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A Starlight reflection on credibility, professional trust and evidence-led teacher development. One of the most valuable things for any education startup is not publicity. It is being challenged to explain clearly why the work matters. Over recent weeks, we have been grateful for the support, guidance and visibility offered by Ross McGill and TeacherToolkit as we continue to develop Starlight, our AI-powered coaching platform for teachers. Ross has long been one of the most i

In September I will be taking part in Artificial Intelligence in Schools: Opportunities and Risks, an online conference hosted by Mark Allen Group across Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10 September 2026. My session runs on the Wednesday. The event arrives at an important moment. AI is no longer a distant prospect for schools. It already shapes how teachers plan, how pupils learn, and how leaders think about workload and professional development. The question now is not whether AI w

Walk into almost any teaching and learning meeting and, before long, the conversation turns to teacher talk time. In a growing number of schools it has become a tracked figure, and in some it has quietly become a target. The instinct behind it is a good one. We want classrooms where pupils are thinking, reasoning and contributing, not sitting passively while an adult fills the room with words. But talk time, taken on its own, is a blunt instrument. It answers a single questio

There is a quiet revolution happening in coaching. For a long time, coaching has been seen as something deeply human, personal and largely one-to-one. A skilled coach sits with a coachee, listens carefully, asks thoughtful questions, and helps that person reflect, grow and act. At its best, coaching is powerful because it is personal. It works because someone feels seen, heard and supported. But that strength has also been its limitation. Traditional coaching is hard to scale

A recent Forbes article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic asks a question that sits right at the heart of the future of professional development: Does AI coaching work? You can read the article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomaspremuzic/2026/04/27/does-ai-coaching-work/ It is an important question, but perhaps not quite the right one. The better question is not whether AI coaching works in some general, universal sense. The better question is: where does AI coaching work best,

Walk into any staffroom this term and you will hear AI mentioned more than ever. What you will hear less of, increasingly, is wide-eyed excitement. Teachers and leaders have moved past the question of whether AI belongs in schools. They are asking harder, more practical questions. Is it secure? Does it actually work? Will it help my staff, or simply give them another thing to learn? The latest Bett UK Education Priorities Report, drawn from more than 17,500 educators and deci

Insights from building the UK's teacher-first transcript-based lesson analysis platform. This week we presented our research at the BERA Teacher Education and Action Network (TEAN) Conference at Sheffield Hallam University. The talk drew together two years of work in classrooms, a year of structured pilot research, and an extended deployment now reaching teachers across the UK, Europe and Asia. This post shares the substance of what we put forward, and what we are taking away

Starlight already supports lesson transcription in over 70 languages. What is new, and what users asked us for, is the ability to transcribe a single recording that moves between two of them. This is the reality in a lot of classrooms. International schools running instruction in English alongside Mandarin, Cantonese, French or others. Welsh-medium classrooms across Wales. MFL lessons in the UK, where the medium of instruction shifts naturally between English and the target l

We've moved Starlight's lesson transcript analysis onto a stronger model this week. The decision didn't come from a benchmark table. It came from sitting down with two sets of reports, generated from the same classroom transcripts, and asking a simple question: which one would a teacher actually find useful? That's the test that matters to us, and it's a harder test than it sounds. What lesson transcript analysis actually involves A classroom transcript is not a tidy document

In 1999, Sugata Mitra cut a hole in the wall of his office in Kalkaji, New Delhi. On the other side of that wall was a slum. He embedded a computer in the hole, with the screen facing into the slum. He turned it on. He walked away. Within hours, children who had never seen a computer were browsing, drawing, playing games. Within weeks, they were teaching each other. Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments, and the work that followed, the Self-Organised Learning Environments (S

There is a pattern we see in schools that adopt Starlight. In the first few weeks, uploads are strong. Teachers record lessons, read their reports, act on the next steps. The platform is doing what it was built to do. Then, gradually, the rhythm fades. Not because the feedback stopped being useful. Not because teachers stopped caring about their development. But because without a regular prompt, professional reflection competes with everything else on a teacher's plate — and

Until today, Starlight was only available to schools. A headteacher or trust leader had to sign off, onboard their staff, and roll it out as an institutional decision. That model works well for schools, and it will continue. But it meant that the individual teacher, the one who just wanted to get better at their craft, had no way in. That changes today. Starlight is now open to any teacher, anywhere in the world. Two ways to sign up There are two paths, depending on who you a

There is a persistent and damaging idea in some schools that coaching is something you offer to teachers who are struggling. It sits somewhere between capability and performance review, wearing the uniform of support but carrying the scent of consequence. Staff learn quickly to read the signal. *Would you like some coaching?* becomes a question with only one safe answer, and the practice itself becomes something to be feared rather than welcomed. This is a problem we have cre

We have published the first edition of Starlight Quarterly, our new newsletter for the Starlight community. This issue covers a lot of ground. We introduce the concept of mining the transcript and why every recording is more valuable than most schools realise. We spotlight three new coaching templates, including Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, the Great Teaching Toolkit suite and a dedicated Careers Guidance template. We share practical guidance on getting the most fr

On Sunday evening, four astronauts aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft flew around the far side of the Moon during their lunar flyby and pointed a camera back towards home. What they captured has stopped the world mid-scroll. A crescent Earth, impossibly delicate, rising above the battered lunar horizon. The Sun’s corona blazing behind the Moon’s dark edge during a near hour-long solar eclipse witnessed from lunar distance. Craters and ridges of the far side captured in extraordin

One of the most common questions we receive from school leaders considering Starlight is a simple one: what do the unions think? It is a fair and important question. Any technology that involves teachers recording their own lessons deserves careful scrutiny, and union representatives are right to ask hard questions about how that data is used, who has access to it, and whether teachers' professional integrity is protected. We have always believed that if Starlight is genuinel

One year ago today, STAR21 Limited was incorporated. Three co-founders, a clear problem to solve, and a belief that teachers deserve feedback that is specific, timely, actionable and regular. Twelve months on, it feels right to pause, take stock, and share where the journey has taken us so far. From classrooms to Companies House Starlight did not begin as a company. It began as a frustration. As a senior leader responsible for teaching, learning and coaching, I knew the probl

In 1995, NASA pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky so small it would be covered by a grain of sand held at arm's length. To the naked eye, there was nothing there. After ten days of continuous exposure, something extraordinary came back: nearly 3,000 galaxies, some of the oldest and most distant ever observed, all hidden in what had appeared to be empty darkness. The Hubble Deep Field did not show scientists something new about the universe. It showed them som

The Education Select Committee has launched a new inquiry examining how artificial intelligence and EdTech are reshaping education across England. The Committee is seeking written evidence on the benefits, challenges and risks of AI adoption in schools, colleges and universities, with a deadline of 10 April 2026. STAR21 co-founder Adam Sturdee, who is also a serving assistant headteacher, has submitted written evidence drawing on his dual perspective as a school leader and as

One of the most common frustrations for careers advisers is not the conversation itself. It is the paperwork afterwards. A meaningful guidance conversation with a student can last twenty or thirty minutes. It can explore aspirations, uncertainties, qualifications, family influences, and possible pathways. Yet afterwards the adviser often faces another fifteen or twenty minutes typing up notes, summarising decisions, and writing action plans that need to be shared with tutors,