The digital clutter crisis

The next sentence you will read will not be a surprise at all…

There’s a really big focus on digitalisation in education, with the end goal being better learning, not bigger bills.

The reality?

Sure, it’s getting there, but it’s not there yet because in almost every school, department and classroom we encounter, there are numerous digital tools and subscriptions at play, equating to a somewhat out of control collection of EdTech subscriptions.

Whilst you may think it’s great that everyone has access to their favourite tools, the stark contrast is that it often ends up looking less like a curriculum-enhancing library and more like an unmanaged expense account, with duplicate subscriptions, underused licences, and little visibility of who’s using what.

This scattered digital toolset brings with it a host of hidden costs — and it’s not just about forgotten usernames. It’s about wasted budget on unused, overlapping or non-compliant services.

“Well, this doesn’t sound like my school or trust”

That may be the case at face value, but often, the scale and scope of the subscription sprawl silently stretch beyond sight, eating away at your school’s most valuable resources: time, security and money.

The cost of wasted time: the “Digital Ten Minutes”

While we’ve begun this blog by highlighting the financial friction that can be caused by digitalisation, the time cost cannot be ignored. Time is money, especially when your staff are paid to teach – not to troubleshoot.

This is not just limited to those in the IT team, but teachers and admin staff, too.

Behind every digital lesson lies a growing layer of invisible administration. Staff are still manually provisioning accounts, chasing licence expiry dates, and juggling multiple invoices from different suppliers — a process that drains hours of valuable time each term.

This isn’t strategic digital leadership; it’s survival mode. When teachers and admin teams are bogged down by low-value, repetitive tasks, the efficiency gains promised by digitalisation are lost.

But time isn’t the only thing being lost.

When digital systems operate in silos, valuable insights about licence use, spend, and impact are hidden from view. Without clear oversight, schools risk paying for subscriptions that are underused, duplicated, or no longer relevant — costs that quietly accumulate month after month.

This leads us directly to the next hidden cost of digital sprawl: The Cost of Missed Opportunities — the unseen financial leakage that occurs when schools lack the visibility to optimise their digital investments.

Licence & budget blind spots

This area is where the real subscription spend can be likened to a leaky tap, quietly draining resources from the school budget. Without a centralised, transparent view, schools are practically guaranteed to be losing money each month.

In the sector, it’s referred to as ‘shelfware’. In an example, it’s like paying for 500 licences for a maths app when only 350 students actively log in, meaning a staggering 25% of the budget is simply thrown away on unused licences.

This waste is compounded by duplicate purchases, which often occur when different departments, or even feeder primary schools and the secondary school, buy the same literacy resource without coordination.

Furthermore, a failure to integrate means you suffer from wasted integration potential: again, for example, if you’ve paid for high-quality digital learning resources for primary schools, but they’re not connected, or not “talking” to your core systems, you’re not getting the full value you invested.

The cost of compliance failure: The GDPR & cybersecurity nightmare

This years’ Cyber security breaches survey 2025 revealed that around 52% of primary schools and 56% of secondary schools consider cyber-security “to a large extent” when purchasing software, meaning nearly half may not. It’s not just security that comes into question but also compliance, with FE News finding that more than half of UK schools and colleges believe they are not fully GDPR compliant.

While it might be tempting to focus solely on cost savings when investing in digital tools, especially given the title and intent of this blog, it’s really important to note that any perceived financial benefits are dwarfed by the potential consequences of a data breach or regulatory non-compliance.

Using unvetted or unmanaged apps for teachers and pupils introduces significant risk — your subscription spend must account for compliance as much as functionality.

The risks are clear:

Unclear accountability: Who signs the Data Processing Agreement (DPA)? If your school can’t instantly identify the data controller and processor for every subscription, you’re not fully in control.

Data over-sharing: Many digital tools request access to data they don’t need. Under GDPR, you are legally required to share only the minimum necessary information.

Cyber-breach impact: A GOV.UK survey found that 71% of secondary schools reported experiencing a cyber breach or attack in the past year — a stark reminder that education remains a high-risk sector.

Protecting your school’s digital ecosystem means going beyond simple licence management. It’s about building a secure, transparent, and compliant digital foundation — where every tool used supports not only learning outcomes but also the safeguarding of pupil and staff data.

Final thought for school leaders

The challenges outlined in this blog, from financial leakage and shelfware to the daily drain of the ‘Digital Ten Minutes’ and the persistent fear of a compliance failure are the inevitable result of fragmentation.

The promise of digitalisation, which includes better learning outcomes, can only be met when the underlying digital infrastructure is organised and controlled.
The good news, however, is that the solution is straightforward: centralisation.

A centralised approach offers real-time transparency, providing senior leadership and finance teams with a clear, unified view of usage and spend across the entire digital ecosystem.

This clarity is crucial, enabling you to proactively identify and cancel under-used subscriptions before renewal, negotiate better volume pricing based on accurate data, and ensure that every pound invested in digital teaching materials is actually being utilised in the classroom.

Moreover, by adopting a unified hub, such as a single sign-on solution like Skolon, you instantly streamline administration, reclaiming precious teaching hours and eliminating the low-value administrative friction that too often eats into every lesson.

Beyond financial and time savings, centralisation is your strongest defence against the compliance nightmare. Utilising a GDPR-secure, trusted platform provides full transparency and control over data flows. This ensures that you hold and manage Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) for each service and that your entire contract portfolio remains visible and auditable, drastically reducing your school’s risk footprint and protecting vital pupil and staff data.

To learn more about how Skolon can be the solution for you, use the button below to book a chat with our team.

This is Skolon – we gather the best digital educational tools and make them work in the classroom.

Skolon is an independent platform for digital educational tools and learning resources, created for both teachers and students. With Skolon, accessing and using your digital educational tools is easy – security increases, administration decreases, and there’s more time for learning.

The digital educational tools come from both small and large providers, all of whom have one thing in common – they create digital educational tools that are beneficial for the school environment.