Episode 07 · The Interrogators

30 July 2026

Laura McInerney

Co-founder, Teacher Tapp

“Teacher Tapp surveys around 10,000 teachers a day. Laura McInerney knows what the data says about EdTech. Most of it isn’t comfortable reading.”

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Laura McInerney is co-founder of Teacher Tapp — the UK’s daily teacher survey platform, taken by between 10,000 and 11,000 teachers every day. She’s also one of the most widely-read voices in UK education journalism and policy. Her annual reports including ‘The Seven Types of Teachers on Social Media’ and ‘Brands That Rule the World’ are essential reading for anyone selling into schools. This conversation covers the school-infrastructure realities that most EdTech marketing assumes away, what actually survived COVID, and why ‘saves you time’ has become a claim teachers have learned to ignore.

In This Episode

• The infrastructure reality most EdTech assumes away — 36% of primary teachers and 27% of secondary teachers report very slow internet, and London has some of the worst school-tech infrastructure in the country
• COVID winners and losers — Microsoft Teams dominance in over 90% of English schools, and the quiet death of Loom and voice-note feedback
• The monthly brand tracker and annual ‘Brands That Rule the World’ report — how EdTech companies can see where they actually stand
• 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 report high confidence but observed behaviour shows something different, and why the first three months of adoption is where you win or lose
• The implementation gap EdTech companies don’t budget for — pop-up tutorials hitting teachers mid-lesson is a pupil-behaviour risk, not a UX feature
• Why ‘saves you time’ is the claim teachers have stopped believing — workload didn’t collapse when AI adoption went from 0% to 70%
• The Ucas-reference example — 3 days becomes 2.5 hours with general AI, and why those one-off wins are why teachers reach for ChatGPT rather than your EdTech product
• The Seven Types of Teachers on Social Media — and what the growing ‘category seven’ (no social media at all) means for every marketing plan in the sector
• Why smarmy salespeople lose in education — teachers read people for a living
• The cake-mix principle for lesson planning — people need to feel involved even when AI is doing the work