On a recent Australian trip I visited several schools to discuss edtech and incubators. It was looking like nothing out of the ordinary until the last school I saw quite unexpectedly turned out to be the best educational establishment I have ever seen.

Yes, it’s a private school, but in Australia that’s not a big deal (unlike the UK) because almost 40% of kids go to private schools. This school wasn’t outstanding because of their facilities (which were OK), it isn’t in a prestigious location and to be honest I doubt it’s even well-known by many parents outside the local area.

What set it apart was the ethos of educational excellence that you could see and feel in every classroom, student and teacher. The school already has BYOD, team teaching, gamified learning and the flipped classroom – heck they even design their own furniture; not because these are trendy educational fads, but because they help deliver exceptional education.

Underpinning all of this is a strong management not led by a single ‘super head’, but a group of highly experienced teachers who connect directly with students and parents, and who don’t hide in their offices tweaking spread sheets for bureaucratic reports.

There is of course an exceptional principal, who has built an institution and culture that will transcend his tenure. I am sure not every teacher in this school is outstanding when they arrive, but the focus is clearly on helping get them there quickly or getting them out the door.

To put you out of your misery, the school I’m writing about is Northern Beaches Christian School in Terry Hills, NSW (about 25km from Sydney’s CBD). The principal is Stephen Harris, who was Australian Secondary Principal of the Year (NSW) in 2011. During his tenure Stephen has not just built an outstanding school, but also overseen the launch of the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning (SCIL), HSC Online and nurtured a close partnership between NBCS and Macquarie University. He often gets asked to speak at international education events, but to our great loss he has never been invited to speak in the UK. Rather than waiting for an invitation to speak at a conference, Stephen is bringing Australian educators to London in October as part of the  SCIL Vision Tour of Europe.

This means that parents should focus on how good the departments and teachers are within are within any given school.  Sound too radical (it is for unions)? Well the NHS is already doing it for surgeons and I think education is just as important, especially when you look at the damage that occurs when a student is trying to learn from a sub-standard teacher.

School leaders also know how damaging bad teachers are, but the real problem they face is getting them to improve or leave. Getting any employee to improve is a challenge, but the education system has been terrible at identifying and capturing what good teachers do and then using this to help their lower-performing colleagues. It can and does work, so why isn’t it used all the time? I believe it’s the dead hand of education unions, whose power gives their members rights and protections that far outweigh students right to a decent education.  Union membership in education is astronomical and it wouldn’t see this as a problem if not for the relentless negativity spewing out of the of the NUT and NASUWT – ‘Minister should resign…… No confidence motion… Proposed industrial action….Campaign for the abolition of the inspection system’, etc. This doesn’t reflect the thoughts of the majority of teachers, it’s the ranting of a tiny number of politically and ideologically driven union activists who have captured these organisations. Teachers are so disheartened with the politicking of unions that apparently almost 25% would join another organisation that gave them similar employment and industrial protection. Luckily this is just what education start-up edapt is offering.

For head teachers the combination of union power and poor teachers has given rise to the ‘pass the lemon’ phenomenon where the easiest and cheapest way to get rid of an underperforming teacher is to offer them an ‘excellent’ reference in the hope they successfully apply for a job at another school.

Yes, I’m sure there are things they can learn, but what infuriates me is a paucity of other examples of educational excellence that might be just as, if not more relevant.

In my work I have seen outstanding examples of educational excellence at schools like Northern Beaches Christian School in Sydney, in exceptional US charter school chains like Rocketship and KIPP,  Studio Schools in the UK and at Service Children’s Education in Europe.

Ironically, while we are looking for ways to imitate Singapore’s PISA ranking success, their educational bureaucrats are looking well beyond PISA, and one of the main things that they have been focusing on is creativity. Most educators think creativity is a ‘nice idea’ and a fair few have watched Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talks on the subject. But in Singapore it’s not an educational fad or option, their educationalists are trying to put creativity at the heart of their curriculum because they think their continued economic success depends on having a workforce of highly-educated creative problem solvers, not just people who did well on PISA.

Our educational myopia is perhaps best exemplified by the answer I had from a leading Oxbridge academic who had been spruiking the merits of Singapore and Finland at the Spectator education conference a few years ago. I asked if she had ever looked at the success of Services Children’s Education, part of the Ministry of Defence that educates 10,000 students in 38 schools in nine countries outside the UK? ‘No’, she said, ‘I only ever look at centres of educational excellence that I am paid to research’. Doh!

Supply of places in elite Australian private schools is very limited and so parents have to pay to join waiting lists. In most markets a supply side gap normally drives in investment, but for elite private schools there isn’t a simple solution.

