Ed Tranham is founder and editor of The Assignment Report, the UK's longest-running source of M&A intelligence, funding data and market analysis for the UK education sector. His 2025 Company of the Year was IMP Software — bootstrapped since 2019, around 55% market share, £14m revenue, 40% growth, 120% net revenue retention. They sell finance and procurement software. Nothing sexy. Everything essential.

IN THIS EPISODE

·      Why IMP Software won Company of the Year — and what they got right about MAT centralisation that curriculum-content companies keep getting wrong

·      The 80% drop in early-stage EdTech fundraising since the COVID peak — what's behind it and what investors are actually looking for now

·      Why AI is making it harder to raise, not easier — including the investor who pulled out when a junior showed a senior partner how to replicate the product in half a day

·      Why Twinkl is still winning despite AI — a paid Twinkl subscription is cheaper than a paid ChatGPT subscription, and the content is curriculum-aligned in a way a general tool can't match

·      Back office scaling vs. curriculum fragmentation: why MIS, HR, budget planning and procurement are winning, and why the maths-product market is eating itself on price

·      Tech stack due diligence — the new category of investor scrutiny that didn't exist a few years ago, and why integration capability now matters at deal stage

·      The primary-sector case study of a product with 90% renewal — acquired, training removed, fell off a cliff

·      The 'company you wanted to sell to just accelerated past you' trap — why you can grow, and still become too small to be acquired

·      The current acquisition sweet spot — £2–3m revenue businesses, not the £5m ones that used to be the target

·      Sparx Maths and Educake as acquisition examples — and what 'filling a capability gap' actually means when a larger company is doing the buying

·      The disappearance of the local-authority advisor channel — why EdTech sales got harder as LAs shrank, and what MAT centralisation is finally restoring

·      The Education Lead role — why more EdTech companies now need a senior education hire, and why Patrick McGrath is the model Ed points to

·      The three skills every EdTech startup selling into schools needs — sales and marketing, technical, and pedagogy — and which one they keep under-hiring for

·      BETT presence vs. actual business performance: the correlation isn't what you'd guess

·      AI-assisted product development cutting cost to market — and the defensible-moat problem that creates for investors

Episode 9 continues THE INTERROGATORS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk

Catherine Lane is founder of The Influence Crowd, the UK's specialist EdTech PR and content agency. She sits on the PRCA PR and Communications Board and works with clients including Juniper Education, GL Assessment, and SIMS. Her January 2026 guide to UK teacher influencers on TikTok is one of the most read pieces in the space.

IN THIS EPISODE

·      Why the MAT leadership conversation has shifted from 'small-win' products to 'move-the-needle' products — and what that means for how you have to communicate value

·      What IMP Software has done right in how they talk to the sector — and why it's less about the product and more about the helpfulness of the surrounding content

·      The 20–40 touch points problem — why no EdTech sale happens on one channel, and why companies relying on email alone are watching their pipeline flatline

·      The single-channel plateau: why email-only marketing that worked five years ago has flatlined, and why buying another list won't fix it

·      Twinkl's 25% growth as the teacher-first benchmark — and what EdTech brands can learn from it about where influence actually travels in schools

·      TikTok teacher influencers — how to know if it's genuine advocacy or dressed-up advertising, and the contract clauses that stop you paying three times for the same content

·      Why brands need educationists on the team — and the practical alternative of paying former maths leads and classroom teachers for advice during the holidays

·      Facebook's continued role in the sector — why SENCO and primary-teacher groups are still alive even as Twitter and LinkedIn change shape

·      Instagram vs TikTok as content channels — the different registers, and why selling on TikTok kills engagement

·      A mental-health campaign case study that delivered a 275% lift in sales leads for an EdTech client, the Young Minds partnership that made it possible, and why most brands won't touch this territory

·      Why EdTech marketing should learn from B2C on emotion — B2B in education has an emotion vacuum, and the campaigns that push into it are the ones that land

·      The ROI-obsession trap — why measuring every touchpoint against direct sales attribution is the wrong measurement, and what 'engagement, trust, visits' looks like instead

·      The TikTok age demographic that keeps surprising clients — hint, it's not teenagers

·      Why journalism is leading with case studies now, not data summaries — and what EdTech marketers should copy from that shift

·      The Stephen Bartlett spelling-mistakes tactic — and why small human signals are about to matter more, not less, as AI-generated content floods every feed

Episode 8 continues THE INTERROGATORS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk

Laura McInerney is co-founder of Teacher Tapp, the UK's daily teacher survey platform, and one of the most widely-read voices in education journalism and policy. Her team publishes annual reports including 'The Seven Types of Teachers on Social Media' and 'Brands That Rule the World' — both of which are free and both of which EdTech companies should read before writing their next launch plan.

