What BETT Taught Me About the EdTech Affordability Gap

I spent a day walking the halls of BETT 2025. Glossy booths. Slick demos. Software that looked like it belonged in a Silicon Valley pitch deck.

And price tags that made my stomach turn.

£1,095 per year for compliance software. £595 for a maths intervention tool. £800+ for assessment platforms that do what a well-designed spreadsheet could manage.

I kept thinking: what small school has that kind of budget?

Not mine. Not most of the primary schools I know.

I Was There as a Customer Too

Here's the thing: I wasn't just at BETT as a curious headteacher. I was actively shopping for a new Management Information System for my own school.

And my two most important questions? How user-friendly is this? And how affordable is it for my school?

Not "how impressive does the demo look?" Not "how many features can you pack into a dashboard?" The reality of running a small primary is that if software isn't intuitive enough for a busy office manager to pick up quickly, it won't get used. And if it costs more than we can justify against everything else competing for the same budget, it doesn't matter how good it is.

I found myself asking vendors: "Yes, but what does this actually cost for a one-form-entry school?" The hesitation before they answered told me everything.

The Pricing Problem

Let me be clear: large schools and secondaries can afford these tools. A secondary with 1,500 pupils and a dedicated IT budget can absorb a £1,000 annual subscription without blinking. A large MAT with centralised procurement can negotiate volume discounts and spread costs across twenty schools.

But that's not the reality for most of UK primary education.

There are roughly 16,500 primary schools in England, and the majority are small. One-form entry. Village schools. Schools watching every penny because their per-pupil funding doesn't stretch to cover the basics, let alone premium software subscriptions.

When a headteacher at a small primary sees "£1,095/year" on a compliance product, we don't think "that's expensive." We think "that's a teaching assistant for a week" or "that's our entire art supplies budget" or "that's the money I was saving for the trip to the wildlife park."

The enterprise vendors at BETT aren't building for us. They're building for secondaries with IT departments and large MATs with procurement teams. Their cost base — the sales teams, the glossy stands, the marketing spend — simply won't allow them to serve a one-form-entry village school in Surrey.

So we're priced out. And we make do.

But Let's Talk About the Genuinely Good Stuff

I don't want to be unfair. There was some genuinely impressive, educationally sound software at BETT — and not all of it was priced out of reach.

White Rose Maths' new Infinity tool looks like a genuine game-changer. It's built by people who understand primary maths pedagogy, and crucially, it's priced at a point where schools can actually consider it. That's the model: educational substance first, commercial reality second.

The National Literacy Trust had a strong presence, championing the National Year of Reading with author A.F. Steadman. This kind of education-focused initiative — bringing authors into schools, raising the profile of reading for pleasure — is exactly what the sector needs. It's not about selling software; it's about improving outcomes.

These are the conversations that matter. Software that serves learning. Organisations that understand schools. Price points that acknowledge reality.

Glossy Sells at BETT. Substance Sells in Schools.

I'll be honest: walking past stand after stand of beautiful interfaces triggered some self-doubt. My own tools don't look like that. They're clean, functional, accessible. But they won't win any design awards.

Then I remembered who I'm actually building for.

Headteachers and SBMs who've been burned before. Who bought the glossy platform that promised the world, cost a fortune, and ended up gathering digital dust because it took 40 minutes to log in and nobody had time for the training.

We don't need spectacle. We need something that works, that staff will actually use, that costs less than a week's supply cover.

There's a difference between "restrained and professional" and "unpolished." But the most important question isn't "does it look impressive?" It's "will this actually help a child learn?"

The Gap Nobody's Filling

The conversation at BETT is dominated by enterprise solutions. AI-powered this. Blockchain-verified that. Adaptive learning engines with machine learning backends.

Meanwhile, English Leads are tracking fluency on paper because they can't afford the digital alternative. SENCOs are managing EHCP reviews in Word documents. SBMs are using Excel templates from 2015 for their compliance tracking because the professional tools are priced for academies with 2,000 pupils.

This isn't a technology problem. It's an access problem.

Small schools deserve professional tools at classroom-friendly prices. The fact that they can't get them isn't a market reality — it's a market failure.

Built by a Head, for Heads

I started building educational tools because I couldn't find what I needed at prices my school could afford.

ReadingFluency.co.uk exists because fluency tracking shouldn't cost more than a day's supply cover. Parchment Pad — my lightweight, free interactive whiteboard tool — exists because teachers shouldn't have to pay hundreds of pounds just to annotate on screen.

This isn't about undercutting competitors. It's about serving a market they've abandoned.

The school that starts with an affordable tool because it's all they can afford becomes the school that trusts you. That recommends you in staffrooms. That tells colleagues at cluster meetings.

The enterprise vendors literally cannot pivot to serve this market, even if they wanted to. Their overheads won't allow it.

Which means the gap is wide open.

What I'm Building

I left BETT more convinced than ever that there's space for practitioner-built, budget-friendly, genuinely useful software in UK primary education.

Not software that impresses in a sales demo. Software that helps teachers teach and children learn.

Not software that requires a training day and an IT consultant. Software that a busy office manager can pick up on a Monday morning and be using effectively by lunch.

Not software priced for MATs. Software priced for the one-form-entry village school that's counting every pound.

If that resonates, I'd love to hear from you. What tools do you need that you simply can't afford? What problems are you solving with workarounds because the professional solutions are out of reach?

The glossy vendors aren't listening. I am.