, emails and job titles of headteachers and senior leaders were among them. The DfE says the risk is "not high." That position needs challenging.
The DfE published new EdTech procurement guidance on July 9. It is the first DfE document to reference the ICO's Edtech Examined findings, and it tells schools to treat procurement as a connected governance decision, not an isolated IT one. Read it before September.
A short note as the school year ends. The summer isn't quiet for everyone, the readership has grown in ways that continue to surprise, and September will bring the KCSIE deadline and everything else. Thank you for reading.
KCSIE 2026 has been published and comes into force on September 1. It makes phone-free schools the default, brings AI-generated content into safeguarding practice, updates data protection for the DUAA, and rewrites volunteer vetting. Schools have six weeks to update policies.
The DfE has announced a £132.5m Every Child Can programme and a new Enrichment Framework, arriving just as many independent schools ran their annual Enrichment Week. The framework is not a compliance test, but it asks every school to take enrichment as seriously as attainment.
The ICO has just audited 28 EdTech providers and the findings cut across the entire supplier stack. Controller/processor confusion, weak DPIAs, outdated privacy information, gaps in data flow mapping. A new statutory EdTech code is on the horizon. Procurement just got harder, and rightly so.
In a single fortnight, the government has admitted its AI tutoring tools have 'limited' evidence, and the EEF has opened formal research into cognitive offloading. The state sector now has the right procurement filter. The independent sector needs to build one of its own.
The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act has introduced a Single Unique Identifier for every child. The safeguarding case is real, the human cost of the status quo has been catastrophic – but the data governance questions are enormous, and schools are going to find themselves holding the number.
Pro-level sports tech is hitting school sports halls and it could genuinely transform PE teaching. Smart rackets, AI motion analysis, and auto-tracking cameras give pupils real autonomy over their own progress. The pedagogy is exciting; the IT plumbing just needs careful planning.
A Commonwealth Prize-winning story was flagged as AI-generated. The case is contested, but the schools parallel is clear. AI detectors deliver binary verdicts on prose they were never designed to judge – and the pupils most likely to be wrongly flagged are the ones who write best.
The DfE is hiring a Director General for Digital and Infrastructure on its highest-ever salary. The remit – AI, data, cyber, the new child identifier and the school estate, all under one person – signals that government now sees digital and risk as one strategic brief. The org chart has caught up.
Nick Harrison of the Sutton Trust warns we are entering a "digital Wild West" where a new AI divide is widening between state and independent sectors. As we look at the data, it is impossible not to draw close parallels to the hardware-access crisis we faced during the pandemic.