Bett 2024 review: race and equality in education and the role of technology

During the annual EdTech Bett exhibition, which is taking place this week in London, Professor Jason Arday sat down with broadcaster Charlene White to discuss race and equality in education and the role tech has to play. 

Professor Arday is notable for becoming the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.

During the conversation, he reflected on his own education, stating, “How education defines intelligence, it's a very narrow proxy. I didn’t fit into that.” 

Sharing his own journey of learning, Professor Arday shared that he didn’t learn to read and write until later in life, and it was his college tutor’s belief in him that really changed things and made him realise he had what he calls a “yearning for learning” that has stayed with him. 

His aim is to support others and challenge the status quo, “My purpose is to make a small contribution to a greater goal in the long run.” He acknowledged the racism and pushback that happened when he started his role as a professor at Cambridge, stating about the pushback and trolling, “People don’t like change. [They had a] feeling that if you have groups of people who don’t conform to the orthodox view of excellence…I don’t give them oxygen.” 

He went on to discuss what drives him and, referring to White, said, “people seeing exceptionality regardless of being black, seeing someone as exceptional as you, who happens to be a black woman, that achievement has a huge impact on everyone else and is reverberating and sends a message out to people, that actually, I can do it… You take your inspiration from people around you.”

As the conversation moved on to technology, Professor Arday talked about his dyslexia and the tools he used to support his work. “One of the greatest interventions in my life is Dragon Naturally Speaking,” a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems. He also uses Read and Write Gold, a literacy support tool that helps students with reading, writing and comprehension skills. It offers users features such as text-to-speech, text and picture dictionaries, vocabulary lists and talk&type. 

He shared his thoughts on how Covid-19 played a part in the use of EdTech, “Obviously, the pandemic progressed with how people were using the innovative technology to continue to engage learning with young people.”

Professor Arday praised schools for using tech in schools to support neurodiverse pupils. 

“I think what’s great about schools is a lot of schools are using really innovative technological methods to engage children from a wild spectrum of educational needs. Technology has really been at the axis of that in terms of how assessments are now done, audio-visual assessments, the use of AI in that space is becoming more prevalent as we move forward. I think, all in all, you’ve got schools really engaging, and they have been for quite a while.”