Episode 05 · The Implementers
19 June 2026
Patrick McGrath
VP Head of Education, Everway
“It’s never budget. It’s always culture.”
Everway (formerly Texthelp) is the largest assistive technology provider in the world — thirty years, hundreds of millions of users. Paddy McGrath wants to stop calling it assistive technology, and stop calling it accessibility. He’ll explain why. Patrick McGrath is VP Head of Education at Everway, the global accessibility-technology company behind Read&Write and a suite of tools used in schools across more than 100 countries. He’s spent the last decade arguing that the industry’s language — ‘SEND’, ‘assistive’, even ‘accessibility’ — is quietly undermining the thing it’s trying to build: genuinely inclusive classrooms.
In This Episode
- Why schools often buy Everway’s tools for 25 exam-access students and stop there — and the commercial conversation about extending to the other 1,075
- RTB (reason to buy) versus RTB (reason to broaden) — what happens when a school names a narrow reason to purchase and then doesn’t deploy further
- Usage versus outcomes: why 20% adoption is research-defined success for some tools, and why that’s still a hard conversation with a senior leadership team
- The cross-platform reality of multi-academy trusts — five devices, three operating systems, one single sign-on, and who’s responsible for which gap
- Why built-in OS accessibility is not inclusion — text-to-speech designed for visual impairment is not the same tool as text-to-speech for dyslexia
- The bus-kneeling analogy — why accessibility you have to ask for isn’t accessibility, and what genuine inclusion looks like by comparison
- It’s never budget, always culture — why inclusion failure is a senior-leadership-team problem that can’t be solved by more money
- Practical redesign without redesign — the Google Docs font change a teacher can make in thirty seconds that transforms a dyslexic pupil’s experience
- How the Everway (formerly Texthelp) rebrand was handled commercially, and what happens to a name-change at global scale when schools still search the old name
- Paddy’s own ‘I hated school’ story — the tech-labs teacher who let him build anything, the football-on-sports-day kid who didn’t fit, and the engagement question nobody thought to measure
- The Teacher Advisory Panel model — paid teachers on a theory-of-change roadmap, not a marketing focus group
- The Abington Academy report Everway didn’t commission, didn’t fund and didn’t influence — and why that kind of impartial evidence is worth more than any case study Everway could write itself
- Measuring something as intangible as a barrier being removed — and why Everway is going through the DfE/Chartered College EdTech Evidence Port rather than writing their own metrics
