Before You Buy Another School Program: Ask These 15 Pilot Questions

School leaders are asked to buy certainty in an uncertain market. Every platform promises engagement, personalisation, skills, career clarity or measurable outcomes. The problem is not that every promise is false. It is that a sales deck cannot tell you whether the programme will work with your timetable, students, teachers, infrastructure and priorities.

UNICEF's 2026 EdTech for Good Framework is useful because it asks decision-makers to look at who is behind a product, what it is intended to do, whether it is appropriate for responsible use in education, and whether claims are supported by appropriate evidence. Schools can translate that mindset into a smaller pilot before a larger commitment.

The 15 questions

• What exact school problem are we trying to solve?
• Which students and grades are in scope?
• What will the provider actually deliver each week?
• What must teachers and school staff do for the programme to work?
• What evidence supports the provider's claims — and in what type of school?
• Which outcomes will we review locally?
• What baseline or starting evidence do we need?
• What student data will be collected, and why is each field necessary?
• Who can access the data, where is it handled and what happens when the pilot ends?
• What training and implementation support is included?
• How will we know whether the programme was delivered as intended?
• What would count as a reason to adapt or stop the pilot?
• What will students actually produce or experience that we can inspect?
• How will parents and students understand the purpose of the pilot?
• What decision will we make at the end: stop, redesign, extend or scale?

Ask providers to separate evidence from aspiration

An early-stage company may have a thoughtful model without mature outcome evidence. That is not automatically disqualifying. The school simply needs honest labels: what is already validated, what is based on external research, what is a design hypothesis and what the pilot is intended to learn.

Fit matters as much as features

A product can be strong and still fail in a school if it requires timetable space, teacher effort or devices that are not realistically available. UNICEF's framework explicitly treats context and implementation conditions as part of quality rather than an afterthought.

A pilot should reduce uncertainty

The goal of the first pilot is not to manufacture a testimonial. It is to help the school make a better next decision. That may include positive student evidence, but it should also surface implementation problems, weak assumptions and changes needed before scale.

"A successful pilot is one that makes the next decision clearer — including the decision not to scale yet."

Score the questions before the demo, not after

A practical procurement meeting works better when the school decides its priorities before meeting vendors. Mark each question as essential, important or optional. A school with limited timetable flexibility may treat teacher workload as essential; another school may place data handling or parent communication at the top. Pre-committing to criteria reduces the chance that an impressive demo quietly changes what the school was trying to solve.

Invite more than one kind of stakeholder into the review. The principal may see strategic fit, a teacher may see hidden workload, IT may see integration or security risk, and a counsellor may notice that the proposed student workflow does not match how guidance actually happens. A short multi-role review is more informative than a long sales call with one decision-maker.

What a useful pilot agreement should contain

• A one-sentence problem statement and the grade/cohort in scope.
• Delivery responsibilities for the school and provider.
• The evidence to be collected and how it will be interpreted.
• Data fields, access, retention and deletion expectations.
• Support and escalation contacts.
• A review date and explicit stop, redesign, extend or scale decision.

This makes the commercial conversation healthier for both sides. The provider knows what success actually means, and the school can judge the pilot against the problem it intended to solve rather than against enthusiasm at launch.

A good vendor should welcome the hard questions

The most useful sales conversation is not one where the provider has an immediate answer to everything. A credible provider should be willing to say which claims are supported, which features are still being tested, what depends on school implementation and what it does not yet know. Schools should treat that transparency as evidence of maturity rather than weakness.

OnliGrow's own pilot conversations should use this standard. Where proof does not yet exist, offer a measurement plan instead of a success claim. The commercial objective is still conversion, but the route to conversion is reducing the principal's uncertainty with a specific, testable proposal.