IN THIS EPISODE

·      The school infrastructure reality EdTech companies assume away: 36% of primary teachers and 27% of secondary teachers report very slow internet, and London is among the worst

·      What actually survived COVID — Microsoft Teams is dominant in over 90% of English schools, Loom has essentially disappeared, and voice-note feedback quietly died

·      The monthly brand tracker and annual 'Brands That Rule the World' report — how EdTech companies can actually see where they stand against the competition

·      Jay Ashcroft's two-loss diagnosis — marketing promise mismatch and implementation gap — and why the product usually isn't the broken bit

·      Why teacher scepticism is rational: marketing over-promise, not product function, is what breaks trust

·      The confidence gap — why teachers who report being confident often don't behave that way in the moment, and why practice-practice-practice in the first three months is non-negotiable

·      The implementation gap most EdTech companies don't budget for — pop-up tutorials hit teachers in the middle of a lesson where the real priority is pupil behaviour

·      The 2009 VLE policy overspend — and why the decade of scepticism it created is finally lifting, making now a more positive moment for EdTech than six years ago

·      Why 'saves you time' is a claim teachers have learned to ignore — what they actually do when you give them time back

·      The Ucas-reference example — 3 days becomes 2.5 hours with general AI, and why those one-off specific wins are why teachers reach for ChatGPT rather than your EdTech product

·      Notification overload — why most EdTech products are undoing the time they save by pinging teachers all day, and why Teacher Tapp sends theirs at 3:30pm on purpose

·      The rise of the 'seventh category' teacher — completely off social media — and what that means for every EdTech marketing plan built on LinkedIn and X

·      Why smarmy salesperson tactics lose in education — teachers read people for a living, and can spot it in thirty seconds

·      The lesson-planning cake-mix principle: teachers need to feel involved in planning, even when AI is doing the work

Episode 7 opens THE INTERROGATORS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk

Kristy Evers works at ImpactEd, an organisation built around the principle that procurement decisions in education should be grounded in evidence. She sits at the point where commercial reality meets the demand for genuine accountability.

IN THIS EPISODE

•      What good evidence for EdTech procurement actually looks like — and why so little of it exists

•      How schools make buying decisions in the absence of robust impact data

•      What ImpactEd's work reveals about the gap between claimed and measured outcomes

•      What EdTech suppliers could do to make it easier for schools to buy well

Episode 6 closes THE IMPLEMENTERS block. Episode 7 begins THE INTERROGATORS.

🌐 seventhsibling.co.uk

New episodes every two weeks on Thursdays. Subscribe on your preferred platform so you don't miss the next one.

Patrick (Paddy) McGrath is Director of Education at Everway, the global accessibility-technology company behind Read&Write and a suite of tools used in schools across more than 100 countries. He's spent the last decade arguing that the industry's language — 'SEND', 'assistive', even 'accessibility' — is quietly undermining the thing it's trying to build: genuinely inclusive classrooms.

IN THIS EPISODE

·      Why schools often buy Everway's tools for 25 exam-access students and stop there — and the commercial conversation about extending to the other 1,075

·      RTB (reason to buy) versus RTB (reason to broaden) — what happens when a school names a narrow reason to purchase and then doesn't deploy further

·      Usage versus outcomes: why 20% adoption is research-defined success for some tools, and why that's still a hard conversation with a senior leadership team

·      The cross-platform reality of multi-academy trusts — five devices, three operating systems, one single sign-on, and who's responsible for which gap

·      Why built-in OS accessibility is not inclusion — text-to-speech designed for visual impairment is not the same tool as text-to-speech for dyslexia

