A quiet revolution has been happening in our education system. Large-scale public sector IT projects are often associated with failure and overrun. This one is different. It is not a single, top-down design, but a growing network of distributed and devolved technology infrastructure that is changing what happens in education.

A quarter of all lessons in primary schools now are using new technology. Over half of all secondary pupils have their own school-based email account for study purposes. Over six million people use our college and university networks in post-school learning. And on the home front, 99 per cent of UK households are now within 10 kilometres of a Learndirect or UK Online centre where they can access online learning at any time.

It is a rapid change, over just a few years. It means that we must expect education to change radically as a result, but in what way? And how will the teaching profession respond?

Access to new technologies is being driven by the business market, and by a now vibrant leisure market. That means that education can ride on the back of wide access to ever-cheaper ICT infrastructure, which is good. But it also means that education is not driving the innovation, which should cause us to pause.

Teachers’ interest in using e-learning derives in part from the startling evidence of the motivational impact of digital technologies. The dynamic interaction offered by a computer program, or a website, or a chatroom, engages the attention of learners and keeps it. No, they often don’t concentrate well in a classroom. But compare the non-activity of sitting listening to a teacher talk with the highly charged activity possible in a moderately well wired teenage bedroom. Teachers see digital learning technologies as a way of engaging these worldly and expert consumers.

But learning technologies, while they make learning more engaging, still need teachers.

The intellectual effort it takes to learn a particular skill or concept will not change dramatically. What changes with the introduction of e-learning is our ability to engage learners in that kind of effort. While it still takes hours of practice to learn a foreign language, they can now do it in the context of an interactive game or an online link to a pupil with similar interests in another country. While it still takes serious cognitive effort to understand Newton’s laws of motion, that process is now motivated by the task of building a virtual reality game about spacecraft, with childrens’ understanding validated by how well the game works.

What it takes to learn is not likely to change a great deal, therefore, but what it takes to teach will – with the result that the outcomes of the education system should eventually be greater in both quantity and quality. The work of the teacher is not to recapitulate what the experts have said or written. The task is rather to construct the learning environment in which learners are encouraged and enabled to do what it takes to learn – personalised learning. It shifts the focus from telling learners about a subject to working out the activities they must do to learn it. There is a broad consensus in the UK that this constructivist approach is right, but our system – Victorian school design, whole-class teaching, mass education – did not easily foster it. With our growing network of interactive, adaptive, online communications technologies, teachers trained to exploit them properly will be able to help every individual achieve their learning potential.

The UK can already boast of some critical successes. The National College of School Leadership links thousands of headteachers in an online community of discussion and shared good practice. The Training and Development Agency for schools provides training on the use of ICT in all subjects for both initial and in-service teachers.

Learndirect’s flexible delivery has brought over 750,000 new learners into adult learning by offering over 400 short courses online. The Open University had adapted its uniquely successful distance learning approach into an even bigger online university, top-ranked for quality by its students, with over 350,000 staff and students online.

The education profession in the UK is engaging well with the future of learning. This is vital when the drivers of technological change are far removed from the classroom and the campus. The government’s e-strategy for education – ‘Harnessing technology: Transforming learning and children’s services’ – is the first of its kind in the world to provide a coherent technology strategy across all sectors of education. At its heart is an emphasis on the importance of teachers and academics reinterpreting their traditional role to also include control of the learning technologies now available. They must drive the innovation in learning that will certainly happen, with or without them.