Expand?

When Yale wanted to expand its undergraduate intake by 15% or 800 students it had to invest US$600m or $750k per student place. Yale’s US$19bn endowment generates so much cash that they could actually let every student study for free. Few Australian elite private schools are rushing out to invest in more bricks-and-mortar assets. Why? For a start most are already heavily overcapitalised because they are locked in an educational ‘weapons race’ to build things like better sports facilities, boarding houses with ensuite bathrooms and the like.

Even where they have the funds, expanding bricks-and-mortar may not the best, or most pressing strategic investment. Parents are already crying over seemingly never ending fee increases and smart schools may be better off in the long term investing in other parts of the educational market like tutoring, edtech, assessment, employment services or even education start-ups.

But few can even contemplate this until they can square the circle of their biggest variable cost, teacher and staff salaries and pensions. In most every industry, output per unit of labour has risen dramatically for decades, but in elite private schools labour inefficiency is sold as a key benefit of what parents buy, i.e. high teacher to pupil ratios. This is unsurprising at one level (from the fee paying parents perspective), but educationally there is little research that shows any significant correlation between this ratio and excellent educational outcomes: teacher quality is far more important.

One possibility that isn’t yet legal in Australia would be to create new for-profit private schools. This is an existing business model in markets in the USA, Middle East, Africa, India and South East Asia, so why not Australia? It can’t happen overnight because of the current legislative and funding arrangements for education but these are not insurmountable barriers. Indeed there are already companies looking at just this situation and I believe it’s a question of when and not if they will eventually open private schools in Australia.

An interesting example, who have already said Australia is on their list of target markets, is Avenues – The World School, who have just opened their first 750-student private school in New York. The US $75m for the new company and this school came from private equity companies – Liberty Partners and LLR Partners. Rather than owning land and buildings the school leases their landmark building from a New York real estate company and subcontracts out capital-intensive activities like sport (to Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex).

Avenues may be an exciting model for developed markets, but the greatest opportunity in private education is probably at the ultra-low cost level (<US$20 per month) in markets like Africa and India (where there are already 200-300,000 such schools). Pearson, the world’s largest education company are already in both markets; in India via TutorVista (online tutoring and schools) and in Africa via investments in Omega Schools (set up by UK academic and entrepreneur Professor James Tooley) and Bridge International Academies.

Are fees too high?

At $28k the basic fees at elite an Australian private school are perceived locally as being too expensive, but what worries parents more is that these keep rising above inflation year after year. But is there a mismatch between perception and reality?

Fees at Avenues are 43% higher than the their elite Australian counterparts, yet according to the Economist Intelligence Unit World Living Survey Melbourne (5^th) is a far more expensive city to live in than New York (20^th). At New York’s many traditional elite private schools $40k apparently only covers 80% of the real cost per student per year (not at Avenues)! The $8k difference being made up by donations and fundraising.

There is a parallel in Australia, which is the money given to private schools from the federal government which currently averages to about $6050 per student, although at elite schools this is an average of just $2,750 per student.

This means elite Australian private school fees represent excellent value in absolute and relative terms, although I doubt you’d find many parents in Melbourne or Sydney who would agree.

What this does indicate is that if a for-profit school wanted to open in Australia and had a different business model, they could probably keep their fees below $28k even with no government support.

Market disruption

Ask 100 economists what they think will happen in a market with the following characteristics:

• demand exceeds supply
• dominated by a few premium priced brands
• competition for customers is increasingly globalised
• labour costs are high
• business models are old-fashioned
• technology has made little impact
• existing legislative barriers are likely to fall

All 100 different answers will have a single theme – this is a market ripe for disruption.

Yet on the supply side it seems that it is educational businesses from outside Australia who see this opportunity most clearly. In terms of scale, the market may seem small compared to Brazil, India, China and the Middle East, but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for by having things like financial, legal and taxation transparency/certainty, political stability and mature capital markets, who thanks to Australia’s superannuation laws have billions of excess funds to invest.

On the demand side I don’t think existing elite schools really appreciate the extent to which their traditional customers (alumni, professionals and aspirational middle and working class parents) are consider abandoning the existing private education system and replacing it with a mix of lower cost services like tutoring, edtech products and services, membership at sports clubs and even international travel.

Even when parents can bear the fee pain, I get a sense many are now starting to question whether the skills and qualifications provided by traditional elite schools are actually what their children need to live in and compere for jobs in (or create their own) a globalised society?

Exclusive brethren?

