Walk into most schools today and you’ll see a world unrecognisable from the one many of us grew up in. Interactive panels have replaced whiteboards. Learning platforms track progress in real time. Virtual labs let students run experiments that would once have needed a fully equipped science block. This shift hasn’t happened by accident – it’s been driven by successive waves of EdTech innovation, each one raising the bar for what schools expect from the technology they buy.
For those of us working alongside EdTech companies as they build, scale, and sell into schools, this transformation is more than a nice backdrop. It’s a map of where the real commercial opportunities sit – and where the next ones are forming.
The buying bar has moved from “digital” to “intelligent”
A decade ago, a school procurement conversation was often about basic digitisation: moving registers online, putting lessons on a shared drive, getting a projector into every classroom. That bar has moved considerably. Schools now expect platforms that adapt to individual learners, surface meaningful analytics for leadership teams, and integrate cleanly with the ERP and MIS systems already running in the background.
For suppliers, this means the product conversation has changed. “We digitise X” is no longer a strong enough pitch on its own. Buyers want to know how a platform uses data to personalise, how it reduces teacher workload rather than adding to it, and how it fits into an increasingly crowded stack of tools a school is already paying for. Vendors who can speak fluently to integration, data governance, and measurable outcomes are winning the room that a flashy interface alone used to win.
The post-pandemic shift created permanent new categories of demand
Hybrid and blended delivery, once a crisis response, is now simply how many schools operate day to day. That shift didn’t just create a temporary spike in demand for video conferencing tools – it opened durable new categories: hybrid-ready assessment platforms, asynchronous learning content, parent-communication tools, and safeguarding and tracking systems that give families visibility they now expect as standard.
Suppliers who treat this as a permanent shift in buyer expectations, rather than a pandemic-era blip, are the ones building products with staying power. Those still pitching pre-2020 assumptions about how schools want to receive support are finding conversations harder to land.
Policy alignment is now a genuine sales lever
In markets with active national curriculum reform – whether that’s frameworks pushing digital literacy, computational thinking, and AI fluency as core skills, or local equivalents elsewhere – policy direction is doing some of the sales job for you, if you know how to use it. Schools and trusts are actively looking for suppliers who can demonstrate alignment with where curriculum and inspection frameworks are heading, not just where they’ve been.
This is an area we see EdTech companies under-use constantly. A product built two years ago rarely has its positioning updated to reflect the latest curriculum language, and that’s a missed opportunity. Buyers respond well to suppliers who can show, concretely, how a platform supports the specific skills and outcomes their regulator or ministry is now prioritising.
Teacher empowerment, not teacher replacement, is the winning narrative
Every wave of EdTech hype eventually runs into the same question from school leaders: does this reduce my teachers’ workload, or add to it? The suppliers who consistently win trust are the ones whose products are explicitly designed around empowering teachers – giving time back, surfacing insight rather than creating more admin, and keeping the human relationship at the centre of the classroom.
This isn’t just a values point, it’s a commercial one. Procurement decisions in schools are rarely made on ROI spreadsheets alone; they’re made by people who have sat through enough pilot fatigue to be sceptical of tools promising transformation. A supplier that can demonstrate genuine time-saving and teacher buy-in, backed by real classroom evidence, moves through a sales cycle faster than one relying on the promise of innovation alone.
What this means for EdTech companies entering new markets
For EdTech suppliers looking to expand – whether that’s a UK company eyeing international schools, or an international platform entering the UK market – the pattern holds. Buyers everywhere are further along this curve than they were even three years ago, more sophisticated in their evaluation criteria, and less tolerant of vague value propositions. Market entry now needs:
- A product narrative built around integration and outcomes, not novelty
- Positioning that speaks directly to current curriculum and policy priorities
- Evidence of genuine teacher time saved, not just feature lists
- An understanding of the procurement and pilot cycles specific to that market
That’s precisely where we spend our time at Jupiter Education – helping EdTech companies translate strong products into propositions that land with school and trust decision-makers, in the UK and internationally.
If you’re building an EdTech product and want a second pair of eyes on how it will land with the schools you’re targeting, get in touch – we’d love to talk it through.
