Right now, a lot of schools are finalising what devices to buy for next year: new laptops for staff, tablets for classrooms, maybe a round of interactive displays. Before that shortlist gets locked in, it’s worth pausing on a different question. How much value is your school actually getting from the technology you bought last year?
According to ASI Solutions’ 2025 Growth and Resiliency Report, reducing costs is now the top IT priority for Australian schools. That makes the answer worth getting right. Every dollar spent on new devices is meant to come back as time saved, better teaching, or less pressure on stretched IT teams, but only if staff have the skills to make the most of what they’re given.
The gap between spend and impact
Schools allocate a growing share of their budget to technology, expecting it to lift teaching, learning, and administrative efficiency. Deloitte research shows organisations typically invest around 5.49% of revenue in technology for exactly this reason. Despite that, productivity often stays flat, not because technology fails, but because staff haven’t been given the skills to use what’s already been bought, and that pattern tends to repeat with every new device rollout unless something changes.
The cost of that gap is more concrete than it sounds:
- Staff spend hours troubleshooting basic tech issues instead of teaching.
- Electric.ai research found staff can reclaim an average of 140 hours a year by clearing common tech hurdles. Based on average hourly wage data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, that’s worth roughly AU$5,600 per staff member annually, or AU$560,000 in recovered value each year for a school with 100 staff.
- Fast Company reports every digital disruption costs staff an average of 23 minutes to refocus.
None of that shows up as a line item on an invoice. It shows up as a teacher spending their prep period fighting with a login, or an IT team fielding password resets instead of working on the initiatives that actually need their attention. Buy new devices without addressing it, and the same pattern just repeats on newer hardware.
Hiring more IT staff isn’t the answer
The instinct when IT support is stretched thin is to look at headcount. For schools, that instinct runs into a wall. ASI’s Growth and Resiliency Report found 44% of Australian education IT teams already struggle to find skilled IT talent. There simply aren’t enough people to hire your way out of this, on this year’s device rollout or the next one.
The alternative is to build capability into the staff you already have. When teachers and admin staff can solve the small stuff themselves, IT teams get their time back for the work that actually moves the school forward, and staff spend less time wrestling with technology and more time on students.
It matters for wellbeing too. Gallup research shows 67% of Australian and New Zealand employees are disengaged, and CPA Australia reports five out of ten Australians experience significant workplace stress. Tech friction is a quiet contributor to both. Closing the skills gap isn’t just an efficiency play, it’s a staff experience one.
What actually closes the gap
It’s tempting to treat digital skills as something you fix once, a professional development day at the start of the year, a quick induction session for new staff, then move on. That’s not enough. The tools staff use change, roles change, and skills that felt solid in Term 1 fade by Term 3 without reinforcement.
What closes the gap is treating digital skilling as ongoing rather than an event: small, regular, role-relevant learning that keeps pace with how staff actually use technology day to day. A teacher needs different skills from an enrolments officer, and both need more than a one-off session to build real confidence. Schools that build skilling into the normal rhythm of the year, rather than a single training block, see it stick, and that matters most in the months around a device rollout, when the gap between old habits and new tools is widest.
That shift also changes who carries the load. Right now, the informal “tech-savvy colleague down the hall” often ends up doing the job an IT team can’t get to. Spreading digital confidence across staff means fewer people are stuck relying on whoever happens to be nearby when something goes wrong.
Make your investment count
The missing piece usually isn’t hardware or software, it’s the confidence to use what’s there. Closing that gap doesn’t need a bigger budget. It needs a deliberate, ongoing focus on the people using the technology, not just the technology itself, starting before this year’s devices even arrive.
Deciding what to buy this year? Book a 1-hour Digital Skills Workshop and we’ll help you identify where improved digital literacy will make the biggest difference for your staff and students, whatever ends up on the order.
MAKE THIS YEAR'S DEVICES COUNT
BOOK A WORKSHOP
