News & Trends

You see the real buying signals at Bett when the “education” badge sits next to “IT”, “estates”, and “safeguarding”. That mix does not shop for shiny features. It shops for fewer failures, fewer complaints, and fewer emergency site visits.

Bett UK 2026 (formerly known as the British Educational Training and Technology Show) ran 21–23 January at ExCeL London, per the official listing on ExCeL’s event page, and it’s a clean read on what UK and EU schools treat as non-negotiable for hybrid learning rooms. The pitch has changed. Schools still want hybrid capability, but they now buy it as “make the room work every lesson” rather than “give us a platform”.

For AVIXA Europe readers, this matters because education work is no longer “nice-to-have”. It is volume, it is repeatable, and it punishes sloppy design. If you want the tenders, stop talking like a vendor and start thinking like a site lead: what breaks, what costs money, and what staff will actually use at 08:55.

What buyers at Bett UK 2026 are paying for

Education AV buying has become brutally practical. Buyers now fund the parts that remove friction and risk, even when those parts look boring on a stand.

Displays that behave like appliances

Interactive flat panels still anchor many classroom upgrade lists, but “interactive” sells less than “predictable”. Buyers ask about wake time, input switching, and whether the screen behaves the same way in every room. They want a display that feels like a dependable utility, not a device that needs babysitting.

They also push hard on fleet control. Can IT apply settings across a site? Can they stage updates? Can they see failures before staff report them? When the answers get vague, buyers smell future support tickets and step back.

The physical layer keeps coming up for a reason. Mount height, cable strain relief, wall plates, and power routing decide whether the room stays tidy and functional after two terms. Ignore that and you build a classroom that looks good on handover day and looks like a crime scene by half-term.

Cameras that make remote learners feel present, not policed

Schools are not trying to create studio-quality video. They are trying to stop remote learners from feeling excluded. That means a stable view of the teacher, the board, and the speaking student without the camera constantly hunting.

Auto-framing and speaker tracking land well when they look calm. They fail when they jump, zoom aggressively, or “choose” the wrong person. A lot of schools now choose a single, strong wide view that stays put over swivelling or auto-tracking systems that distract staff and add failure points.

Placement is also political. Poor angles make staff feel watched. Poor audio-video alignment makes classes look like CCTV. Buyers want a normal-looking install that feels like teaching support, not surveillance theatre.

Photo by sara sanchez sabogal on Unsplash 

Speech-first audio, because nothing else works if nobody can hear

This is where budgets have gotten smarter. Many schools now treat speech clarity as the first spend, because it improves in-room teaching and hybrid delivery at the same time.

Wearable mics still win in hard rooms, especially where staff move a lot, turn away, or teach from the sides of the room. Ceiling and front-of-room mic arrays win where “staff forget the mic” is the real failure mode. Either way, buyers want consistent pickup, simple muting, and predictable gain behaviour when the room gets noisy.

Accessibility sits inside this audio push. Schools have to think about equal access, hearing support, and usable caption settings, and they increasingly tie that expectation to procurement checks. UK guidance on digital accessibility in schools and colleges spells out why accessibility belongs in policy and buying decisions, so “we’ll deal with that later” stops working as an excuse.

Sharing that works for any teacher, on any day

One-cable sharing keeps winning because it reduces chaos. USB-C helps, as long as the room still supports the messy reality of mixed devices and missing adapters.

Wireless sharing still sells, but buyers now treat it as an option rather than the only route. Schools have lived through flaky connections, inconsistent student devices, and Wi-Fi rules that change mid-year. The designs that survive have a wired default that works instantly, plus wireless that behaves when it’s allowed.

Labelling matters more than many integrators admit. “Laptop”, “Visualiser”, “Camera” beats “HDMI 1”. If staff need a laminated cheat sheet taped to the lectern, the design is already losing.

Recording that is easy to run and safe to defend

Schools want replay for catch-up, revision, and remote support. They do not want a production workflow. They also do not want safeguarding surprises.

The systems that stick feel automatic. Start, stop, store, permission. Minimal steps. Clear ownership. Tight control over who can watch and how long content lives. When recording is clunky, staff stop using it. When storage and access rules feel fuzzy, safeguarding leads block it.