Elite private schools look like the ultimate bastions of conservatism and tradition. Ever since I attended one I have continually heard people speculate about the supposed benefits of the old-boy/old-school-tie networks. These do exist in cities like Melbourne and Sydney mainly because so many people go to private school, university and then work in the same city. This is almost uniquely Australian and quite unsustainable, if these are to be truly global cities in the 21^st century. In fact the old school tie is, in my experience, more of a barrier than benefit. For the first time in 30 years I recently tried to use this brotherhood of exclusive brethren to arrange a meeting to discuss an edtech incubator idea with my alma mater. The result – complete disdain and disinterest. This may say more about the school’s corporate memory of my undistinguished time in their charge, but I had the last laugh after one email and phone call had me meeting with the senior management team of their most bitter rival.

Radicals arise

Elite private schools are predicated on the rather radical notion (in educational circles anyway) of educational excellence and elitism. For the last 40 years this has often meant ignoring the educational trends and whims espoused by academics or attempted to be imposed by politicians (including at least two edtech ‘revolutions’).

I think the time has come for these institutions to rediscover their educational radical spirit if they want to prosper and stay relevant in the short and longer term. This will include, but also be far more than just deeply embracing edtech or tinkering with their business models. If they don’t (and soon) they risk creeping irrelevance or extinction from foreseeable challenges of an order of magnitude many times greater than any proposed reforms to curriculum or educational funding.

I have been thinking upon private schools a lot since an interesting meeting with the senior management team at a high profile Australian private school to discuss an edtech incubator idea. These were experienced senior educationalists and administrators running a large multi-campus establishment, where senior fees are $28k p.a. Rather than edtech, our conversation soon focused on the significant challenges this school faces if it’s to remain at the forefront of the Australian education market. To their credit the first major issue they highlighted was that the school couldn’t keep increasing fees by 6% p.a. because it was getting beyond what parents could or would pay.

The cinema business model

I think the basic business model of private schools is very similar to that of a cinema and within ten years many of the pressures that transformed the entertainment business will start changing private schools.

30 years ago every small town in Australia had a local cinema. As a kid growing up in Wangaratta, I spent almost every Saturday night at the Orana cinema. The Orana like hundreds of similar venues, no longer exists, killed off by wave after wave of technology starting with VHS videos and more recently content streamed over the web from companies like LoveFilm, Sky, Foxtel, Telstra and Netflix.

Today most cinemas are large multiplex chains, operating from leased sites with highly leveraged, often private-equity backed, business models. The ushers and staff who controlled the rowdy kids and ran the Orana are long gone, replaced by a lean staffing model (their major variable cost) of one person checking the tickets for several cinemas and another one or two managing the sound and projection for multiple screens.

Private schools by comparison tend to be medium-sized businesses, who are overcapitalised (with land, buildings and other assets) and who have not been able to reduce their major variable cost; teacher salaries and pensions. Instead of being able to cut costs, just last week the Victorian government agreed an increase in government school teacher salaries by 16% over three years (plus a guaranteed $1k ‘bonus’) for no extra work or performance gains.

Options

Australian schools could follow the lead of their UK counterparts (who are mostly charities) in establishing external for-profit subsidiaries. This keeps commercial risks ring-fenced and more importantly allows any profits to be directed back to the core school business.

Schools could free up huge amounts of capital by selling their assets, like land and buildings and leasing them back. It’s not a new idea, Eddie Groves tried it with ABC Learning and it’s also been popular with private equity companies who have built portfolios in areas like special education needs, private hospitals and sports clubs. However, even if a school could convince their multiple stakeholders like religious organisations, alumni and parents that’s a viable strategy, the residual stink from the demise of ABC Learning makes it a remote possibility.

What’s left?

• Raising fees – unpopular and to what strategic purpose would the funds be put?
• Pressuring government to allow for-profit schools – long game with little current political support
• Flipping from being a private to a government school – really only an option for low cost non-elite schools
• Use edtech to ‘remodel the classroom experience’ i.e. cut teacher numbers. It’s worked in US charter school chains like Rocketship, but it’s only a partial solution and seems anathema to the small class ethos of elite private education

Synopsis

I think the senior management teams and those charged with steering the fortunes of elite private schools face a huge challenge. The same external forces that transformed the entertainment industry (globalisation and rapid technological change) will likely also radically reshape private education. But rather than waiting passively for this to happen, smart schools will drive change from inside to reshape not just their existing schools but the whole notion of the role they play in the education market.

If the boarding school I attended thirty years ago was a cinema, then the main feature was more Lord of the Flies than Hogwarts. Extreme bullying was endemic/systemic and the greatest institutional focus was on things like sport and cadets rather than anything educational. I survived by becoming as awful as the worst of my peers; it shaped the man I am today and I sometimes wonder if some sort of penitence for my former deeds is what has kept me in the education business for so long?

I have been involved with a couple as a mentor and in one as an investor in the edtech start up Night Zookeeper. I work in education, not in delivery, but  the business end, which is a huge international market. To many educators and commentators I’m one of the bad guys, but I don’t mind because there is very little in this ‘secret garden’ isn’t supplied by people motivated primarily by the profit motive. Doubt it, then think about who provides the paint on the wall, the floor coverings, lights, heat, toilet paper, water, desks, chairs and the IT software and hardware used ins chools? None is made by a government, they just use our taxes to buy them from for-profit private companies (and if you want to fix something in education start with procurement because it stinks in almost every market).

For education start ups, most accelerators and incubators simply don’t work  because they lack sector knowledge (particularly amongst mentors) and this is something that is almost as valuableto an edtech start up as angle investors money.

For a few years there was only one specialist in this area, ImagineK12 in Silicon Valley. They pitch themselves as ‘not an incubator’, so I suppose they’re an accelerator, but the distinction seem tenuous. Imagine K12 are terrific, they really push teams  with edtech ideas to being investable propositions, with 70% of their alumni companies having raised money so far (13 of 19). I also rate several of their alumni including Chromatik, LearningJar, Bloomboard and ClassDojo. I spoke to Tim Brady of ImagineK12 last year about whether they were looking to expand outside the US and he said quite bluntly they had no plans to do so (not an unusual world view for many US edtech players and investors).

In the last 24 months investors have started to get more excited about edtech, first in the US and now in Asia, Latin America and to a lesser extent Europe. Most people interested in edtech will know about the money investors have piled into companies like Edmodo, Udemy, Coursera, 2U, EverFi, Wireless Generation, Grockit, Busuu, etc. Interestingly few institutional investors have had the courage to back UK edtech start ups, but that’s another story.

Given the success of ImagineK12, and the growing investor interest, it’s perhaps no surprise that there have been a slew of announcements about education-specific accelerators and incubators in the last few weeks. These include Kaplan’s EdTech Accelerator with TechStars (New York), Pearson’s Catalyst incubator (UK/US), EdTech Passport from Socratic Labs (New York), Learn Launch in Boston, Emerge Venture Labs (London) and even a rather woolly ‘social impact’ edtech program due for mid 2013 from Teach First (funded by the Esmee Fairburn Foundation)

This is a good thing and I have even been looking at starting my own edtech incubator, but the difference between what I think is needed and what these programs offer, is still quite marked.

• Only two (ImagineK12 and Kaplan’s EdTech Accelerator), have deep links with schools and students (i.e. the market). Only one (ImagineK12 again) has any real track record of success
• Too US centric. There is a lot of investor appetite for edtech, but good investable ideas and the teams who can be found all over the world and many simply don’t want to live in the US
• Bubble valuations – incubators and accelerators are giving pre-revenue edtech start ups crazy valuations, e.g. £40kfor 10% (or less) of their equity
• The promise of high-level mentoring is more honoured in the breech with busy executives not having the bandwidth or the skillset needed by edtech start ups
• A mismatch between qualifications and skills. Having an MBA/Oxford degree and time as an investment banker may help you raise some EIS/SEIS cash from your mates, but they aren’t the skillset to build a successful edtech startup.

Will they work? That depends on your metric of success. I think some of the higher profile ones will continue as small outposts within corporate behemoths, but their real remit won’t be CSR or to boost the edtech sector. They will be cogs large market intelligence programs, identifying trends and scooping up start ups whose DNA could potentially infect or kill their corporate host. Even where they get close to the market, the programs from the large players will probably suffer a fundamental disconnect between the speed and agility needed in a start up and the slow, process-driven, political cultures of their sponsors. The best example I have seen of this was with Mathletics and Microsoft. When Mathletics and World Maths Day started to take off, Microsoft owned a chunk of the equity in their owner 3P Learning, via a JV they had in Australia called 9MSN. I remember speaking to a senior Microsoft person in Seattle who said his team loved Mathletics and thought it could become a flagship product to help rejuvenate their education offering. As it turned out Microsoft couldn’t really engage with the much smaller 3P and eventualy their shares were sold to US VC firm Insight Venture Partners.

