Episode 03 · The Builders
4 June 2026
Matt Tiplin
Director of Education Services, Keys Inclusion Pathways
“Learning is a human experience. You can’t program the human mind.”
Matt Tiplin was a teacher, an Ofsted inspector, then sold EdTech. Now he runs education at Keys Inclusion Pathways — ALFA for hybrid re-engagement, CF Education for specialist tutoring, and an online school for pupils who can’t physically attend. This conversation asks whether EdTech actually solves the problems it claims to — and what building provision for children mainstream couldn’t reach tells you about why it so often doesn’t.
In This Episode
- Why EdTech is only as useful as the clarity of the reason you pick it up — and why anecdotal wins get projected onto what no single tool can deliver for everyone, everywhere, all at once
- The personalised learning problem: why AI can’t know the experiences and background a child brings to learning — and why at best it’s just personalising content distribution at volume
- How Keys Inclusion Pathways is structured — Keys Alternative Learning, Keys Engage, Keys Tuition, and the online school — what each does and who it’s for
- The industrial batching model: why the education system is predicated on age not stage, and why it’s answering a question that may have been right once but isn’t anymore
- What successful outcomes actually look like in alternative provision — going to bed on time, passing functional skills, showing up consistently — and why a GCSE grade is not the same as a good education
- His Ofsted inspector years: whether holding schools accountable for outcomes he now understands are incredibly difficult to reach was ever entirely fair
- The SEND reforms and white paper: why structural change won’t achieve the cultural shift that actually matters
- Scaling without losing the personal: why everything in alternative provision is relationship-driven, and what that means for how Keys builds commercially
