Technology is playing an increasingly important role within trust strategy. CST’s 2026 National School Trust Report survey of chief executives found that around a third of trusts identified digital strategy among their top five strategic priorities.¹ Technology, data and IT infrastructure ranked first among operational priorities at 66%,² while 33% identified the use of technology to support learning as an area of focus within quality of education.³
The Schools White Paper reinforces that direction, setting out an ambition to “harness the power of technology” to improve outcomes, particularly for the most disadvantaged, while saving teachers time and protecting the “human interaction that is so essential to teaching.”⁴
In the foreword to the EEF’s Using Digital Technology to Improve Learning guidance report, Sir Kevan Collins wrote: “The question is no longer whether technology should have a place in the classroom, but how technology can most effectively be integrated in ways which achieve improved outcomes for young people.”⁵
That distinction remains just as relevant today. The question is not simply whether technology features within trust strategy, but how it is implemented in a way that strengthens teaching and contributes to wider school improvement.
Pedagogy before technology
Technology does not change what is known about how people learn. Effective instruction, modelling, practice, feedback and assessment remain important whether technology is used or not.
Technology can support teachers to put those principles into practice, remove barriers and improve consistency. This is where PedTech provides a useful lens: the purposeful connection of pedagogy and technology, with pedagogy coming first.
Digital implementation can too easily begin with the technology and then look for ways to use it. A more useful starting point is the educational priority. What needs to improve? What does the evidence tell us effective practice looks like? What barriers are preventing that practice from happening consistently? Only then should we ask where technology can strengthen or enable that practice.
Connecting the priorities
The theme of this year’s CST Annual Conference, Connecting, provides an opportunity to take this further. Identifying the use of technology to support learning as a priority is an important step, but it can still position technology as a separate strand.
The greater opportunity is to connect technology to the priorities already shaping school improvement. Inclusion and SEND, assessment, teaching quality, teacher expertise and oracy all contribute towards the wider goal of improving outcomes and narrowing the attainment gap.
For inclusion and SEND, technology can help remove barriers to accessing learning or demonstrating understanding. Within assessment, it can make pupils’ thinking more visible and help teachers identify misconceptions earlier. For teaching quality, it can support evidence-informed practices such as live modelling, worked examples and recording the thinking aloud process.
One purposeful use can connect several priorities. A pupil recording a verbal explanation may remove a barrier created by writing, support oracy and provide formative assessment evidence simultaneously.
Moving from adoption to impact
Trusts are beginning to move beyond measuring adoption and towards quantifying the impact of PedTech across their trusts.
Inspiring Futures through Learning (IFtL), a multi-academy trust serving more than 8,500 pupils across 20 schools, reported in its 2026 Impact on Learning, Impact on Futures study an 8% rise in pupils achieving age-related expectations in reading, writing and maths.⁶ 98% of teachers reported a significant positive impact on the quality of their teaching,⁷ while digital workflows created approximately 23% additional capacity for learning time by reducing classroom “slippage time”.⁸
These findings should not be read as technology alone driving improvement. Their significance is in showing what can happen when technology is connected to pedagogy, inclusion and trust priorities.
Supporting trust-wide implementation
At Sync, this means supporting trusts to develop and implement trust-wide initiatives grounded in evidence-informed PedTech, strengthened by operational excellence and backed by the technical expertise needed to make implementation sustainable at scale. The focus is on aligning strategy, professional learning, operations and technical delivery around clear educational priorities.
Three questions provide a useful starting point: What are we trying to improve? What does the evidence tell us about how to improve it? Where can technology genuinely strengthen that practice?
When those questions come first, technology stops being a bolt-on. It becomes one of the vehicles through which trusts can strengthen teaching, remove barriers and improve outcomes for all pupils.
- Richard Anderton is Head of Education at Sync. Sync is the headline sponsor for CST Annual Conference 2026.
We welcome perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
¹’²’³ Confederation of Schools & Trusts - CST National School Trust Report (2026)
⁴ Department for Education - Schools Whitepaper (2026)
⁵ Education Endowment Foundation - Using Digital Technology to Improve Learning (2019)
⁶’⁷’⁸ Inspiring Futures through Learning - Impact on Learning, Impact on Futures Study (2026)
