Lately, I’ve noticed a concerning shift in the role of the educational IT teams. Many have started settling into a role of risk mitigators rather than innovators. A defensive stance where the primary success metric is the absence of problems, rather than the presence of meaningful learning & outcomes.
In many ways, IT administration in schools can be a perverse race to the bottom. School IT administrators are incentivised to reduce technology use under the guise of “safety” or “security.” The logic is simple: if no one is using the tech, there is nothing that can “blow up”.
For an IT admin a landscape with fewer tools is a landscape that is easier to manage, but that isn’t a strategy, it’s surrender.
Having an IT strategy is about making deliberate choices about what we do to add value. When we prioritise risk mitigation above all else, we’re led into a trap of building digital sanctuaries, frozen in time that avoid the often messy work of innovation. We are incentivised to put up walls, block features, and restrict access, often fighting against the very users we are supposed to be serving.
The problem with this approach:
**Decisions become divorced from teaching practice. **We stop asking “How can this help a student?” and ask instead “How could this hurt uptime?”. This conflates “keeping students safe” with “not enabling anything.” Like all complex issues, the answer is found in balancing these ideas in the middle, not at the extremes. **Confidence is eroded **When technology is so locked down that it becomes a hurdle, teachers lose the confidence to innovate. They end up solving their own problems outside the system, leading to “Shadow IT” and bad outcomes like data breaches that are often more dangerous than the tools we originally blocked. **We ignore the opportunity cost **Every time we legitimately filter or block a tool that is relevant to the classroom, we are closing doors for our students. The goal is to look for ways to improve outcomes, IT should be at its core an enabler in the organisation not in the business of policing.
Reducing risk cannot be a strategy. It does not add value. The absence of risk may appear like a win in the short term, but it short-changes the long-term value technology promises our teachers & students.
We need to accept that risk is a baseline requirement for progress. Instead of switching things off, saying no and blocking progress, we should be pursuing opportunities to help teachers and students with the fundamentals that actually drive their productivity and needs. If we can deliver a mission of confident use of technology (where the tech is invisible because it just works) we will serve our communities much more positively than a set of restrictive tools that are “safe” but offer dwindling value.