Dr Neelam Parmar

EdTech Consultant, Researcher & Author of Digital Parenting

“It’s never the platform. It’s always a named person.”

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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.

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 or 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