Episode 2: Dr Neelam Parmar | THE BUILDERS

Most EdTech conversations about AI default to either excitement or panic. Dr Neelam Parmar does neither. She's spent nearly two decades at the implementation end of the sector — starting her PhD in 2009, just as the iPad arrived — and she knows what moves the needle and what falls off the shelf.

Dr Neelam Parmar is an EdTech consultant, researcher, and author of Digital Parenting. Her work spans multi-academy trust strategy, professional development platforms and teacher-facing AI. She advises groups across the UK and internationally on what genuine scale and impact look like when they're actually achieved together.

IN THIS EPISODE

·      Why 60% teacher engagement is the threshold she uses to judge whether a platform is working — and why anything lower usually means the platform isn't the problem

·      The accountability question in EdTech implementation: why it's never the platform and always a named person (director of education, IT lead), and why so few trusts have one

·      The TPACK model and what happens to it in the age of AI — why content and pedagogy have collapsed into the technology layer, and what teachers now need to become literate in

·      Multimodality as the learning-experience principle for AI tutoring — one-to-one visual, auditory and text interactions at a depth a thirty-child classroom can't offer

·      How working with Alpha Blocks and the first wave of iPad learning shaped her thinking on dyslexia, ADHD and visual pedagogy

·      The Digital Parenting contract she drew up with her own children — and why she wouldn't write a dictatorial book on it

·      Her 'cautious excitement' about AI-led personalised learning, the Sugata Mitra comparison, and the hybrid and fully-AI school models already emerging internationally

·      What happened inside the Department of Education EdTech leadership group during COVID — the gap between independent and state schools, and her frustration about who could deliver online and who couldn't

·      The AI curriculum gap — why the UK is behind China and the Middle East on agentic AI, and her current work building a holistic digital and AI framework for schools

·      Women in EdTech — her counter-intuitive answer that men have backed her career and women have been the first to shut doors

·      Three international markets, two rules: trust and time travel across UAE, Southeast Asia and UK, off-the-shelf products don't

·      The 'three new things a year' rule that separates progressive school leadership from stuck school leadership

·      Why onboarding — not the product — is where most EdTech companies lose the school

Episode 2 opens THE BUILDERS block of Series One.

LINKS

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and everywhere via Podbean

Full episode and transcript: https://podcast.co/b2educationunpacked

EdTech Sales Mastery course: https://seventhsibling.co.uk/self-paced-courses

Website: https://seventhsibling.co.uk