GUEST COLUMN:
Cerys Furlong
CEO
GroupED
Wales’ schools and local authorities are not short of data. Attendance, behaviour, attainment and engagement information is collected daily, often at significant effort and cost. Yet despite this, education leaders across the system continue to ask the same fundamental question: what can this data actually tell us about what is happening for individual learners, groups of learners, teaching practices, how we manage our school and its culture and crucially – how should we respond?
The problem is not information. It is insight.
Too often, education data is presented in isolation, in disconnected systems and without the context needed to support fair, proportionate and effective decision making. A fall in attendance, a rise in behaviour incidents or a pattern of lateness may trigger concern, but rarely provides the explanation. Leadership then risks becoming reactive, driven by thresholds and compliance rather than data informed understanding. At system level, this risks misdirecting resources, escalating interventions unnecessarily, and missing opportunities for early, preventative action.
This is where decision intelligence becomes strategically important for Wales.
Decision intelligence moves beyond reporting to support judgment. It brings together multiple indicators and real-world context to help leaders understand not just what is happening, but why. A spike in lateness may reflect transport disruption or local pressures rather than disengagement. Without this context, decisions risk being blunt and inequitable. With it, they can be targeted, timely and supportive.
This matters because education is fundamentally a human system. Learners cannot be reduced to single metrics, and schools are most effective when leaders can see the whole picture: attendance, wellbeing, parental engagement, behaviour and wider circumstances. When emerging risks are understood early, proportionate support can prevent small issues becoming long-term problems that place sustained pressure on schools, councils and public services.
This approach aligns closely with Welsh Government policy. The Curriculum for Wales places the whole child at its centre, emphasising wellbeing, confidence and long-term development alongside attainment. The prevention agenda similarly recognises that early, informed intervention delivers better outcomes and reduces downstream cost. Decision intelligence provides the visibility needed to make these ambitions operational.
However, realising this potential is not primarily a technical challenge. It is a leadership and procurement challenge.
Local authorities and Welsh Government hold a powerful and often under-recognised lever through procurement. Decisions taken now will shape not only which technologies are deployed in schools, but how effectively leaders are able to act on evidence in the years ahead.
Its bewildering to us why closed procurement frameworks and long, inflexible contracts are still being used by councils in Wales, constraining progress. They limit competition, reduce choice, and risk embedding systems that prioritise compliance and reporting over insight and prevention. Once adopted at scale, these solutions can be costly and complex to unwind, locking schools into approaches that no longer reflect policy intent or local need, and leaving them with multiple expensive and inflexible contracts. This practice is directly at odd with the ambition set out in Welsh Government’s new procurement legislation, the Social Partnerships and Public Procurement (Wales) Act 2023, which mandates that Welsh public bodies adopt socially responsible procurement.
For political and senior educational leaders, this represents a strategic risk. Procurement that narrows the market or favours closed systems can undermine innovation, reduce value for money and restrict the ability of schools and councils to respond to evolving challenges. In a rapidly developing AI and data landscape, inflexibility is not neutral; it is a liability.
By contrast, open, competitive and outcomes-focused procurement creates space for better decision-making. It enables councils to test approaches, support Welsh-based innovation, and set clear expectations around transparency, ethics and alignment with national policy. It also ensures that public investment drives continuous improvement rather than long-term dependency.
This is particularly important as Wales positions itself as a leader in ethical and trusted AI. The establishment of AI Growth Zones signals national ambition, but ambition must be matched by implementation choices. Education, with its public value and complexity, should be a priority sector — and procurement decisions will determine whether AI supports professional judgment or simply automates existing limitations.
Digital transformation in education should not be about scaling existing processes. It should be about improving outcomes for learners and supporting those responsible for their care and education. Decision intelligence enhances human judgment rather than replacing it, enabling leaders to act earlier, more consistently and more fairly.
At GroupED, our work has been guided by a simple belief: schools do not need more systems; they need better insight from the data they already hold. As a Welsh edtech company, built with an understanding of Wales’ education structures and values, our focus has been on supporting leadership capacity rather than increasing administrative burden.
As local authorities and Welsh Government consider the next phase of data and AI adoption in education, there is an opportunity to lead by example. Trust, transparency, competition and alignment with policy are not optional considerations; they are essential to safeguarding public value.
Wales has the policy framework, the digital ambition and the emerging AI ecosystem to lead in this space. The responsibility now sits with those shaping strategy and procurement to ensure that technology choices strengthen, rather than constrain, school leadership. If used wisely, decision intelligence can help embed prevention, improve wellbeing and deliver better outcomes across the system. If not, the risk is that Wales invests heavily in better data, but fails to achieve better decisions.
Given the many complex challenges facing Welsh schools, its surely time to work together on improving outcomes for our pupils, showing once again that Wales can lead the way when it comes to educational performance, not lag behind. It’s the least our children deserve.
Cerys is also Chair of Governors of Fitzalan High School in Cardiff, and a Board member of MEDR, The Commission for Tertiary Education & Research.
