Hwb and School Autonomy
As you can probably tell by the amount of blogs that I'm currently posting, I am currently thinking a lot about the current state of EdTech especially with regards to generative AI. This is also having quite a knock on effect with regards to thinking about teachers and pupils use of digital technologies in schools and also more widely to local and Welsh Government digital strategies for education.
This week I had an interesting phone call with a network manger from a high school in Wales who had contacted me. They had stumbled upon a BBC Wales News article from 2018 which my name appeared in and which to be honest, I'd completely forgotten about! The article was all about the debacle that was Hwb+ and in it I commented that it was basically "a very challenging technology to use in the classroom" and that it was "clunky, old fashioned and difficult to use." I still stand by what I said, it really was an appalling piece of technology. The network manager basically wanted to know what I thought about the current version of Hwb. I said I can't really comment from a high school perspective as I haven't worked with that sector for several years, but for the majority of primary schools I think it works really well for them. Microsoft 365 is pretty much the tool of choice for school communication and management type 'stuff'. Also cloud based applications such as Just2easy and Adobe Express are good at supporting DCF skills. Most (all?) of these schools would not have a network manager such as yourself, so the burden of managing these systems is carried out by Hwb. I also went on to say that from what I know from work I had done with high schools in the past, they would like more autonomy and look after and manage these types of systems themselves and that their needs would be possibly more complex for high school than a primary school. I suggested he talked to the other high schools in his local authority and interestingly said that most of them still looked after their own networks, cloud platforms themselves. It appeared from he said, that the high schools hadn't embraced the Hwb platform in the way that primary schools most clearly have done. They were still holding onto control of digital technologies as much as they could. The problem he had was that the school was about to move into a new building and the tech in that new build was being tied more closely into Hwb. In fact, he said that their existing network infrastructure was being removed and not being replaced by the local authority!
Why am I writing this. Well because it ties into a similar conversation I had with a primary school digital leader a couple of weeks before. This was a primary school that was one of the few exceptions to the Hwb centric primary schools. They used their own Google for Education instance, which they had been using very successfully for about 10 years and still bought into Purple Mash from 2Simple. The reason being that they worked so well for their pupils and teachers. In our discussions, the digital lead told me that the local authority are making it more and difficult to keep working in the way that they were used to. Their Chromebooks for instance could only be logged onto using the Hwb usernames and passwords.
So this is early stages but the above has got me mulling over a couple of things:
- Hwb has got a huge influence on digital education and infrastructure across all of Wales. It can work for some schools but not necessarily for all. Even though the Welsh Government say that they don't mandate the use of Hwb, it is certainly clear that they strongly 'encourage' schools to adopt it and from the FOI requests I've linked to below, it feels like they use the local authority as a lever to get Hwb into schools. Should a national body be strongly encouraging its schools to do exactly the same thing? Are schools able to exercise digital choice in their way forward for their teachers and pupils, especially if they believe it maybe better than the national offering?
"The Welsh Government continues to encourage the adoption of Hwb services to ensure that all learners benefit from a safe, secure, and equitable digital learning environment." FOI request, June 2025
"The decisions regarding the migration of schools from existing, legacy, or corporate systems to the Hwb platform are made at the local authority level. Schools are not required to migrate but are encouraged to consider the benefits of adopting the national approach." FOI request, April 2025- This brings me back to my concerns about the roll out of generative AI tools across Hwb. In a recent post I made the comment that it might have been better to get in place the national strategy for AI, professional training and the updates to the DCF before releasing Microsoft Co-Pilot and Google Gemini to teachers and pupils. If schools had more autonomy then that decision could have been implemented at the school level. Giving individual schools the time to put those pieces in place before opening it up, or even making a school decision that we won't be using generative AI tools.
Here are some 'quite interesting' freedom of information (FOI) requests that I've just found relating to Hwb, local authorities, AI, etc:
August 2025 - Data Protection Impact Assessment in relation to the use of CoPilot on Hwb I think the Welsh Government might have possibly a mistake in one of their answers. They comment that, "It is also important to reiterate that the feature is not available to learners when using their Hwb credentials." However, I was recently in a primary school where a teacher logged in as a pupil and could get access to Co-Pilot.
June 2025 - Requirement to Use Hwb System for EdTech Funding Eligibility
May 2025 - Hwb Permissions and Hwb Platform costs
April 2025 - Documentation related to Mandating the Hwb platform in WelshSchools
April 2025 - School Requirements for Migration to the Hwb Platform
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