Episode 7: Laura McInerney | THE INTERROGATORS

Teacher Tapp asks around 10,000 teachers a day what's actually happening in their classrooms. Including Christmas Day, when they also discovered that 23% of people put cauliflower cheese on their Christmas dinner. Laura McInerney is here to talk about what the data actually shows about EdTech — and most of it isn't comfortable reading.

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