A Week in London #bettuk2026 #bett26 Part One Pre Bett OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026

As ever, a very busy week, as the world's clans of educational technologists gather in London in and around BETT.

What was one post has become three posts as each event I attended really worth digging into.

Monday

OECD Digital Education Outlook 2026: Exploring Effective Uses of Generative AI in Education , The Law Society Hall Chancery Lane

The event was to launch the OECD recent research paper. It was good to meet some old chums from the European policy landscape.

It was great too to have an update from the Education Department's Susan Acland-Hood, who was confident and on the ball , reporting on the AI test beds happening in English schools that are all exploring the possible. 

This including a content store, a repository of documents, such as curriculum guidance and anonymized pupil assessments, to train AI models for better educational outputs. 

The key bit of all of this is criticality of developing local models 

"Launched in May 2025 with £3 million in funding, pools and encodes curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work, to train AI tools that generate accurate, high quality educational content. Training on the content store increases accuracy of feedback on students’ work to 92%, up from 67%, meaning safer and more reliable use of AI in the classroom"

She also pointed out the refreshed English standards launched to coincide with BETT week. She also keyed up well the Education ministers speech on day one of BETT. 

Key messages are much more than cautious optimism and much more than a narrow focus on teaching and learning.

There is always a danger that the AI industry like IT industry before sells education fantasies and that is why it is so critical that education takes technology and uses it to build it's own closed models.

Education needs to develop specialist tools to amplify learning. We do need to redesign practice in ways that continues to support teacher agency.

Other work highlighted over day

• The work of Harvard's Bok Centre
• Open AI work around AI Schema to improve reliability of services for education and other areas. Would allow education to customise their own models.
• The emergence of Gemini for Education and Co-Pilot tools that can match and create content against available competency frameworks.

This was a useful paper to take to my second meeting of the week which was more technical about the standards needed to support ethical application of AI.



Pre conference I caught up with Joseph Jones CEO Saige Qualifications an Ofqual approved awarding body in England rolling out AI awards and training for pupils and teachers.

Main takeaways - 

• Education needs to start making more use of AI in a customised way to support learning and operations. 
• At a national level this means system change as well as policy and guidance.  I think we have latter but not former in Scotland.
• At institutional level requires operations , IT , learning technology and whole community to work more effectively together. Start building local agents now.
• As an institution you need that local data store and you need to start making effective use of your data
• For schools in Scotland - local authorities need switched on to this and there is probably a role for Education Scotland but certainly Scottish Education Department in creating something similar to English content store. 

Part Two to follow -