Written by COBIS Supporting Associate, 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.

In our recent COBIS webinar ‘Navigating K12 Digital Turbulence in the AI Era’ we highlighted three inter-related domains (aka ‘The 3 Ps’) that schools should now be focusing on to prepare their communities for the opportunities that Generative AI is bringing, whilst avoiding the inevitable disruption. The domains are:

• Prepare: Instilling Digital and AI Literacy into the whole school community
• Protect: Improving Cyber Security protection measures - especially around training and awareness
• Pare-back: Reducing the school’s digital footprint to save costs, increase efficiency and minimise its ‘cyber-attack surface area’

We emphasised that addressing the three domains in parallel is recommended and should be overall cost neutral. The savings from ‘Pare-back’ activity can be used to fund Prepare & Protect. Digital expenditure reduction of 10% should be easily achievable, translating into ±$100k / year for larger international schools.

If you haven’t already - please do watch the webinar on the link above. One attendee described it as “perhaps one of the best webinars I have attended in recent times”. Since the broadcast we have been inundated with questions on how to go about implementing the recommendations - especially in the ‘Pare-Back’ domain. The questions tend to fall into three distinct categories, which this blog will address:

• How to go about digital footprint reduction?
• What to do about spiralling edtech related staffing costs?
• How to accommodate AI?

This article will address each of these questions. Our advice is predicated on several tenets, derived from our research and practical experience:

• There is still no proven causal link between edtech usage/expenditure and educational outcomes. In fact, like salt in a meal, too much can easily ruin things. We see a growing trend for reducing student exposure to technology with examples including the return to books in Scandinavia and the recent research that excessive screen time is seriously damaging the vocabulary development of the under 5s
   
• A positive flywheel effect emerges when Paring-Back. The slimmed-down digital footprint lowers expenditure on licensing and hardware, whilst also reducing the demand for IT support. In addition, the school community becomes more productive as choice/uncertainty is removed and focused training and PD takes place. Importantly, each component removed contributes to reducing the risk of data leakage and cyber-attack.
   
• The role of GenAI in education is still not clear. Despite a lot of noise from big tech, the research results are currently conflicted. Some studies show the potential for individualised learning, whilst others show clear signs of cognitive-offloading and skills attrition in both teachers and students. The OECD’s Skills and Education Directorate published their ‘Digital Education Outlook 2026: Exploring Effective Uses of Generative AI in Education’ on 19 January 26 and it is an excellent summary of where we currently stand. The 300 page Report provides strong research based analysis, and the launch Webinar (YouTube) gives a good overview.

Paring-Back

Q1: How To Go About Digital Footprint Reduction?

Digital Footprint is the collective term for all things digital in your school; hardware, software, licenses, services. Over the last decade, most schools have only added components without pruning and now the footprint is starting to resemble a midden, with 100-200 live components being commonplace. This is excessive for any small business, let alone a school on a limited budget.

Commonly encountered issues are:

• Multiple applications performing the same or overlapping functions. This is especially prevalent in school-divisions where middle school may be on different platforms to primary and high school - causing transition issues for students and teachers as well as unnecessary incremental expenses.
   
• Unused products where licenses continue to be paid. Normally caused by a lack of communication between the Administrative and Educational functions - where an recurring invoice is paid without question, or a credit card ‘auto renew’ is not flagged.
   
• Outdated supplier contracts that have never been renegotiated and are overpriced in today’s market. An annual review of high-value contracts against current industry benchmarks is a must.

Our advice is to start by creating an inventory of all your digital components along with their contractual and financial attributes. Next analyse them functionally to understand where you have gaps and overlaps, and document in detail which data interfaces are in place. It may help to populate our generic functional edtech schema for K12 schools, which is shown below and available for download on the ‘Approach’ page of our website here. You can use the schema to talk to your community about what it being used (and what is not) as well as where the issues lie. From here it will be possible to identify the components that can be tagged for removal and where the remainder need to be finessed for maximum performance.

EduTec Alliance Functional Edtech Schema for K12 Schools – Generic and Populated

Q2: What To Do About Spiralling Digital-Related Staffing Costs

Staffing represents the main digital-related operational expenditure for most international schools. A typical organisational structure is:

• An IT Director: responsible for strategic direction and purchasing/vendor relations
• An IT Manager: responsible for day to day operations
• 4-5 IT support staff: supporting day to day operations and ticket resolution - often one per school division and one for the Administrative functions
• A Head of Digital Learning and various ‘edtech leads’ in the school divisions

Paring-back the school’s digital footprint reduces the support demand on the IT staff, as well as providing focus to the training and professional development activity across the whole school community. This results in both better performance of the remaining edtech stack and opportunities to reduce support headcount.

In our experience, the IT department’s role in international K12 schools is primarily operational. The skills/experience required to develop and execute strategically are hard to find and retain in today’s competitive marketplace. Organisations such as MSP LAB (a COBIS Supporting Associate) offer ‘Virtual IT Director’ services which can represent a cost-effective alternative to a full time in-house position and draw from experience across a wide range of schools and solutions.

Q3: How To Accommodate AI?

There is no doubt that Generative AI is here to stay, in education and society at large. However, the industry is still fast evolving and economically challenged. All business sectors are attempting to identify practical use cases with long term benefits, and precious few are being identified in education. Our guidance is that schools remain in pilot / test mode and take advantage of the rapidly increasing portfolio of tools included in their productivity platforms (Microsoft / Google) rather than contracting with a 3^rd Party AI platform. The rationale for this is:

• Cost: AI features are included in most plans
• Data security: school information not used for model training and school is not adding to its ‘cyber-attack surface area’
• Training: Easier to train on existing platform and embed in current school workflows
• Supplier Confidence: Less likelihood that Google / Microsoft will encounter financial and operational difficulties than new VC backed start-ups.

We hope you’ve found this blog useful, and please look out for our next COBIS Blog ‘Digital Outlook for International Schools 26/27’ in June. Our website contains a large library of free resources, including ‘how-to’ videos, templates and interviews. If you’d like to discuss any of the topics covered above with us, then please reach out to us at hello@edutecalliance.com.