Peopling the crowded education state: Heterarchical spaces, EdTech markets and new modes of governing during the COVID-19 pandemic

•The pandemic opened for new forms of digital education governance, with implications for teachers’ practices and selves.•Remote education engendered new heterarchies and policy network in conceiving and creating the Oak National Academy.•EdTech businesses and private sector built on existing public education problems to combine profit and humanitarism.•The state created the infrastructure for the private sector to flourish, mixing market-making and social responsibility.•New public and private heterarchies have implications for post-pandemic (hybrid) education and the addressing of inequities. In this paper, we examine a set of complexly related education policy issues that concern changes to the form and technologies of the state, and changing modalities of government and processes of policy and service delivery, and concomitantly, the re-agenting of education policy within extensive but exclusive policy networks. We also explore the role of the state in creating opportunities for business and social purpose organisations within the delivery and management of state education in response to the ambitions of EdTech (Education Technology) companies seeking to sell their products within the state system. The time is that of COVID-19 and lockdown (2020-2021) and the case is the English Oak National Academy (ONA) – a national platform for remote teaching and learning resources that was conceived and created in England in April 2020, with funding from government and various philanthropists, and designed and run by a team of third sector and business policy entrepreneurs. Alongside and in relation to the ONA we consider a series of UK government policy papers on EdTech, interrogate the membership of the EdTech Leadership Group (ELG) and of the EdTech Advisory Forum.