Yesterday, the Educational Publishers Forum (EPF), a network of educational publishers and their country associations within the IPA (International Publishers Association) met for the first time in 2025 in London. The group have been meeting three to four times a year annually and this was the 59th meeting, but it struck me that, on the eve of World Education Day 2025, the diverse range of topics discussed reflect an education environment potentially undergoing its biggest revolution since the introduction of printed schoolbooks.
There are of course technological changes like learning platforms which enable teachers to create videos and lesson content very cheaply and quickly, …and students to create video answers and then …AI tools that automatically correct voice answers by pupils.
And then there are initiatives that remove the technology with one country investing over €200m on educational resources that must be from professional educational publishers and cannot be digital. We also discussed the concept of breaking space and time and how while education no longer needs to take place in a classroom that isn’t necessarily a reason to enable the remote technology. The social setting of school and classroom is fundamental to student development.
The are legal changes with one country changing copyright permissions to allow the training of AI models (while copyright law is clear but not being implemented in many countries) and legal challenges where publishers in one country are serving judicial review proceedings on its government for unfair competition in the state provision of free education resources
And finally, and reassuringly, there is recognition of the importance of reading with one country making reading for an hour a day compulsory as part of the national curriculum.
While the revolution and the rate of change may feel dizzying, it was inspiring to hear how educational publishers are engaging on all these fronts and seeking to improve learning outcomes for pupils everywhere.