Why Your EdTech Champion Matters More Than Your EdTech

Adam Sturdee
Apr 10
6 min read

A practical guide for school leaders on internal championing, change management, and making technology actually stick.

The research is clear: technology in schools thrives or stalls based on the quality of internal leadership around it. A well-chosen tool with poor change management will underperform a modest tool with excellent local championing.

This is not a comfortable truth for senior leaders who have just signed off a procurement decision. But it is a useful one, because it means the most important variable in your technology investment is not the software. It is the person you put in charge of it.

The gap between purchase and practice

Most schools have experienced this pattern. A platform is chosen carefully, piloted enthusiastically, launched with a briefing in September, and quietly abandoned by February. The technology was never the problem. The rollout was.

Kraft, Blazar and Hogan's 2018 meta-analysis of teacher coaching programmes found that the quality and focus of coaching interactions mattered more than the number of contact hours. The same principle applies to technology adoption. It is not the number of training sessions you run. It is whether someone credible is consistently present, removing friction, answering questions, and modelling use.

That someone is your internal champion.

What makes an effective champion

The right person for this role is not necessarily the most technically confident member of staff. Technical competence helps, but it is secondary to three other qualities.

The first is trust. Staff will not adopt a tool they suspect is being used to monitor them. The champion needs to be someone teachers believe is genuinely on their side. If the tool touches sensitive areas like lesson recordings, coaching feedback, or classroom data, this trust requirement is not optional. It is foundational.

The second is consistency. A champion who introduces a tool in September and disappears until the spring review has already lost the room. Effective championing is a sustained, low-intensity presence: a corridor conversation, a quick message after someone's first upload, a five-minute slot in a department meeting. Regular, not episodic.

The third is credibility. The champion should be using the tool themselves, visibly and without pretence. If a teacher sees their champion genuinely engaging with the platform and talking honestly about what worked and what did not, adoption follows. If the champion is simply relaying instructions from SLT, resistance follows instead.

The trust problem that kills adoption

In my experience, both as a senior leader and as someone building an AI coaching platform for schools, trust is the single biggest predictor of whether technology lands well or badly.

This is especially true when the technology involves anything that could be perceived as surveillance. Lesson recordings, transcript analysis, AI-generated feedback: all of these carry enormous potential for professional growth, but only if teachers believe the data belongs to them and will not be weaponised against them.

The champion's role here is to be explicit about boundaries. What does leadership see? What remains private? Who controls deletion? What happens if something sensitive is captured accidentally? These are not abstract governance questions. They are the questions teachers will ask each other in the staffroom, and if the champion cannot answer them clearly, the technology is finished before it starts.

Union guidance in the UK is helpful here. The NEU model policy and STPCD framework both emphasise that participation in recording-based feedback tools must be voluntary, and that data collected for developmental purposes must not be repurposed for performance management. A good champion knows this and says it plainly.

Five things an effective champion does in the first half-term

Rather than a grand launch, the most successful implementations I have seen follow a quieter pattern.

They start with a small, willing group. Not the whole staff. Not even a whole department. Three or four teachers who are curious, not coerced. Early adopters generate stories. Stories generate interest. Interest generates momentum.

They make the first experience frictionless. If a teacher's first encounter with the platform involves a 45-minute login process, a confusing interface, or a broken upload, you have lost them. The champion's job in week one is to remove every possible barrier between intention and action. Walk people through it. Sit with them. Do the boring bits.

They share their own experience first. Before asking anyone else to try, the champion should have used the tool themselves and be willing to talk about the experience honestly. Not a polished testimonial. A real account: what surprised them, what they found useful, what felt awkward.

They create a visible rhythm. A short standing item in a weekly briefing. A Slack channel or Teams group. A simple tracker of who has tried it and might want support. The goal is gentle visibility, not surveillance of uptake.

They protect the purpose. When other priorities crowd in, when a data drop lands, when Ofsted rumours circulate, the champion quietly maintains the thread. Not by demanding compliance, but by continuing to model use and keeping the conversation alive.

What senior leaders owe their champion

This role cannot be done in a vacuum. If you appoint a champion and then leave them unsupported, you are setting up a single point of failure.

Champions need time. Not a free period once a fortnight, but genuine protected space in their timetable and calendar. If this feels expensive, consider the cost of the platform licence multiplied by the number of staff who never log in. The champion's time is the multiplier that determines whether the investment returns anything at all.

Champions need authority. Not positional power, but the visible backing of the headteacher or the SLT lead for teaching and learning. When staff see that leadership is genuinely committed, and not just delegating downward, the champion's job becomes significantly easier.

Champions need honesty from the provider. If the tool has limitations, the champion should know about them before teachers discover them. Nothing destroys credibility faster than a champion promising something the platform cannot deliver. The best providers are transparent about what works, what does not yet work, and what is coming.

The compound effect

The reason internal championing matters so much is that technology adoption in schools is not a single event. It is a habit. And habits form through repeated, low-friction, positive interactions over time.

This is the same logic that underpins the coaching research. Kraft and colleagues found that coaching works not because of any single conversation, but because of the sustained professional dialogue it creates. The champion is doing the same thing, just for a different purpose: building the conditions in which a tool becomes part of how teachers work, rather than something extra they are asked to do.

When this works well, the compound effect is striking. A small group of early adopters becomes a larger group. Department leads begin referencing the tool in their own conversations. New staff arrive and find it already embedded. The technology stops being an initiative and starts being infrastructure.

When it does not work, the pattern is equally familiar. The tool sits unused. The licence renews out of habit rather than conviction. Leadership quietly writes it off as a failed experiment and moves on to the next thing.

The difference between these two outcomes is rarely the technology. It is almost always the champion.

A checklist for senior leaders

Before your next technology rollout, ask yourself these questions:

Have you identified a champion who is trusted by staff, not just competent with technology?
Does that person have protected time to support adoption in a sustained way?
Have you been explicit with staff about what the tool is for and, equally importantly, what it is not for?
Have you given the champion authority to make small operational decisions without escalating everything to SLT?
Have you asked the provider to brief the champion honestly about limitations as well as strengths?
Is there a plan for the first half-term that prioritises depth with a small group over breadth across the whole staff?

If you can answer yes to all of these, you are giving your investment the best possible chance. If you cannot, the most sophisticated platform in the world will not save you.

Technology does not transform schools. People do. Your champion is the bridge between the two.

Interested in this kind of work?

I work with school leaders on digital strategy, inspection readiness, and AI-augmented leadership practice. If you're thinking about how to build your school's evidential infrastructure — or how to use it more effectively — I'd be glad to talk.

Adam Sturdee is a senior leader and co-founder of Starlight, the UK’s teacher-first AI-powered transcript-based coaching platform for educators. His work sits at the intersection of dialogic practice, instructional leadership and responsible AI strategy for schools and trusts.

He will be presenting his research on AI-supported coaching at the BERA TEAN Conference 2026: https://www.bera.ac.uk/conference/bera-tean-conference-2026