·      The bus-kneeling analogy — why accessibility you have to ask for isn't accessibility, and what genuine inclusion looks like by comparison

·      It's never budget, always culture — why inclusion failure is a senior-leadership-team problem that can't be solved by more money

·      Practical redesign without redesign — the Google Docs font change a teacher can make in thirty seconds that transforms a dyslexic pupil's experience

·      How the Everway (formerly Texthelp) rebrand was handled commercially, and what happens to a name-change at global scale when schools still search the old name

·      Paddy's own 'I hated school' story — the tech-labs teacher who let him build anything, the football-on-sports-day kid who didn't fit, and the engagement question nobody thought to measure

·      The Teacher Advisory Panel model — paid teachers on a theory-of-change roadmap, not a marketing focus group

·      The Abington Academy (Cavendish Education) report Everway didn't commission, didn't fund and didn't influence — and why that kind of impartial evidence is worth more than any case study Everway could write itself

·      Measuring something as intangible as a barrier being removed — and why Everway is going through the DfE/Chartered College EdTech Evidence Port rather than writing their own metrics

Episode 5 continues THE IMPLEMENTERS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk

Al Kingsley MBE is CEO of NetSupport — the classroom management, safeguarding and remote-management company that has been building infrastructure for schools since 1989. He chairs multi-academy trusts across several English regions, has chaired alternative provision, sits on the DfE regional schools advisory board and chairs the county SEND board. He's also the author of five books on EdTech and school governance, and was named an EdTech Digest 2026 Global Leader two days before this recording.

IN THIS EPISODE

·      Why NetSupport has deliberately kept AI out of its safeguarding product — the 'whoop whoop' problem and why context beats pattern-matching

·      The three skills every EdTech company selling into schools eventually needs — and why it's usually the third one they under-hire for

·      How a MAT risk register actually reads from the inside: recruitment and retention, reputational damage, cyber security, estate condition — and why none of it is sexy

·      Why classroom tools should be built to be invisible — the toolbar colour-change example for children who won't raise their hand

·      Cognitive offloading: the phrase that now gets dropped into every AI conversation whether it fits or not

·      Selling concepts, not features — the BETT-stand anecdote where more toolbar features won deals but lost the classroom

·      Pitching to a school vs pitching to a MAT — why the messaging has to shift when the buyer is aggregating 20 schools' data rather than one

·      Why the current assessment system is the real problem, not AI — the viva and doctorate comparison, and what project-based and problem-based learning is actually exposing

·      Microsoft and Google in the room when the digital strategy gets written — and why Al is prepared to be blunt about whose interests that serves

·      The British Council session before BETT — North Africa and Middle East school-system leaders running initiatives the UK could learn from

·      Alternative provision, county lines, and why the pupil referral unit had higher engagement online during the pandemic

·      The Year 6–7 transition 'cloud' zone — how one of his secondary schools takes the primary-teacher nurture model seriously for pupils who aren't ready to leave it behind

Episode 4 opens THE IMPLEMENTERS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk

Matt Tiplin is the Education Director of Keys Inclusion Pathways, working at the intersection of technology, inclusion, and specialist educational provision. He has built something in one of the most complex and high-stakes areas of the EdTech market.

IN THIS EPISODE

•      Why inclusion-focused EdTech is a growing commercial opportunity — and a high-risk one if you get it wrong

•      What SEND procurement decisions actually look like from inside a school

•      The difference between building something for inclusion and marketing something as inclusive

•      What Matt wishes more EdTech founders understood before entering this space

Episode 3 closes THE BUILDERS block. Episode 4 begins THE IMPLEMENTERS — the people on the other side of the sales table.

🌐 seventhsibling.co.uk

New episodes every two weeks on Thursdays. Subscribe on your preferred platform so you don't miss the next one

Dr Neelam Parmar is an EdTech consultant, researcher, and author of Digital Parenting. Her work spans multi-academy trust strategy, professional development platforms and teacher-facing AI. She advises groups across the UK and internationally on what genuine scale and impact look like when they're actually achieved together.

