A colleague at one of my schools put a question to me recently that I haven't been able to put down. PICRAT asks what technology is doing in a lesson: does it replace, amplify or transform? His challenge went after the first word. Replacement, he argued, has always carried the idea of progress. We replaced walking with the horse and the horse with the car, and each swap was the improvement. But a student starting school in 2030 will never have known the analogue version of most classroom tools. When there is no analogue thing left, what does Replace even mean?
My answer in the moment was narrower than his question deserved. I defended the word as it stood and pointed to the analogue examples everyone already knows. He was asking about 2030 and I was answering about 2015. The question kept working on me afterwards, and this piece is my new thinking: the answer I should have given him at the time.
Stop looking for a before
My first instinct was to say that replacement is measured against whatever the teacher did before, and that "before" has never had to mean paper. The lineage supports that reading. Kimmons, Graham and West set out PICRAT in their 2020 paper, building on Hughes' earlier RAT framework, which judged replacement against a teacher's established practice, whatever that practice ran on. But follow it forward five years and Replace only means swapping an older piece of technology for a newer one. The baseline becomes a moving floor: the blackboard, then the interactive whiteboard, then the slide deck, and before long one AI tool standing in for another. The better answer is to stop comparing with any before. Replace means the technology is replaceable today: it only carries the task, and you could swap it for something else and ask the same of students. If a department changes one quiz platform for another and the lesson uses nothing new, the cell does not move. All the R column needs is a swap you could make today.
When both sides of the swap glow
The car analogy hides a second assumption worth pulling out. In transport, the swap itself was the gain: the car genuinely got you there faster than the horse. In classrooms, the swap is often neutral. The OECD's PISA study of classroom technology found this pattern at scale: heavy investment in devices, no measurable gain in outcomes, because the teaching underneath hadn't changed. A school that retires its search-engine research task and has students put the same questions to a chatbot has changed the tool, not the cell. The worksheet questions are unchanged, the thinking demanded of students is unchanged, and the lesson lands exactly where the old one did. Both sides of the swap glow, so nobody notices. That is the kind of tool swap I expect to see most over the next decade, and it is harder to spot than the laminated-worksheet-turned-PDF kind, because there's no nostalgia signal to give it away.
None of this makes Replacement a failure. PICRAT's nine cells are placements, judged by context, and a lesson that lands in Replace can be exactly the right call: a calmer logistics layer under teaching that already works. The point of the R column was never to shame teachers about paper. It exists to stop us mistaking a tool swap for a change in learning.
The word will age, the test won't
Where my colleague is right, and I want to concede this properly, is that the word will age strangely. Teachers in 2030 will carry a reference point their students never had, and "what did this replace?" will feel like a question about archaeology rather than practice. I can imagine the label needing a refresh long before the test behind it does.
Because the test is the durable part. Could you swap this technology for something else and ask the same of students? Every framework word we use is scaffolding around that one question, and it needs no older tool to compare with, on a screen or off it. The analogue world can disappear entirely. The question still works today.
Andy Perryer is Director of Education Innovation at a group of international schools and the creator of PICRAT Suite. The PICRAT framework was developed by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West in their 2020 paper in the CITE Journal. The Replace, Amplify, Transform axis was first proposed by Joan Hughes (RAT, 2002).