Martin Hoszowski: Redesigning British Education for a Digital Age

Martin Hoszowski

Technology is advancing faster than education can adapt. While policymakers in Westminster debate curriculum hours and grading scales, a quiet digital revolution is reshaping Europe’s classrooms. From Helsinki to Tallinn, schools across the continent are building systems fit for the century we live in: digitally fluent, inclusive, and adaptable.

The question is not whether Britain can match these reforms, but whether it dares to do so.

A SYSTEM AT A CROSSROADS

Picture a secondary school in northern England. The connection flickers, the cloud tools buffer, and the Year 10 teacher, who spent the weekend preparing an interactive lesson, reverts to a printed worksheet. The problem isn’t a lack of enthusiasm; it’s a lack of infrastructure.

For years, ‘Digital Britain’ promised to deliver a ‘Universal Service’ – broadband access for everyone, everywhere. Yet, by late 2023, Ofcom reported that gigabit-capable networks reached most UK premises, but real-world performance remained uneven. Median broadband speeds of approximately 85 Mbps still lagged behind those of key European peers such as the Netherlands (approximately 178 Mbps), Portugal (approximately 150 Mbps) and Poland (approximately 133 Mbps).

When classrooms depend on fragile connections, innovation becomes a risk, not an opportunity.

If we fix education with the same delivery model that left our broadband patchy and inconsistent, not much will change.

‘We have a 21st-century ambition constrained by 20th-century infrastructure and a 19th-century obsession with terminal exams.’

THE GRAVITY OF ASSESSMENT  

Every British headteacher understands the phrase ‘assessment gravity’, the unseen pull of GCSEs that shapes every decision in the system.

Timetables, curriculum choices, and even well-being policies orbit around a handful of high-stakes papers taken at sixteen. It is a model that rewards discipline but punishes risk.

Across Europe, the centre of gravity is shifting.

In Ireland, the Junior Cycle Profile of Achievement complements final exams with Classroom-Based Assessments and an Assessment Task worth ten per cent of the exam grade (in subjects such as history), which recognises progress over time as well as exam performance.

In Portugal, university application scores typically combine national exam results with overall school grades, often in a 50:50 ratio, rewarding both consistency and exam success.

In Estonia, teacher autonomy is closely tied to national trust, as digital portfolios, moderated projects, and cross-disciplinary tasks have become integral to the mainstream educational approach.

None of these systems is perfect, but all distribute risk more fairly. They measure learning as a journey, not an event.

INCLUSION BY DESIGN, NOT ADJUSTMENT

A system’s quality is revealed by how it treats its most vulnerable learners. Britain’s Equality Act rightly protects students with disabilities through ‘reasonable adjustments’. Yet it remains that reactive support arrives only when requested.

Across the European Union, the principle is different.

The European Accessibility Act (Directive 2019/882), which comes fully into force in June 2025, sets binding accessibility requirements for many digital products and services, including e-books and learning platforms. Through public-sector procurement standards, such as EN 301 549, it also applies to the learning platforms used in schools. Captioning, contrast tools, and screen-reader compatibility become defaults rather than add-ons.

This isn’t bureaucracy; it’s strategy. A captioned video helps a deaf student, a child learning English, and a pupil revising on a noisy bus. Universal design improves the experience for everyone.

‘The philosophical gap is clear: reasonable adjustments treat inclusion as a compliance task; accessibility-by-design treats it as innovation.’

TECHNOLOGY, TRUST AND THE PACE OF CHANGE

The UK has the ambition to be an edtech superpower, but ambition without delivery is noise.

Estonia offers a counterpoint: a nation that treats connectivity as public infrastructure, incorporates digital literacy into teacher training and remains steadfast in its long-term plan. Its latest ‘AI Leap’ programme trains educators to use adaptive learning tools, not fear them.

Europe’s strategic advantage is also financial – coordinated, multi-year investments, such as the European Social Fund+, create stable environments for innovation. This stability enables schools, governments, and technology partners to collaborate towards shared outcomes rather than focusing on short-term funding cycles.

In Poland, for example, the government’s long-term digital-competence strategy spans the entire education system, from early years to adult learning. By combining EU frameworks with national reform, countries such as Poland and Lithuania are showing how smaller systems can move quickly and decisively.

Contrast that with the British pattern of short pilots followed by headlines and retreat – bursts of innovation that rarely survive beyond the news cycle.

Our challenge is not capacity but continuity. True transformation doesn’t come from another round of strategies; it comes from setting clear service standards and meeting them relentlessly, just as we once built railways, telephones and the NHS.

WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE

If we want classrooms that match our rhetoric, reform must move from declarations to disciplined experimentation. Major reforms make headlines, but small, well-designed pilots change systems. Another review or ministerial plan will not decide the future of British education; it will be built by schools trusted to test, adapt, and share what works.