IN THIS EPISODE

·      Why 60% teacher engagement is the threshold she uses to judge whether a platform is working — and why anything lower usually means the platform isn't the problem

·      The accountability question in EdTech implementation: why it's never the platform and always a named person (director of education, IT lead), and why so few trusts have one

·      The TPACK model and what happens to it in the age of AI — why content and pedagogy have collapsed into the technology layer, and what teachers now need to become literate in

·      Multimodality as the learning-experience principle for AI tutoring — one-to-one visual, auditory and text interactions at a depth a thirty-child classroom can't offer

·      How working with Alpha Blocks and the first wave of iPad learning shaped her thinking on dyslexia, ADHD and visual pedagogy

·      The Digital Parenting contract she drew up with her own children — and why she wouldn't write a dictatorial book on it

·      Her 'cautious excitement' about AI-led personalised learning, the Sugata Mitra comparison, and the hybrid and fully-AI school models already emerging internationally

·      What happened inside the Department of Education EdTech leadership group during COVID — the gap between independent and state schools, and her frustration about who could deliver online and who couldn't

·      The AI curriculum gap — why the UK is behind China and the Middle East on agentic AI, and her current work building a holistic digital and AI framework for schools

·      Women in EdTech — her counter-intuitive answer that men have backed her career and women have been the first to shut doors

·      Three international markets, two rules: trust and time travel across UAE, Southeast Asia and UK, off-the-shelf products don't

·      The 'three new things a year' rule that separates progressive school leadership from stuck school leadership

·      Why onboarding — not the product — is where most EdTech companies lose the school

Episode 2 opens THE BUILDERS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk

Aatif Hassan is founder, Chair and CEO of Dukes Education and founder of Cavendish Education, the fastest-growing group for children with what Aatif calls 'unique learning profiles'. He sits on boards for charities supported by the King and Queen, including the British Asian Trust. Before founding Dukes he worked in the military, in the City, in banking and in private equity — and none of those careers prepared him for the morning he stood outside a derelict former police dog school in Girton holding the keys and burst into tears at the weight of what he'd taken on.

IN THIS EPISODE

 Why he has never been able to answer the 'is there a number' question on selling Dukes — and what permanent capital allows him to build that fixed-life investors cannot

 The deliberate refusal of the word 'SEND' — why Cavendish uses 'unique learning profiles' and why the language of labels cuts against what the schools are actually trying to do

 The 100% mission at Cavendish — that every child ends up in sustained employment, vocational training or university

 Dyslexia as a superpower — simplicity of thought, and the 'if I can't explain it, nobody else can understand it' principle that shapes how the group is run

 The fifteen-captains-on-the-pitch test — why he believes any of his top team could run the organisation, and how he built toward that

 Why he hired Professor Mark Bailey (former high master of St Paul's), David Goodhue (Latymer) and Libby Nicholas (GDST, MAT CEO) — and what 'positive capitalism' had to demonstrate to win them over

 How Dukes and Cavendish got their names — Cavendish Road, Dukes Meadows in Chiswick, and the letter from the Queen granting permission to use a royal name

 From care homes and vets to education — why the loss of his older son, losing his mother young, and being thrown out of school himself made education the only direction he could go

 The Duke's Diploma and Duke's Plus — an original character-and-virtues curriculum sitting alongside IB and A-level, and the 'cradle to Cambridge' vision for developing the whole child outside the classroom as well as inside it COVID as a near-death moment — paying staff 100% when 80% was the option, the bank negotiations that ran into the small hours, and the 'Hartington School' homeschooling assembly he wrote every night at eight o'clock

 The £114 million Institute of Education investment, Cardiff Sixth Form College (named best in the world by A-level results), and the £100m Cardiff Bay project being built while everyone else is running out of the UK over VAT

 The Portugal expansion — ULIS (United Lisbon International School), British School in Lisbon, Braga and Porto — and how an open-armed welcome broke his 'two-hour rule'

 The world's first ski-in ski-out school in Verbier — European Champions, 250 pupils, 3,000 metres above sea level

 The acquisition that almost broke the company — Cardiff Sixth Form College, taken on at Charities Commission and Welsh Government request with no access to the P&L

Episode 1 opens THE BUILDERS block of Series One — and the entire series.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk