Education and EdTech: when the numbers challenge the narrative

There is a paradox that recent data makes difficult to ignore. In public discourse, education is presented as a priority. In practice, per-pupil spending in primary education in France remains 13% below the OECD average — a gap that raises questions about our collective ability to translate intentions into lasting investment.

It is against this backdrop that the French edtech sector published, in June 2026, results worth noting: 550 companies, €1.8 billion in revenue, 16,000 jobs. Real growth, driven by entrepreneurs who have chosen to build digital responses to educational needs — for students, teachers, and employees in training.

What this coexistence reveals is less a contradiction than a productive tension: between a public education system that evolves slowly, by nature, and an entrepreneurial ecosystem that innovates rapidly, by necessity. One of the central questions for the years ahead is how these two dynamics can better converge — and under what conditions.

Vocational training, which accounts for 44% of the sector’s revenue, offers a partial answer. This segment has thrived because it operates in an environment where decision cycles are shorter, where buyers — companies — can be more responsive to innovation. What this tells us about the conditions for adopting digital tools in education is instructive: the pace of transformation is not solely a matter of technology. It is a matter of governance.

This does not mean that public institutions are impervious to change. Partnerships between edtechs and research laboratories, experiments carried out in certain schools, the growing number of impact assessment initiatives — all of this sketches an underlying shift, even if it moves at a different pace from the entrepreneurial world.

The challenge of the coming years may be less about producing more educational innovations — the sector is capable of that — than about building the conditions in which these innovations can be evaluated, adopted, and deployed at scale. This is not a technical challenge. It is a challenge of trust, method, and time.