I’m writing these words at the end of my first week as the Chief Executive of Unity Schools Partnership and I’m feeling an appropriate mix of excitement for what’s possible (‘What great schools! What amazing pupils!’) and awe at the responsibility (‘What a lot of schools! What a huge number of pupils!’)

I’m also very happy to be back in the East of England, the part of the world I’ve spent my entire adult life, apart from the last year. I arrived as an 18-year-old at teacher training college in Cambridge, where I met my wife (a native of Norfolk), and we’re really glad to be back in what, for us, is the best place in the country to live.

Such is the halo effect of homecoming, I’m even having warm feelings about the A14 and A11…let’s see how long that lasts!

With 25+ years of working in education under my belt, I’ve seen and done quite a few things that I’ll bring to my work at Unity Schools Partnership. But one consistent thread has been the use of technology to support teaching and learning.

This is all started when, as a newly qualified teacher with a class full of Year 5s, my Head said to me ‘I’ve noticed that you use the computer mouse with only one hand – would you like to be in charge of IT?’

If I’d known then that this path would eventually see me, early-pandemic, leading a national webinar on remote teaching from my shed, I’d probably have politely declined.

In this past week, I’ve visited several Unity schools and seen technology being put to really effective use. This has ranged from teachers using tablets to cast their lesson to the whiteboard, free to move around the classroom and support children, to pupils having their understanding in Maths pushed further and faster by a well-designed app that knows the exact skills they need to practice.

Examples like these remind me of Steve Jobs’ famous description of computers as ‘a bicycle of the mind’ and it’s brilliant that so many pupils in our schools have access to an iPad.

This isn’t to say that technology is an unquestioned ‘good thing’. There is a world of difference between providing children with a secure, safe and managed device containing software specifically designed to support learning and permitting the unconstrained use of phones in school.

If fact, I fully support Headteachers who decide that the very best thing they can do to help their pupils learn is to remove the distraction and the negatives that mobile phones can bring, and to free up children’s capacity to focus on what we’ve always known makes education effective – great teachers using a powerful curriculum to deliver engaging lessons.

Technology in service of learning needs to be our guiding principle as we prepare our children to become adults in a digitally rich world.

Dominic Norrish, Chief Executive, Unity Schools Partnership