Between 2014 and 2017, a team of researchers from the Open University, Lancaster, and Manchester Metropolitan universities set out to explore the ways children use digital technology outside school and the extent to which that connects with what happens inside school.

The project was called NP3 — New Purposes, New Practices, New Pedagogy. It was funded by the Society for Educational Studies and ran over two years across 13 primary schools in England and Scotland. More than 100 children and 60 teachers took part. Forty-three 'log children' used digital cameras to capture their home digital technology use and were interviewed individually. More than 20 of their carers were also interviewed. Thirty-one teachers were each observed teaching at least one lesson and interviewed at least twice. It was a substantial piece of work.

What it found was, in retrospect, predictable, but the evidence matters. Schools and children were, in effect, living in parallel digital worlds.

What children actually do with digital technology

The first thing the project established was rich, detailed evidence of how children use digital technology outside school. The range was wider than many people assume. Children played games, from simple arcade formats to sophisticated virtual worlds like Minecraft. They searched for information, frequently via YouTube rather than a conventional search engine. They created and shared images, videos, and music. They communicated with family and friends using WhatsApp, Skype, and FaceTime. Some ran their own YouTube channels.

Importantly, the study challenged the common assumption that children today are uniformly capable, enthusiastic digital users. There was wide variation. Some children's home contexts placed significant constraints on their digital technology use due to: parental rules, limited parental confidence with technology, or concerns about safety. Gender also appeared to influence the patterns of use. The idea that all children arrive at school as competent, engaged digital technology users does not hold up under scrutiny.

To make sense of this variation, the project developed the Digital Practice Framework (DPF). The DPF maps children's digital practices across two dimensions:

• purpose (entertainment; extending a physical-world interest; computer science) and
• degree of participation (marginal; engaged; core).

This is a genuinely useful tool for anyone trying to understand what children bring with them to school. It shifts the conversation from a binary 'do they use technology?' to a more precise set of questions about how, why, and with what level of commitment. (See this article in BJET for a full explanation of the DPF)

The gap between home and school

The central finding of the project was stark. In almost all instances across the 13 schools, digital technology use in school did not align with children's digital practices outside it. Children themselves did not feel that their out-of-school digital lives were relevant once they walked through the school gates, except when doing homework, where they often had more agency.

This matters because it is not simply a missed opportunity for engagement. It has implications for social justice. If a school's digital technology practices fail to connect with what children do outside school, they also fail to recognise the very different starting points children bring. Children from different home contexts, with different levels of parental support, different access to devices and different patterns of use, arrive at school carrying different digital histories. Schools that ignore this will, by default, advantage some children and disadvantage others.

The analysis using the Digital Technology Impact Framework (DTIF), a tool for assessing the quantity and pedagogical impact of digital technology use, made the picture sharper. Of the 91 observed or reported instances of digital technology use in classes where children were estimated to use technology for more than 10% of the time, only 13% actually changed what or how children were taught in ways that could not have been achieved without digital technology. A further 40% had the potential to do so but were either implemented in a way that undermined that potential, or there was insufficient evidence to judge. In other words, the majority of digital technology use in these schools added convenience rather than changing learning. (Find out more about the DTIF, which was called the ICT Innovation Framework (DTIF) in the NP3 Project)

Why the gap exists

The study identified three layers of explanation.

The first is structural. Curriculum requirements, assessment frameworks, and accountability regimes (particularly Ofsted inspection in England) were significant constraints on what teachers felt they could do. Schools in Scotland, operating under a less prescriptive accountability regime, showed this effect less strongly. Independent schools, where accountability ran primarily to parents rather than to formal inspection, also showed some variation. The system within which schools operate shapes what teachers feel is possible, and in England that system pushes against the kind of sustained, interest-led, open-ended digital work that characterises children's out-of-school practices.

The second layer is resourcing. There appeared to be a minimum threshold of digital technology provision below which meaningful use was simply impractical. However — and this is a finding worth sitting with — once that threshold was exceeded, more resource did not straightforwardly translate into better use. The relationship between resourcing and impact was not linear. What mattered more was what teachers chose to do with what they had.

The third layer is pedagogical. This is where the project's most significant conceptual contribution sits.

