Promethean recently published their third annual report in their “The State of Technology in Education Report” series. Over 1800 educators across the UK and Ireland (both Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland) replied to the invitation sent out by Promethean to school Leaders, Senior Leadership Team, Senior Management Team, Classroom
Teachers, IT Managers and Bursars. Classroom Teachers who responded taught all age groups from under 6 years to 15 years and older. Nearly half of those classroom teachers who responded taught 12 to 15 year olds as can be seen in this table. It is also interesting to note that the majority of classroom teachers responding (72%) were not part of a senior leadership team (SLM) or a senior management team (SLM).The percentage of respondents teaching under 6 year olds was very low at 4%.
Promethean, this year again examined Schools’ Strategic Goals. In 2017 they found that all school leaders stated that their school had a clear vision of the strategy in place for technology in their school whereas almost half of the teaching staff were unaware of it. In 2018, this gap had reduced from just over 50% to about 25%. This was encouraging as it would appear that school leaders and teachers are collaborating more closely on the vision for their schools.
A new feature introduced to this years survey was that they gathered the opinions of all school employees surveyed on workload and wellbeing. The majority responding (62%) believe that teachers’ workload is contributing towards high levels of stress in schools, of this 62%, 83% were teachers. In addition 32% believe their workload is having a negative impact on pupils’ learning. When it comes to recruitment and retention of staff, we can see from the chart below that over 30% believed that staff retention was already a challenge in their schools and over 40% believed that recruiting new staff was a challenge for their schools.
It also is not surprising that in this year’s survey, opinions on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) were gathered. The General Data Protection Regulation is a new set of regulations for controlling and processing personal information, introduced by the European Union in the last 12 months. 28% responded that they were not clear on what GDPR is and nearly a half (45%) were unsure on whether it will have a positive impact on education or not.
To access the full report, one must sign up and register an account in order to download the report here