Page 6 - Winter 2025

• 32,000 schools and 165 higher education
Students were shown an image of Canadian soldiers
in a trench in 1918, the details of which the students
were challenged to identify. The subsequent
generation of ideas was penned onto a screen.
Technology was clearly used as a lesson enhancer
with One Note being notably totally searchable with
video and audio resources fully accessible. This
helps students working at home as well as in class,
providing a real benefit to those with additional
needs. Students can adapt information “on the fly”
rather than requiring the teacher to enlarge text, for
example.
A knowledge organiser is used to annotate text from
a textbook page in One Note and all students carry
headphones so that they can access information
and link with One Note. Mentimeter is used to rank
issues raised by students about the lesson, such as
those most likely to be of concern to those involved in
trench warfare, such as constant shelling and ‘trench
foot’.
It was concluded that EdTech assists collaboration,
reducing the need for photocopying and chasing
issues. When asked about how these devices helped
with learning, the student response was that it made
learning “much more interesting”. When asked if
he would recommend One Note, another student
replied by saying that it was good for looking back at
revision and helped with spelling and grammar.
Questions from the audience followed, including one
that raised the issue of the amount of work involved
in learning to use the technology. In reply Ms. Fletcher
emphasised that it was “not about doing everything
all at once” and went on to explain how ‘digital
leaders’ had been trained to help their peers in this
regard.
Department for Business and
Trade champions British EdTech
The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has
published its own guide to Bett 2025 in which it
presents the following statistics to illustrate why the
UK is a large market for EdTech:
6 7
without relying on facial recognition. It supports The approach works exceptionally well for
institutions
• UK schools spend more than £900 million a year
on edtech with an average edtech budget of
£80,000 per school
• Over 70 per cent of children in British schools
use laptops and tablets
• The UK is Europe’s largest tech market with an
average of 7 per cent year-on-year growth and
a startup/scaleup ecosystem that is valued at
3459 billion
• Since the pandemic UK businesses have
brought forward the planned digitisation of their
operations by an average of three to four years
• One in four of Europe’s edtech startups is based
in the UK
• Since operations began in 2004 the UK
Government’s flagship Global Entrepreneur
Programme has successfully attracted over
1,100 high-potential tech entrepreneure and
their IP-rich businesses
With this backdrop the DBT headed a line-up of
eighteen exhibitors at the UK Pavilion, beginning with
Manchester-based Certify Assessment Solutions, who
specialise in innovative and secure assessment and
invigilation solutions, including SmarTest Examiner:
“SmarTest Examiner streamlines the entire
assessment lifecycle, enabling organisations to
author exams, deliver online assessments, and
automate scoring and reporting.
SmarTest Invigilate offers robust AI-assisted
invigilation with advanced features such as eye-
tracking technology, to uphold exams integrity
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multiple modalities, including live invigilation and individuals who are reclined in their chairs or laying
record-and-review, while providing additional tools supine in beds, as staff can see improvements in
for improved monitoring. visual tracking and attention.
Completing the suite is SmarTest Nexus, a Now, we have a stable baseline to assess
comprehensive candidate management and test visual needs and determine preferences with
centre management system. It simplifies key areas
such as payment processing, registration, voucher
generation, eligibility checks, venue coordination,
test-day logistics and remote invigilation”
Elsewhere is Classoos, a single platform for accessing
online (digital) textbooks:
“Classoos enables textbooks to come to life;
teachers and students can create overlays which
include supplementary content including external
links (pictures, audio, video) as well as notes and
bookmarks”.
Pupil Progress has a mission to transform how schools
use data with a platform that provides exam-board-
specific live tracking tools that simplify student
progress at subject, topic and skill levels:
‘ Our intuitive system centralises performance data
into a single point of truth, giving educators clarity
and confidence. Teachers save time with pre-built,
live trackers that calculate grades exactly as exam
boards do, enabling quick, actionable insights for
lesson planning, curriculum refinement and parental
communication’.
Also featured is Venture Simulations Limited, Winner of
the ‘Education and EdTech’ category in the Made in the the convenience of being able to change
UK, Sold to the World Awards 2024. backgrounds, images, animations, high contrast
visual tracking effects and more at any time.
This also means we can maximise meaningful
Introducing the Magic Room engagements for pupils as soon as they are ready
to engage”.
Exhibitors Sensory Guru are specialists in creating
immersive learning environments and at Bett 2025
they showcased the Magic Room, a system that allows The Future Forest Experience
students to use various assistive technologies and
Avantis Education and Rainforest UK have joined
augmentative and alternative communication devices
together to produce a new Future Forest Experience that
such as iPads, tablets, switches, speech, breath and eye
was revealed for the first time at Bett 2025.
gaze to interact with learning materials.
Using resources from Eduverse+, the new Future
The Magic Room has notably been implemented at
Forest Experience takes visitors on a journey that
Charlton Park Academy in London in 32 classrooms
shows the beauty of planet Earth, the dangers it is
so as to create immersive learning environments
facing and the consequences of doing nothing.
that cater for the diverse needs of pupils with
profound and multiple learning difficulties, severe A free education pack has been produced which can
learning difficulties, autism spectrum conditions and be taken into schools to enable the experience to be
cerebral visual impairment (a disorder that notably shared with other students and colleagues.
affects the brain’s vision processing areas such that
multisensory inputs become even more crucial).
Karen Panter, a PMLD teacher at Charlton Park
Academy, states:
“ Sensory Guru created a projection unit for our
pupils that can display images onto walls or
ceilings, allowing visuals to be projected onto any
surface. This has been a game-changer for our
pupils.
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