Trends and Issues of Digital Learning in the United Kingdom

This is a page with the Abstract and some Conclusions from the book chapter "Trends and Issues of Digital Learning in the United Kingdom" in the Taiwan Government book "Trends and Issues of Promoting Digital Learning in High-Digital-Competitiveness Countries: Country Reports and International Comparison"

Both the full book and several of the chapters, including this one on the UK are on the web:

• "Trends and Issues of Digital Learning in the United Kingdom" - on ResearchGate and File:DigitalLearning UK.pdf
• "Trends and Issues of Promoting Digital Learning in High-Digital-Competitiveness Countries: Country Reports and International Comparison" on ResearchGate (with an immensely long URL) and Eric (with a much shorter URL)

Abstract

This chapter reviews the current state of digital K-12 in the United Kingdom with emphasis on England. It gives evidence to substantiate the UK's high ranking in digital maturity studies and analyses. The chapter begins by summarising England's K-12 system and the factors of the National Curriculum and National Exams which produce a uniform system despite the wide variety in size, purpose, organisation and funding of schools.

It describes the digital policy interventions, funding schemes, large-scale projects and influential reports in the period 2010-23, demonstrating that decisions taken more than ten years ago have continuing effects today, and that the pandemic rapidly accelerated existing trends rather than setting a brand new direction.

A broad view is taken of infrastructure covering technology, leadership, budgets, course design/delivery, ensuring student success, staff development, quality/inspection, and analytics. It provides data, with key examples, supporting the main trends analysed - bandwidth, school networks, software, end-user devices, and content.

It covers topics often omitted in such reports, such as private schools, homeschooling, virtual schools, open content, online national examinations and the overlap of K-12 with the post-secondary sector.

It reviews key issues:

• structural disorganisation leading to fragmented procurement of a plethora of systems,
• the multi-dimensional isolation of K-12 including the disconnect between school and post-secondary digital approaches and systems,
• lack of clarity on the role of parents,
• the rigidity of the school day/week/year limiting the scope for blended digital learning, and
• the promise but problems of advanced technologies

Challenging features of digital learning

Homeschooling

In England [and indeed the UK], students do not have to attend a face-to-face school. Parents can "homeschool" their children, in other words, teach them at home with help from online resources or online tutors. This means that there is a market for online content and service provision direct to parents in a way different from many other countries.

Too wide a range of systems and devices

Teachers in England use over 50 different ICT systems (Gibbons, 2020). Very few schools run one of the four global VLEs used in universities and colleges (Moodle, Canvas, Brightspace or Blackboard) - instead they use less functional offerings, which no post-secondary UK institution would use in a core role for online teaching and learning.

The demands of employers of professionals require a post-secondary institution to ensure that students are competent in Microsoft Office. The vast majority deploy and/or require students to have Windows PCs (a few use Mac computers). In contrast, many schools use low-cost tablets often without keyboards. Chromebooks and Microsoft Surface tablets occupy an intermediate position: low power, less flexible, but low cost and with keyboards useful for Microsoft Office apps.

The isolation of digital K-12 in England

Digital K-12 in England is fragmented and isolated,

• from the university sector (which provides much teacher training),
• from each other (no central agency or regional aggregation) and
• from other countries especially in Europe (most EU countries' exam systems are much more compatible with England than the US system is).

In more detail, summarising and extending some points made earlier:

1. There is no central agency for ICT in schools. Becta was closed in 2011 - to dismay from experts (Preston, 2010; Selwyn, 2011).
2. There is no regional structure that is effective for digital support or procurement - 150 municipalities is far too many, thus many are too small.
3. Most schools do not use a full-function VLE which universities/colleges use.
4. There is no standard scheme to ensure that teachers have up-to-date skills in using ICT to support teaching. The topic is covered in courses for new

teachers, but not for teachers already qualified. Few schools are large enough to mount such courses themselves.

1. University/college e-learning staff have the Association for Learning Technology, ALT (2023b), which is well known and has considerable traction; however, few school teachers are members.
2. The national inspection system for schools has little focus on ICT. The work from the EU, OECD, and other countries on quality schemes for ICT in schools is little known or used.
3. UK-EU collaboration in education ceased soon after the UK left the EU.

