Al Kingsley has been on every side of the EdTech table: supplier, MAT chair, alternative-provision chair, SEND board chair, BESA EdTech chair. Which means when he tells you why your pitch doesn't land, he isn't guessing.

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

Inclusion is one of the fastest-growing areas of EdTech procurement. Matt Tiplin thinks most of what's being sold into it isn't built for the right reasons.

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.

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Most EdTech conversations about AI default to either excitement or panic. Dr Neelam Parmar does neither. She's spent nearly two decades at the implementation end of the sector — starting her PhD in 2009, just as the iPad arrived — and she knows what moves the needle and what falls off the shelf.

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 was expelled from school. He has dyslexia and ADHD. He now runs one of the largest private education groups in the UK — Dukes Education — with over twenty UK schools, twenty-five international schools across Europe, and a deliberate refusal to use the word 'SEND'. This conversation is about why.

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