I left teaching to fix this. Here's why.

I have been a teacher for over a decade. I still teach. Last year I went part-time in the classroom to start Digital Attitudes, which means I now spend about half my week in a school and the other half building software and consulting with other schools.

People ask me the same question fairly often. Why now. Why this. I usually answer with a story.

Three years ago I was running the workplacements program at the school where I teach. I had inherited a spreadsheet, a folder of emails, and a folder of paper. I had also inherited the exhaustion of the person before me, who had been in the role for four years and had done a remarkable job of holding the program together with goodwill and Sunday afternoons.

Inside six weeks I understood why she had been exhausted. The work itself wasn't unreasonable. Coordinating placements for 78 Year 11 students is tractable work. The exhausting part was that the system around the work was missing. Every term I was rebuilding the same data from scratch. Every term I was answering the same questions from the same hosts in slightly different forms. Every term I was producing the same compliance reports, by hand, from the same source data.

What I noticed, over the next twelve months, was that the school had bought multiple systems intended to solve adjacent problems. None of them solved this one. The systems had been built by people who had never run a placement program in a school. Their assumptions about how schools work were all reasonable. Almost none of them were correct.

I started writing my own tooling. First a script to send the host reminder emails. Then a small web app to track host responses. Then, slowly, a real system. By the end of that year I had something working at our school that was meaningfully better than any of the commercial options I had reviewed. I had also started getting calls from coordinators at other schools who had heard about it through state-level professional learning communities.

The decision to go part-time wasn't a brilliant business decision. It was an acknowledgement that this work, the work of fixing how schools actually run, is not work that gets done by a vendor who has never set foot in a school. It needs to be done by people who are still teaching, still embedded in the operational reality, and still willing to be wrong in front of their colleagues.

That is what Digital Attitudes is. A small team led by someone who is still in the classroom enough days a fortnight to remember what term 4 actually feels like. Building tools that I would be willing to use myself, because the schools we work with deserve nothing less.

The honest answer to "why now" is that I couldn't keep watching the same problems repeat in school after school. The honest answer to "why me" is that I am close enough to the work to know what it costs to get it wrong. The honest answer to "why this" is that nobody else, in my opinion, is doing it the way it needs to be done.

I'd rather be the person inside the building who fixed it than the person outside the building writing a strategy paper about it.