People talk a lot about “pedagogy”. But what do they actually mean? Pedagogy is a model of education in which the teacher and the learner learn together and mould oneself in every respect.  There is a long-standing need to find a way of teaching traditional and modern skills systematically at a higher scale.  In order to succeed in this voyage, education has to go through its own industrial revolution, which will introduce systematic processes, backed by effective quality controls and robust quantitative evidence of effectiveness. 

The demand for education is an appetite that grows with the feeding. The more complex a nation’s economy, the greater will be the demand for a longer period of education or training. The more democratic a society the more anxious its citizens become to give their children a good start in the race of education. Supporters of education technology have commonly relied on the argument that we need to educate our young people for a substantially different world in the twenty-first century than existed in much of the twentieth.

All schools are different. It is something we often forget. One of the problems with the way that the evidence has been presented in the past is that we don’t take enough notice of those differences. Schools need to say “What is our real learning need? What do our teachers and students in this school need the most? Maybe they need to be doing more work to explore their own understanding, for example, maybe we should put more of an emphasis on assessment in this school, in the formative sense. How can we be more effective at assessing what our students understand so that we may support them more effectively.