Change should begin where it is safest to innovate within Educational Zones – regional clusters of primary and secondary schools supported to trial flexible timetables, blended assessment, and digital-first teaching without fear of punitive inspection. Evidence from pilot regions in Finland, Portugal, and Scotland indicates that autonomy, when combined with accountability, fosters sustained improvement in pupil outcomes and staff confidence.

Yet freedom must be matched by reliability. Connectivity should be treated as essential infrastructure, not an optional upgrade. Every school should have a measurable digital baseline with symmetrical upload and download speeds, low latency, rapid repair times, and transparent service reporting. According to Ofcom (2023) and the Department for Education’s Technology in Schools Survey (2022-23), over half of UK primary school leaders and nearly half of secondary leaders cite unreliable Wi-Fi or broadband as a significant barrier to digital learning. When connections fail, continuity of learning is disrupted, and innovation stalls before it can begin.

Assessment, too, requires recalibration. GCSEs should remain rigorous but not monolithic. A modest share of marks, perhaps ten to fifteen per cent, could reward moderated project work or sustained enquiry, similar to Ireland’s Junior Cycle and aspects of Portugal’s continuous assessment. This would recognise the skills modern workplaces value most: collaboration, research, creativity, and critical thinking.

Teachers must also be given the time to adapt and grow. A national entitlement of around thirty hours per year for professional development in digital pedagogy and inclusive practice, similar to the CPD frameworks in Estonia and the Netherlands, would have a greater impact on long-term capacity than another short-term initiative. Investment in teachers is the single most effective investment in reform.

Across much of Europe, targeted public funding tied to measurable outcomes has helped drive educational innovation while maintaining a focus on equity and social justice. Where policy, funding, and purpose are aligned from Brussels’ strategic frameworks to national initiatives in Finland and Poland, progress tends to be steady and sustainable. It is a model of strategic patience that Britain could study with interest, particularly as the UK no longer benefits from EU structural funds that once co-financed digital infrastructure and skills projects in schools.

Procurement must also evolve. Schools should not adopt technology because it is new, but because it demonstrably improves accessibility, interoperability, and learning outcomes. Public spending should drive the adoption of open standards and inclusive design, rather than vendor lock-in or fleeting trends.

Ultimately, inclusion must become a structural, not situational, reality. The often-overlooked sectors, including SEND provision, alternative education, small rural schools, and hospital-home learners, require ring-fenced funding for compliant devices, reliable connectivity, and accessible digital content. When those at the margins are fully included, the entire system benefits.

None of this is radical; it is pragmatic. But sustained pragmatism, applied consistently, is what turns ambition into progress.

LEADERSHIP THAT DELIVERS

Change in education rarely begins with policy papers. It starts when people build, test, and prove what works, one lesson, one teacher, one connected classroom at a time. Progress comes from doing the small things brilliantly: maintaining consistent connectivity, providing fair assessments, and designing solutions that include everyone.

Britain already has the ingenuity, the teachers, and the will. What it needs now is the discipline to turn vision into measurable outcomes. But ingenuity alone will not solve the challenge ahead. We cannot grow teachers on trees, and even if we could, adding more people to a system running on outdated tools would not solve the problem. A hospital cannot deliver twenty-first-century care with Victorian-era equipment; education, too, needs modern tools, data, and applications that enable teachers to perform at their full potential. True progress lies in giving educators the tools, training, and confidence to work with intelligent systems, not against them. In an era shaped by generative AI, knowledge alone is no longer enough; the essential skill is discernment – the ability to distinguish fact from fabrication and truth from noise.

At 21C, we have seen what’s possible when innovation and inclusion align. Working with schools and governments across the UK and Europe to turn these principles into practice, our work, from adaptive teaching tools to fully localised, SEND-ready content, is founded on a single belief: that technology should not divide education, but democratise it.

It’s often said that some things will never change. But they can when we decide to change the work, not just the language.

The next chapter of British education will be written not in strategy papers, but in classrooms where technology empowers rather than distracts; where reliable internet access and equal opportunity mean every pupil can participate.

Our challenge isn’t that young people misuse technology, but that we fear it – and, in doing so, fail to teach it. Too often, we try to ban what we don’t understand, as though the answer to the future were to turn off the light because electricity can be dangerous. But progress has never come from fear. The task before us is to teach wisdom, not avoidance: to guide young people in using technology creatively, critically, and responsibly.

For me, that starts with reflection. I’ve learned that meaningful change in education begins when leaders continue to learn, a belief reinforced by my work and ongoing study through initiatives such as ‘Teaching with Purpose’, powered by Harvard Business Impact. Growth, after all, is the first act of leadership.

That is what a digital-first nation looks like: one that treats technology not as a threat to control, but as a language to master.

‘When education stops being an argument and starts being a strategy – the results can be astonishing.’

It’s time to move from potential to purpose – and this time, to mean it.

Martin Hoszowski is the CEO of 21C, a UK-based company that develops AI-powered teaching and learning platforms for schools in the UK and Europe. Learn more at www.21c.digital.