Written by The EduTec Alliance.  Selected as COBIS’ Digital Advisory Partner, The EduTec Alliance supports the International K12 Schools sector in its creation and implementation of their digital strategies.

1        Introduction

As the digital strategists for international schools, the EduTec Alliance is fortunate to draw on a wide range of research and practical experience to spot the trends in K12.  In last year’s Digital Outlook, we opened by highlighting that edtech investment has no causal impact on learning outcomes.  The Economist magazine appears to share our view with their January 2026 piece entitled ‘Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless’.  A good read if you have an Economist subscription - if not, the title tells you all you need to know.

The challenge for the whole education sector now is how to impart the skills that their students will need to thrive in life beyond university.  As Steffan Sommer, The Director General of Misk Schools in Saudi Arabia, notes in his July 2025 whitepaper ‘Assessment 3.0 – Aligning K-12 education with life beyond school’ a recent McKinsey report found that 87% of employers believe recent graduates lack critical workplace competencies such as teamwork and adaptability.

Schools need to move away from ever increasing rafts of edtech and focus on delivering these ‘workplace competencies’, which will include skills in how to get the most out of digital platforms – safely and ethically.  Many are already embarking on this path and pivoting their digital environments to focus more on digital literacy and wellbeing instead of additional teaching and learning apps.  The key trends in this transformation are presented below.

2        Trends

2.1       Digital Wellbeing

Last year we focused on how schools are taking steps to limit screen time.  This year we’ve expanded the scope to include digital devices of all types and their impact on students.

There is a growing perception that personal devices on school premises (smart phones, laptops etc) have been a major source of distraction – both for students and teachers.  The trend ‘smart phone free’ school movement is already going strong.  Many schools are opting for lockable, signal blocking pouches from companies such as Yondr for the whole school day.  A major advantage of the pouch approach is that students can’t connect wirelessly to their devices and cheat the system.

Another trend we’ve noticed is the migration away from BYOD to school owned devices for secondary school pupils.  As well as alleviating pupil distractions through direct management of the devices and installed applications, schools have benefited from less tech related disruptions in class, lower IT Support demands and reduced cyber threat.

On a final device note, Apple launched its MacBook Neo laptop in March of this year with a price tag of $499 for education.  This build quality is excellent and its already making inroads into schools as a device for both pupils and teachers, especially those who have already deployed iPads as it can control Apple Classroom.

2.2       AI

As we predicted last year, the ‘goldrush’ of AI edtech applications promising miracles has continued to subside.  The majority of these were no more than GPT wrappers with very little in the way of guardrails, pedagogical alignment or data security.  In their place we have seen the main productivity platform players (Microsoft and Google) making significant advances in their educational AI offerings, based on their own Large Language Models.  We have been impressed with the effort that Microsoft Education has put into their Teach Module - a new AI‑powered teaching workspace built directly into the Microsoft 365 Copilot app for educators. It centralizes lesson planning, assessment creation, content adaptation, and learning‑activity design, and is free for all Microsoft 365 Education customers.

We’ve also noticed the maturing of AI features being integrated into the existing functionality of LMS providers, such as Toddle.

Multiple challenges around AI remain, common to both the K12 and tertiary education sectors;

• Cognitive Offloading: Exhibited in both pupils and teachers using AI is a real concern.  The widely reference 2025 MIT Study ‘ Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task’ clearly show that students using AI retain little to no content information and have no grasp of the subject matter,
   
• AI Detectors: Have proved time and time again to be ineffective and generate false positives – especially with students where English is a second language.  Institutions need to accept that students will continue to use AI outside school and adapt accordingly,
   
• Prompt Engineering: Once the darling of K12 AI courses, prompt engineering is suddenly out of fashion.  This is largely due to the evolution of the main AI models and the guidance of their creators to move away from structured prompting to natural language.  This April 26 article on Medium provides details of Open AI and Anthropic’s guidance,
   
• Costs: Whilst the main AI companies continue to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in data centres and model training, none of them are making a profit.  In an attempt to increase their revenue streams, they have started to raise the price of their plans and tokens.  These charges will already be hitting the 3^rd party educational AI providers and will likely be passed on.  Schools should beware of over dependency on AI until the market is operating at commercially viable rates,
   
• Public Backlash: The public mood is increasingly against AI, as the potential harms to individuals and society begins to permeate the mass media.  This was recently brought into focus by Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence’.  An excellent summary by Father Greogory Pine can be found here on YouTube if you aren’t keen to read the whole 200 pages

Our final AI observation is that the market has been attempting to migrate from passive conversational chat AI (eg Chat GPT) to active agents that can, in theory, take your instructions, access your computer and ‘do’ things.  Despite the hype, AI agents are in their infancy and are exhibiting high failure rates and a tendency to spiral out of control.  This light-hearted video by Hannah Fry is an excellent summary of the state of the nation.

