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Why the inspection vocabulary has changed, and why the evidence got there first. Here is a small linguistic detail with large implications. When Ross McGill of TeacherToolkit analysed Ofsted’s new Schools Inspection Toolkit earlier this year, he found the phrase ‘professional learning’ fifteen times. The phrase ‘CPD’ does not appear once. That is not an accident of drafting. Words carry intent, and the intent here is unmistakable. The renewed framework, published in November

At STAR21, the company behind Starlight, our mission is simple: to make high-quality feedback more specific, timely, actionable and regular. That is what we mean by STAR feedback. Teachers do not need more generic comments. They do not need feedback that arrives weeks after the lesson. They do not need another overloaded dashboard that takes more time to interpret than it saves. They need feedback that helps them see something clearly, reflect on it quickly, and decide what t

Satya Nadella says the future belongs to organisations that own their learning loop. For schools, the whole organisation is the dataset, and almost all of it currently disappears by Friday. Satya Nadella recently posted a long note titled “A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable.” His argument has a simple core. In the AI era, the organisations that thrive will not be the ones that pick the best model. They will be the ones that build a learning loop on top of a model,

A solstice reflection on a year of AI teacher coaching at scale Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. It is also, by our own choosing, STAR21’s company day. We picked this date deliberately. The solstice is a moment of maximum light, and a natural point to pause, take stock and look ahead before the next season of work begins. For a company built around feedback and growth, that felt like the right rhythm to keep. STAR21 was fou

Some of the most useful things we write come straight from the questions teachers and leaders ask us. When a school is weighing up whether to bring Starlight into its professional development, the people in the room are right to push. Hard questions are not an obstacle. They are the reason we keep sharpening how we explain what we do, and very often they are the reason a topic ends up here on the blog. Two questions have come up repeatedly in recent weeks, and both deserve a

When we reflect on our own teaching, context is everything. The lesson you teach to a top set first thing on Monday is not the lesson you teach to a mixed-attainment Year 9 class last period on Friday. Different prior knowledge. Different pacing. Different personalities, routines and pressure points. Every teacher knows this instinctively. Yet most coaching, and most observation, has struggled to hold that nuance. That is the problem we have just set out to solve. We have shi

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