Number and power of devices used

Currently, few face-to-face schools have a device:student ratio of 1:1 - a typical ratio is 1:4 (CooperGibsonResearch, 2021, p. 18) and most devices are not PCs, yet.

Exams remain paper-based

During the pandemic, exams were cancelled, students were awarded grades based on teacher predictions, and universities, employers and parents agonised over standards (Kippin & Cairney, 2022).

This led to pressure for digital assessment - for many prior years there had been little interest in this (Mansell, 2009). Covid provided the stimulus - but researchers had already researched the issues and vendors gained experience in other countries.

Most exams require students to handwrite all their answers, including essays - in fact, laptops are allowed mainly when some disability precludes handwriting (Think Student, 2022) rather than for all exams, as would seem natural in a digital world.

In 2022 Ofqual announced a review of "whether greater use of technology in assessment and qualifications could deliver benefits for students and apprentices" and specifically mentioned "remote invigilation" (Education Hub, 2022). One exam board (AQA) also carried out research (Whilooking conclusion was that such work should "enable the next wave of school development, allowing students to experience a rich curriculum while also preparing for its application in a digital world" - but there was a key caveat, that the initiative's success "relies upon on a government-led programme of national change" (AQA, 2022).

In summer 2023 Ofqual confirmed a study of the feasibility of "fully digital" exams (ParliamentLive TV, 2023).ttaker, 2022).

However, at the time of writing [October 2023] there were no plans for fully digital exams, unlike the situation in e.g. Estonia.

Virtual schools growing but still peripheral

Virtual schools first appeared in the United States. Hence an early definition is US-oriented: "an entity approved by a state or governing body that offers courses through distance delivery - most commonly using the Internet" (Barbour & Reeves, 2009).

Virtual schools in the US sense started in the UK in 2005, when Interhigh was founded to teach online (King's Interhigh, 2005). Earlier, in 1963 the National Extension College started as a correspondence college - this began a move to blended provision (with some online) around 2000 (NEC, 2023).

There is currently no official data on the number of virtual schools or the number of students who are studying at them in England. The Department for Education is reported as estimating "25 online education providers" (Martin, 2023). All are private schools.

United_Kingdom/England/Tables#Table_V.1_Virtual_schools_in_England_likely_to_be_eligible_for_DfE_accreditation shows some virtual schools operating from England.

There was until 2023 no accreditation system for virtual schools (Department for Education, 2023e). The indicators for the scheme (Department for Educa�tion, 2023f) mainly ensure that the virtual school can be accredited as a school on the official list (Get Information about Schools, 2023) - there are only a few indicators on teaching and just one (2.6) on use of digital resources (De�partment for Education, 2023f, p. 15).

At last, an increasing role for centralised and open content

England never had a K-12 OER policy and never funded any OER K-12 repositories, surprising since there was a large government-funded OER programme for universities in 2009-2012 (McGill, 2014). [Other home nations were no better.] There has been no central overall repository of digital K-12 content, until recently.

The key issue that came to the fore in the pandemic was the lack of free (or easily licensable) relevant content. The content did exist - many virtual schools and online K-12 providers had most subjects available online in both self-study and tutored form. Yet, government did not seem to want to license access to such material; instead it set up a new provider, Oak National Academy. This led to long delays in creating a critical mass of data, with large gaps (Martin, 2022) at the start of the 2022-23 school year.

After reflecting on the needs demonstrated very visibly during the pandemic, the government came to the view there was again a national need for a central repository, not one with a wide remit like Becta, but with a specific remit to provide online learning resources for the National Curriculum. A Full Business Case was published in October 2022.

The consultations leading up to this policy caused the usual backlash from teachers (Martin, 2022), unions, and content developers (Publishers Association, 2022) - and even some of the original Oak partners (Coles, 2022). There were the usual issues over teacher autonomy (NATE, 2023).

Nevertheless, the National Academy is going ahead.

Key challenges remaining

Continued structural disorganisation in the school sector

The wide variety of ICT systems used in schools leads to problems with support, training and resource sharing. The structural issues within the sector and the lack of group action do not help.

Some progress is being made. The Department for Education now has an effective regional structure based on the Government Regions, but still no regional component to handle digital issues.