2.3       Data Privacy

Data Privacy remains a major concern with K12 Digital.  Following hot on the heels of the 2025 Power School LMS data breach, Instructure’s Canvas suffered two major data breaches in quick succession, ceding the personal data of the personal data of millions of students worldwide.

Schools are waking up to the fact that providing personal student data to third parties applications, even those of scale such as PowerSchool and Instructure, isn’t a guarantee of security.

But storing on premise and handling cyber security locally is no longer an option either.  Francis de Souza, COO of Google Cloud, recently observed that “average time between an initial breach and the handoff to the next stage of an attack has dropped from eight hours to 22 seconds” and argued that companies need to demand security, governance, and auditability from their platforms from the start.

Several of the schools we work with have recognised that this is a risk reduction game and started consolidating their digital presence onto trusted platforms such as Microsoft and Google.  Their rationale is threefold;

• These platforms can support the vast majority of their LMS and Digital Literacy needs
   
• All the data is in one place, protected with best-in-class security
   
• The platform owners have explicitly stated that they will not use student data to train their LLMs

The latter point is becoming important for schools, as they recognise that student generated work is the intellectual property of the student and there are legal implications if it’s utilised for AI training.  This is particularly problematic in AI Assessment apps for teachers.

2.4       Digital & AI Literacy

We are seeing the continuation of the trend for schools ditching the traditional ICT class and embedding Digital & AI Literacy across the curriculum for all years.  It’s the right move, but a challenge without a comprehensive framework to tie it all together.  Luckily the OECD has just launched its DigComp 3.0 – its ‘Digital Competency Framework for Citizens.’

For us, the DigComp 3.0 currently represents the gold standard in digital competency frameworks.  It is;

• is comprehensive, real world and easily understandable
   
• is well structured with 5 areas of competence, 21 competencies and 4 proficiency levels for each
   
• incredibly well documented with the full 123 page definition document containing competence descriptors for each proficiency level

You may find the infographic below helpful.  It was produced by us using CoPilot’s design tool, and the four page OECD DigComp 3.0 Information Leaflet.

[insert infographic]

OECD DigComp 3.0 Infographic (Source Microsoft CoPilot Create)

In addition, AI is now woven throughout the framework and there is a large amount of training and support available. 

Whilst the DigComp 3.0 framework benefits from being for citizens, the challenge for schools is on how to embed such an extensive framework into their day to day activities.  Our advice is to think local and big picture to begin with.  Work with the school community to understand the ‘must have’ competencies that pupils should possess when moving between school sections and on leaving school.  Then work backwards with the framework as a guide to define what needs to be taught, when and where to achieve these goals.

3        26/27 Guidance

Our 25/26 guidance was that schools focus on three interrelated and self-reinforcing domains;

• Digital & AI Literacy
   
• EdTech Rationalisation
   
• Cyber Security

This guidance remains in force, with the following updates;

• Digital & AI Literacy: Should be considered community wide with special attention paid to the needs of the teachers.  They are at the forefront of the AI incursion into education, and the challenges are broad as this recent Guardian article entitled ‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI’ well illustrates.
   
• EdTech Rationalisation: Last year the focus was on cost saving.  This year, with the aggressive advance of cyber attacks, the focus has moved to data privacy and identification of ‘least risk’ partners
   
• Cyber Security: It remains true that the weakest link in the chain is the unwary user clicking on the wrong link in an email.  And AI is turbocharging phishing campaigns with hyper realistic voice and video image cloning.  KnowBe4’s ‘Phishing Threat Trends Report’ from April 2026 makes for sobering reading.  But schools need to protect themselves, and laser focus on the ‘Safety’ competence area of the DigComp 3.0 framework above will be indispensable.

Unfortunately, this blog post is only able to scratch the surface of the digital challenges that International Schools are currently facing.  Our website contains a library of free resources, including ‘how-to’ videos, templates and interviews.  If you’d like to discuss in more detail, then please reach out to us at hello@edutecalliance.com.