The short answer is that the UK government from 1979 to 1997 was pretty hostile towards the entire idea, with the exception of a few specific pet projects like the BBC micro, and subsequent governments were lukewarm.
Some the projects were brilliant engineering but commercially never stood a chance like Concorde; other projects like the amalgamation of struggling private car companies as a part-nationalised state one were renowned for the sort of mediocrity and mismanagement that made privatisation and abandonment of industrial subsidies politically fashionable, even independently from those approaches helping pay for tax cuts.
The BBC Micro is arguably an outstandingly successful pivot instead. Promoting computer lessons at schools might have been a huge success in encouraging more parents to buy PCs, but parents bought commodity hardware running Windows/DOS, and after that it became natural for schools to shift towards purchasing the same thing with connectivity to the newfangled world wide web rather than Acorn's specialised systems providing educational wordprocessors with speech synthesis that ran on a floppy disk. Even without that trend, specialised hardware/software products specific for the UK educational market was never an ideal niche to be in anyway, whereas licensing ARM chips turned out to be a very lucrative and long term business for one of Acorn's subsidiaries instead.
Some the projects were brilliant engineering but commercially never stood a chance like Concorde; other projects like the amalgamation of struggling private car companies as a part-nationalised state one were renowned for the sort of mediocrity and mismanagement that made privatisation and abandonment of industrial subsidies politically fashionable, even independently from those approaches helping pay for tax cuts.
The BBC Micro is arguably an outstandingly successful pivot instead. Promoting computer lessons at schools might have been a huge success in encouraging more parents to buy PCs, but parents bought commodity hardware running Windows/DOS, and after that it became natural for schools to shift towards purchasing the same thing with connectivity to the newfangled world wide web rather than Acorn's specialised systems providing educational wordprocessors with speech synthesis that ran on a floppy disk. Even without that trend, specialised hardware/software products specific for the UK educational market was never an ideal niche to be in anyway, whereas licensing ARM chips turned out to be a very lucrative and long term business for one of Acorn's subsidiaries instead.