The governance questions are not theoretical. Buyers ask who controls retention, how consent is handled, and what happens when a student appears on camera unexpectedly. Practice-focused guidance like Jisc’s lesson capture and streaming guidance is aimed at FE, but the compliance and trust points translate cleanly to school environments.

Spending spreads to the “forgotten rooms”

A quiet shift is happening: money is moving into rooms that used to be ignored. Small group spaces, intervention rooms, flexible halls, staff training rooms. These spaces now carry real teaching load, and hybrid demand reaches them too.

The winning approach is not “kit for each room”. It’s a small set of repeatable room types with the same user routine. When staff can run the same two-minute pattern anywhere, adoption becomes habit, not a special event.

The procurement signal: schools buy categories, not brand stories

If you want to understand education buying, look at how buyers label the spend. In England, the Department for Education’s buying support service treats classroom AV as a defined category, and its Audio Visual Solutions page frames what schools expect to buy, including classroom audio, interactive learning tools, and hearing assistance technology.

That matters because it shapes tenders. It shapes comparisons. It shapes what “good” looks like when a buyer’s checklist gets built. If your proposal is a brand narrative without clear mapping to those buying categories, you force the client to do your job for you.

For AVIXA Europe readers, the integrator play is simple: build a repeatable room standard that fits the buyer’s categories and reduces their risk. Sell the support story. Sell the lifecycle story. Sell the training story. Education clients will pay for reliability when you link it directly to fewer broken lessons and fewer support escalations.

The second signal at Bett: what schools stop buying

Big “platform” pitches still draw crowds, but buyers keep circling back to boring questions: how many clicks, how many logins, how many ways this breaks when the network is busy. Hybrid learning has matured into an operational job, not a transformation project. That changes the kit list.

You see more interest in room consistency than room features. Schools want the same connection points, the same on-screen prompts, the same default inputs, and the same recovery steps across a whole estate. They want a substitute teacher to walk into any room and get going without a panic. That is why “standard room types” now sells harder than “best-in-class”.

The IT angle is sharper too. Buyers ask about device management, user permissions, and whether the system can be supported at scale without turning every classroom into a bespoke snowflake. They also want better separation between teaching simplicity and admin control. Teachers want two or three obvious actions. IT wants everything else locked down, logged, and updateable without drama.

There is also more realism about AI features. Buyers like the idea of auto-captions, summaries, and smarter search, but they treat it as optional until someone can explain the data handling and the safeguarding posture in plain English. If the answer sounds like marketing, the conversation ends fast. Schools do not need hype. They need defensible workflows that survive scrutiny from leadership, parents, and policy.

When buyers say “hybrid learning,” they rarely mean one perfect flagship room. They mean a school estate that behaves consistently under pressure. 

Where hybrid learning projects still fail in the real world

Most rollouts do not fail because the kit is bad. They fail because the design ignores how schools operate.

The first failure is ownership. Classroom AV becomes a liability when nobody owns it end-to-end. Devices need patching. They need clear network rules. They need basic monitoring. If IT cannot control the fleet, they will treat it as a threat, not an asset, and you will feel that in every project meeting.

The second failure is room physics. Acoustics wreck good audio. Bad placement wrecks cameras. Light wrecks content visibility. When the room is wrong, staff blame the technology because that is what they can see. Your design has to include set-up discipline, not just product selection.

The third failure is the routine. Teachers keep tools that save time. They drop tools that steal it. They also do not tolerate “learn the platform” moments when a class is waiting. If your room has no fast recovery path, staff will revert to improvised workarounds and your installed system becomes expensive wall decoration.

The fourth failure is change control. Surprise firmware changes kill trust. Schools cannot babysit rooms after every update. Buyers now push on change logs, staged rollouts, and rollback options because they have been burned and they remember.

My Verdict

If you want to win hybrid learning work after Bett UK 2026, build for the teacher’s worst day, not the showroom demo. Put speech clarity first. Keep sharing dead simple. Make recording easy to run and easy to defend. Give IT control of the fleet and a clean change story.

Most of all, standardise. Define a small set of room types, lock the user routine, and stop promising features that add complexity. Schools are buying fewer surprises and fewer support calls. If your design adds friction, you are not selling innovation. You are volunteering for unpaid troubleshooting.


Main photo credit: Getty Images/gorodenkoff