Should a school run a school platform pilot?

When is a pilot worth running, and when is a demo enough?

A school should pilot a school platform when the claims that decide the purchase can only be checked in use: the time one daily task takes with real records, how support answers in week one, whether staff are still using it in week six. Where the contract is small, short and touches one person, a demo and a reference call may be enough.

A thing built to be shown may be thinner than a thing built to be used. The UK government's Service Manual page on making prototypes states that “The code in a prototype does not need to meet the same standards as production code. For example, it does not need to be secure or to perform well with large volumes of traffic.” That page is for UK government service teams, not school software, but it names the gap a pilot closes. Telling the two apart in the room is covered in the concept screen or real feature guide.

Treat a pilot as evidence a school produces for itself before it signs. For the United States, UNESCO's 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report records “an average of 67% of education software licences were unused and 98% were not used intensively”. That is about American schools and says nothing about any one vendor.

This is the pilot that decides whether to buy — not the questions to ask in the vendor-led demo before it, nor the limited pilot inside a rollout after it (onboarding checklist). The wider process is in the platform evaluation guide; the terms are in the glossary.

Which slice of the school should the pilot cover?

Pick the narrowest slice that still produces real work: two or three classes, one subject, or one year group. Include every role that would touch the platform daily — a parent, an administrator and whoever looks after the school's systems. A slice with no parent in it leaves the handover from school to home untested.

Small and repeated beats big and once. Table 2 of the Education Endowment Foundation's guidance report Putting Evidence to Work: A School's Guide to Implementation — headed “Examples of implementation strategies, adapted from the ERIC framework” — lists “Conduct small scale pilots of change”: “Implement changes in a cyclical fashion using small tests of change before system-wide implementation.” It is guidance to schools in England, not advice on buying software.

Then settle the six decisions below, naming people rather than departments. The roles are in the school role map; whether one platform or several should carry them is weighed in the integrated platform or separate apps guide.

How long should a school platform pilot last?

Long enough for the task under test to be done many times over, and short enough to stop. One full teaching cycle gives a register taken dozens of times and one full round of results entry, which a two-week trial cannot. Results entry is the rarer event, and the same Making data work report sees “no reason why a school should have more than two or three attainment data collection points a year” — so pick a cycle that contains one. Set the end date so the result arrives before next year's budget is fixed.

What should a school agree in writing before the pilot's first day?

Settle six things in writing first: when the pilot stops, what it costs and what the platform costs afterwards, who holds the records entered during it, what happens to those records if the school does not proceed, how support is reached meanwhile, and who signs. Put the stop date in writing, so the pilot ends by decision rather than by default.

Put these in the pilot note, in this order

1. End date, and what happens on it. Does access stop, continue, or convert?
2. The price now, the price after, and the roll-out costs — data migration, training and ongoing support, each priced separately from the licence. Ask what the price is counted on (per student, per teacher, per class or per school), the minimum term, and what a longer commitment changes.
3. Who holds the records, and where. Ask about this pilot, not about policy in general.
4. Export and deletion if the school walks away. Ask for the format and the timescale, not a reassurance — wording in the data ownership guide.
5. Support during the pilot. How it is reached, in which hours, and how quickly it answers.
6. Who does the setup and the training. If the vendor's staff do both, the pilot measures them, not the school; ask for your own people to be trained and to do the work.
7. Whether the pilot runs on the system the school would buy, or a separate demonstration copy. The answer changes what the pilot proves.

Where real student records go in, treat the pilot as live use. The legal floor under a pilot is thinner than most buyers assume: UNESCO's 2023 report finds that “Only 16% of countries explicitly guarantee data privacy in education by law”. Malaysia's Personal Data Protection Act 2010 (Act 709) is, in the 2022 reprint published by the Personal Data Protection Department, “An Act to regulate the processing of personal data in commercial transactions”, and section 3(1) states that it “shall not apply to the Federal Government and State Governments”. Whether and how it reaches a particular school is for that school's own adviser; a pilot suspends nothing that does apply. Vendor questions: the PDPA privacy guide.

What should a school platform pilot measure?

Write four measures down before the first login: how long one daily task takes, how many records had to be corrected afterwards, how many pilot staff were still using the platform in the final week, and how long support took to answer. Keep it to four numbers a teacher can produce in two minutes, and do not run a survey instead.

Record the same four numbers for the same task in the two weeks before day one, and fix a mid-point date to look at them: without that baseline the pilot's numbers compare with nothing. Plan the training alongside the measures. Digital Promise's EdTech Procurement Framework puts both in one phase, “Design & Plan”: “Collaborate with your educators and school leaders to build a professional learning and measurement plan to monitor implementation fidelity and to evaluate impact for your targeted teaching and learning goals.” Digital Promise is a United States non-profit writing for American district leaders.

Keep the pilot from becoming a second data-entry job. The UK Department for Education's report Making data work, from the Teacher Workload Advisory Group chaired by Professor Becky Allen and published in November 2018, advises leaders to “minimise or eliminate the number of pieces of information teachers are expected to compile”, and records that the Workload Challenge (2014) found 56% of respondents citing tasks around “recording, inputting, monitoring and analysing data” as burdensome. So where a whole-school function such as attendance must run twice during a pilot, hold that parallel period to the pilot classes and to a few weeks — the problem the duplicate record entry guide deals with.

Write the four numbers and the two dates into the pilot note, so the result can be checked after the pilot has ended. Evidence a school gathers itself is worth having: UNESCO's 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report notes that “A survey of teachers and administrators in 17 US states showed that only 11% requested peer-reviewed evidence prior to adoption.”

How should a school decide at the end of a pilot?

Set the decision rule before the pilot starts: which results mean buy, which mean stop, who signs, and by what date. Then hold one session with the pilot users and the numbers in front of everyone, and record the decision and its reasons where the next person will find them.

Write the rule for the middle case too: the numbers moved but not far enough, or the teachers adopted it and the office did not. Decide in advance what a mixed result buys — a second cycle with a named thing to fix, the same pilot in another year group, or a stop — and name the one number that would have to move for a second cycle to be worth running.

A yes is the start of the work. The Education Endowment Foundation's guidance report, written by Professor Jonathan Sharples and colleagues (second edition, December 2019), puts first among its recommendations: “Treat implementation as a process, not an event; plan and execute it in stages.” Digital Promise puts the same thing at the end of its own process, as “Sustain & Scale”: “Share the pilot results with critical partners … to collaboratively develop a comprehensive plan for expanded and/or long-term use of successful tools.” If you are working from an older write-up, note that what many still call the eight-step EdTech Pilot Framework is now published as a six-phase procurement framework. After a yes, go on to the onboarding checklist.

What can a pilot not tell a school?

A pilot cannot tell a school how long the product will stay as the pilot found it, what a full roll-out will cost, or how support behaves once the school is no longer a prospect. One teaching cycle is too short to see any of the three. UNESCO's 2023 report observes that “Education technology products change every 36 months, on average.” So close the pilot with the questions it cannot answer: what the school commits to at renewal, what the price does with every class on it, and how it would get its records out if the answer becomes no.