Academy Trusts play an increasing role in overseeing their schools, but many local education authorities do not manage digital strategy for their schools. In fact, a high percentage of both primary and secondary schools have no strategy or school-specific strategies - making group procurement hard or impossible (CooperGibsonResearch, 2021, pp. 76-77).

There are still around 5,000 small primary schools (enrolment under 200 students) (Weale, 2019) - unviable for an autonomous ICT strategy.

This situation leads to fragmented procurement, leading to no economies of scale or free added value services such as training. In contrast, UK colleges and universities have a more centralised/regionalised/group-oriented approach to procurement, which leads to a much smaller range of systems, and better support for these.

Unclear role of home and parents in Digital Learning

There are a number of home- and parent-related areas in digital K-12 where there is a long-standing reluctance of government to confront key issues.

The main ones are:

• Homework, with the vagueness over the value and amount - discussed earlier.
• A reluctance to monitor homeschooling (discussed earlier) and the challenge of children not in school. After the pandemic, the Children's Commissioner (2022) revealed "tens of thousands of children who are persistently or severely absent or missing from education altogether".
• Vagueness about whether government, municipalities, schools or parents will fund the "one laptop per child plus broadband" needed at home to make ICT in schools really work. This is in addition to the laptops or desktops needed within each school.

There is no recent published research on the extent to which 1:1 access to a suitable device (tablet or laptop) has been achieved - but initial indications (see the Table below) are that a small but steadily increasing set of schools of all types are doing this, for some age groups (see Table 9 in the full Report)

The examples [in the Table] of the Ark Schools Trust and Oldham College show what can be done within state school budgets, suggesting that the key constraints are motivation not finance. An iPad can be leased and supported for £120 per year (KRCS, 2023), within the overall framework set by the government (Department for Education, 2023b).

However, there are few signs yet of any schools adopting a PC [i.e. not Chromebook or tablet] laptop policy for pupils.

Unwillingness to change the school day or year to support Digital Learning

There is no evidence of any schools in England adopting a significantly different length of or pattern to the school day because of blended learning. [This is crucial if hybrid learning or substantial supplementary virtual schooling were to take place.]

The school week in England is defined as a "a 32.5-hour week" - an average 6.5-hour day (The Key Leaders, 2023). The length of a school day is "tightly distributed" between schools (Long, 2023, p. 17). There have been years of discussion on the benefits of a longer school day - in contrast, there is little discussion of the benefits of a shorter school day (JuniLearning, 2023) facilitated by DL.There is an approach, "study leave", which allows older children to stay at home while studying for exams (Nash, 2023), when they could use online resources. However, this approach does not apply during days when teaching takes place at school.

In England, local authority-maintained schools have to open for at least 190 days in the school year (Long, 2023, p. 4). Tradition and parental expectations mean that schools all divide the school year into three terms with similar dates.

There are discussions about changing school terms: in particular, the summer holiday is felt by educators to be too long. During the end-phases of the pandemic, suggestions were made for "longer school days and shorter holidays" to help students overcome the learning gap that Covid produced - these led to strong fight-back from teachers (Miller, 2021) and were never implemented.

Use of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies in schools

[This section will no doubt change radically in the 2024 edition.]

Few schools use any artificial intelligence or virtual/augmented reality technologies (CooperGibsonResearch, 2021, p. 18).

In the 2023-24 school year, artificial intelligence - mainly via language model tools such as ChatGPT - will continue to integrate into school-level education. This includes the use of tools by both teachers and students alike.

In the 2022-23 school year, teachers in many schools were discussing the issues surrounding AI and how it would impact on assessment, both in-school and high-stakes national (GCSE and A levels). The government released initial guidance in March 2023 (Department for Education, 2023g) along with detailed guidance from the Joint Council for Qualifications (2023). Later, the government issued a Call for Evidence to further inform their future policy development (Department for Education, 2023a). The Teacher Development Trust (2023) has produced a guidance document with comprehensive information.

The view from K-12 experts, such as Professor Mike Sharples, who led the Becta CAPITAL project, is that such tools "should be used to enhance pedagogy, rather than accelerating an ongoing arms race between increasingly sophisticated fraudsters and fraud detectors" (Sharples, 2022). However, there are likely to be a few "difficult" years for AI in schools in the immediate future, reminiscent of when pocket calculators arrived (Watters, 2015).

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