The Innovative Pedagogy Framework and what it tells us

The project introduced the Innovative Pedagogy Framework (IPF), developed by Patricia Murphy. The IPF defines five theoretically grounded models of pedagogy:

• behaviourism/information processing,
• cognitivist Piagetian constructivism,
• radical constructivism,
• social constructivism, and
• innovative-sociocultural.

It is a powerful tool for analysing teachers' practices and making explicit what is otherwise often implicit about how a teacher thinks learning works.

If you have read my earlier posts on learning theories and their relative strengths and weaknesses, the IPF will look familiar as it maps closely onto the four main pedagogical stances I have explored in those posts, with the addition of a more fine-grained split within constructivism. The NP3 data suggested a relationship between where a school sat on this framework and how much digital technology was used and to what effect. Schools with a more traditional pedagogical model tended to use less digital technology, and what they used had less transformative impact on what or how children were taught. Schools with a constructivist or sociocultural model tended to use more digital technology and use it in more impactful ways.

This finding is, I think, fundamental. It suggests that the question 'how do we use technology better in our school?' cannot be answered without first asking 'what do we believe learning is, and what are schools for?'. Digital technology use is downstream of pedagogy. This is precisely the argument at the heart of a PedTech approach, as set out in From EdTech to PedTech (Aubrey-Smith and Twining, 2024). As I have noted in the post on whether teaching is atheoretical, every teaching decision rests on a theory of learning whether or not that theory is made explicit. NP3 gave us empirical evidence, across 13 schools, that the theory you hold (or that holds you) shapes what you do with digital technology in practice.

The project also found that individual teacher identity mattered as much as and sometimes more than the school's overall pedagogical model. Teachers who saw themselves as ICT users, and who placed digital practice centrally in their professional identity, used digital technology more and used it in more impactful ways, regardless of the wider school context. This has implications for professional development. Generic training in specific tools is unlikely to shift practice if it does not also engage teachers' sense of who they are as practitioners.

What actually worked

Amongst the many examples of digital technology use that were observed or reported, a small number stood out as genuinely aligning with the kinds of digital practices children engaged with at home. These included:

• School radio stations, where children operated as radio presenters with real autonomy over production and content.
• Digital leaders programmes, where children went beyond equipment management into genuine expertise and teaching of peers.
• Class blogs where teachers relinquished editorial control.
• Giving children the freedom to decide for themselves when and how to use mobile devices to achieve a goal.

What these examples share is that they gave children agency. They were not tasks where the digital technology was a vehicle for the teacher's purposes. They were contexts where children's purposes drove the use of digital technology, which is how most meaningful digital learning outside school actually works.

Lessons for practice

Several things follow from this.

For teachers, the most important implication is also the most uncomfortable: teacher agency is one of the most significant determinants of what happens in classrooms. The curriculum, the school's resource model, the accountability framework are real constraints, but they are not the whole story. Teachers who made the most effective use of digital technology were those who had been deliberate about their pedagogical beliefs and who saw digital competence as part of their professional identity. Making your pedagogical stance explicit (as I have discussed in earlier posts on the IPF and learning theories) is not an academic exercise. It is a practical precondition for changing what you do.

For school leaders, the message is that your digital technology strategy needs to be grounded in your pedagogical stance, not the other way around. An digital technology strategy that is not aligned with a clear pedagogical model is likely to produce compliance rather than impact: teachers using technology because it is expected, not because it transforms what children can do and learn.

For policy makers, the NP3 findings point to a structural problem. In England, the accountability and curriculum regime that was in place at the time of the study was actively constraining teachers' ability to connect with children's digital lives. That may have shifted in some respects since 2017, but the underlying tension has not gone away.

For all of us, the finding about social justice deserves particular attention. Children in 'lower ability' groups consistently had less access to digital technology and a higher proportion of 'drill and practice' tasks. Children labelled 'more able' were more likely to be given open-ended, agentic, collaborative tasks. This is not a neutral distribution of provision. It is a pattern of use that compounds existing inequity. Any serious commitment to equity in education has to attend to who gets to use digital technology in genuinely empowering ways, and who does not.

Read the full NP3 report.