Assessment Technology recognised in England’s ed-tech market – fame at last?

It’s good to be recognised. Customers often ask me what the Total Addressable Market for their products and services is. Once a sector is codified, it becomes ‘addressable’ for them. This helps investors bring new money into the sector, suppliers with sharpening their strategy, and institutions/ exam owners with procurement.

England’s June 2026 Department for Education (DfE) report, ‘Assessment of the education technology market in England’, attempts to analyse and codify the UK EdTech sector, it tracks its maturity, composition, and real-world adoption since a 2022 baseline.

Encouragingly, assessment technology is claimed to be a growth front-runner. An annual growth rate of 18.1%, generating £470M in turnover, supporting 2,705 employees, across 71 identified companies. I track over 100 UK-domiciled companies within digitally-enabled high stakes assessment, and not forgetting ex-UK companies employing UK people serving UK assessment contracts. But at least we’ve got a baseline.

Assessment technology is a growth front-runner. It would be further in front if all of the UK companies were represented.

It’s great that schools and universities are included. But the report’s remit is too narrow. Assessment technology is used in many more sectors. Future iterations must consider: UK Government Contracts; Medical; Professional; Vocational - call me, guys!

Future reports must include assessment tech used across other UK sectors, such as Government Contracts, Medical, Professional.

Digital assessment is now on the investor and analyst radar. That helps investment. Policy folk can also educate themselves properly on the sector. The report also claims the overall market is ‘strong and economically significant’. BETT show and eAssessment Association conference (eAA) attendees will no doubt agree. But there are issues.

There’s a revenue-led disconnect: Despite leading the market in growth, the report claims that e-assessment attracts a disproportionately low share of venture funding; £24.3M in annual investment is quoted.

This indicates a highly practical, ‘revenue-led’ ecosystem, skewed towards current academic year school budgets, seeking workload solutions. The report infers that there is a contrast with private venture capital favouring more speculative, AI-labelled software platforms.

Weak end-of-life device management is preventing the use of fully cloud-based services.

Platform Integration The report notes 29 companies overlap between Assessment and Foundational Learning. There’s a clear allusion to assessment moving from a stand-alone post-hoc (summative) service into an integrated feedback loop, embedded within formative tools and broader learning. That is encouraging, and chimes with a number of keynote speeches made at the eAA’s conference this month.

There’s a sense of impending system integration that’s starting to promote formative assessment

Importantly, the report calls out procurement by individual school departments, rather than a single whole-school contract. A number of 2.75 contracts per school per system is cited, with AQA’s Exampro exam prep tool as an frequently recorded example.

That surprised me. England’s schools back-office procurement is becoming increasingly financially sophisticated. No doubt multi-academy trusts are aware of the buying power they actually have.

For test developers, the report notes a rapid uptake of generative AI tools for practice test items and drafting grading rubrics. Some generic (Claude, ChatGPT), others education-specific (Oak National Academy's Aila). Mixed with the school phone ban, the rapid uptake of ‘grey’ IT to generate test prep should concern those advocating for digital formative assessment within schools.

The combination of a school phone ban and using grey-IT AI tools creates difficulty for formative assessment advocates

The report notes some critical market hurdles. 

1) Hardware compliance Only 16% of England’s schools meet all DfE digital and technology standards. Patchy wi-fi coverage and weak end-of-life device management is preventing the use of fully cloud-based services. While acute in primary schools, perhaps the report team could learn a lesson from how Wales overcame this years ago for their adaptive digital assessments?

2) What does good look like? Sector suppliers face confusing definitions of what constitutes robust, ‘good’, or valid evaluation frameworks. They understand different buyers (even across Government) need different certifications and compliance standards. However, this proves difficult for niche exam tech providers to standardise their evidence of impact. Frameworks such as G-Cloud have valiantly attempted to do this, but a new approach is needed. While UK government departments have singularly different approaches to high-stakes exam delivery enabled by technology, the sector remains frustrated and hampered.

3) Data Friction and Lack of Interoperability: Multi-vendor systems are still prone to silos. Some schools are increasingly enforcing strict procurement thresholds: rejecting third-party assessment apps unless they support automated API data integration, avoiding manual data-handling burdens on staff.

So, the sector has shifted and political mood turned since the 2022 report. The UK remains an ed-tech market-leader, and was a leadership contender in digital assessment. While the sector gains recognition and codification, it is being conflated with ‘the digital problem that needs to be managed. The sector recognition is great, but much more sensitivity to ex-school assessment and exams is desperately needed.