Education news roundup – November 2020

As we enter the final month of the year, here are four of the latest UK education and edtech news stories from November 2020.

There’s a rise in teachers working 50-hour weeks

This article highlights the ongoing pressure on teachers’ time which is affecting mental health and staff retention. The number of teachers working more than 51 hours a week has increased for the third year in a row, according to TES. Half said dealing with unnecessary paperwork and data gathering was a specific reason for considering leaving (compared with 40 per cent in 2019).

These findings mirror those in our annual State of Technology in Education report. Unmanageable levels of work continues to be the major reason for teachers thinking about leaving the profession.

Creating the connected classrooms of the future

If the global pandemic has shown us one thing, it’s that the walls of a classroom are no longer a barrier to education, according to this article. But to offer hybrid learning in future, the classroom of tomorrow requires a reliable, high-performing network.

Schools should be prepared to invest to make the connected classroom of the future a reality. But the first step is a robust infrastructure — only 44% of school IT leaders in the UK think their Wi-Fi network is good enough to support their current and future digital learning aims.

Sound familiar? Why not chat to Ed, our friendly edtech assistant, to find out how you could improve your school IT and infrastructure?

Is it edtech’s time to shine?

According to this ET article, the fragility of our education infrastructure – and the role of education technology – has never been so clear. Since schools and universities reopened, many are scrambling to adopt a new hybrid delivery model.

But what does this hybrid future look like? 

It means a fundamental shift in our approach to national education, which puts technology-first foundations — and proven classroom technologies like the Promethean ActivPanel — at the heart of short and long-term planning. 

To support this, Promethean is currently offering on-site or virtual demos with a free one-week ActivPanel loan. This allows future-focused schools to witness how a hybrid learning environment could work for them in practice. Request your own demo here.

Exploring school budgets and CPD in our annual report

This final article highlights the key trends found in our annual State of Technology in Education report. Following the recently-launched edtech strategy and tech usage sections, the next two parts of this year’s report were published at the end of October.

As our annual research found, only 1% of schools are treating tech training as a pressing need, dropping 23% in priority over the last five years; while 41% of respondents claim staff have had to commit to training in their own time out of school. Read the rest of the report to find out how trends this year have impacted educator health and wellbeing.