My money is on small programs that link edtech entrepreneurs quickly and directly to their market. They will be run by sharp-elbowed individuals with a successful track record in edtech. Hopefully smart UK investors will soon start backing their judgement because if they don’t the small edtech diaspora I see today will soon become a brain drain that UK plc can’t afford.

Ben Barton an edtech entrepreneur comments:

While I, like Richard, welcome this interest in edtech and the move of accelerators/incubators into this space, I think that without the track record of achieving funding (one route to money) or deep penetration into the education vertical (another route to cash) there is little reason for me to invest the time, effort or energy into applying, pitching and taking off to NYC for £20k in return for a 6-10% stake and no guarantees.

I prefer a do-it-yourself approach: twitter, teachmeet/edcamp, a board advisor committing twice the amount for the same stake and a no-fear attitude to approaching VCs and angel networks should get you traction, revenue and some meetings (one-to-one rather than many-to-one). Having said that, I’ve been in education for 20+ years in the UK and overseas and Zondle is my third start-up (one success and one failure).

So what do I want? Am I too late for an incubator/accelerator?

Zondle is 2 years in, 200k users, 5m questions answered every month, 6 weeks into revenue generating.

We will push through or … we could find an incubator/angel who will support us with VCs, help us to get into a core market (one US state) and push us every step of the way on details of the business, especially the financials. They may drip cash in on great terms but they will primarily be about growing the business in the market (rather than with the investor eco-system).

In 2008, Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard (then Minister for Education), having launched the $16bn (£10.5bn) Building the Education Revolution (BER) followed this with the $2.4bn (£1.6bn) Digital Education Revolution (DER).

‘Revolutionary’ sums; except that BER wasted several billion dollars and now DER is causing a revolt, not by taxpayers, but amongst teachers, parents, students and state politicians.

DER’s aim was to revolutionise Australian education by giving every Australian student in years 9-12 a computer. $1.4bn (£0.9bn) was spent on computers and $800m (£526m) on ‘implementation’. Using the unique mathematics and accounting measures used in Canberra this totalled $2.4bn. The ‘missing’ $200m is to most people a large sum but to Ms Gillard and her Treasurer this is a rounding error given it represents less than 1.2% of the $175bn (£115bn) deficit they have run up since coming to office in 2007. Prior to their election the national deficit was $0bn.

As with any revolution there are heretics and for DER these are the state governments who have the actual responsibility for delivering education. They quickly saw that Ms Gillard’s ‘gift’ was actually going to hit their education budgets hard and protested vigorously, only to be placated by the promise that ‘there would be future funding arrangements subject to negotiation of new agreements’. In revolutionary terms this is about as substantive as Marie Antoinette encouraging the starving peasants ‘to eat cake’.

From 2009, DER delivered 957,805 computers but with no new funding agreement, schools are now threatening to charge parents $400 p.a. for the laptops and software.

Why did DER cost $2.4bn or $2,506 per computer? The answer is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) something well understood in corporate Australia and so it seems in schools. In 2008 (before DER) the NSW Department of Training and Education, Australia’s single largest organisation (public or private with a budget of $11.8bn), put out a tender for a new email system. As a result NSW DTE moved to Google apps for Education (Gmail), which in the first year alone saved them 66% on what they had been previously been paying to Microsoft.

So what will happen to the revolution?

Ms Gillard’s government has been lagging in the polls and to regain the political initiative she unexpectedly announced Australia’s longest election campaign with the poll date set for September 14. A bold, almost revolutionary move, but so far things haven’t gone quite to plan. In the first week a serving former Labour member was arrested on 149 counts of fraud followed days later by the announcement that two senior Cabinet ministers had decided to leave politics. It doesn’t take a political pundit to see Ms Gillard needs to do something substantive and fast or in October she may be looking for a new job. My guess is she will fall back to what has worked for her in the past, spending lots of money to create another ‘education revolution’.

With a softening economy and sizable deficit, Ms Gillard can’t afford another BER so my guess is we will soon hear a big media launch of DER II.  When/if this happens, I can only hope she and her team grasp the TCO nettle and this time choose something more affordable like Google Chromebooks. I have just calculated the TCO for 957,805 Chrome Books (manufactured by companies like Samsung and ACER) and while this is only what Google estimate, it does give a TCO of $1.025bn (£688m) compared to their estimate of $6bn (£4bn) for PCs.

Chromebooks are only one option, and Ms Gillard may like a true revolutionary may elect to use something more sexy like Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) or the $20 Indian Aakash tablet. Either may work, but from a financial and risk management perspective Chromebooks are a better choice as a proven technology whose TCO is known and even more importantly 1.2m Australian students (in NSW) already use Google’s underlying technology.

In the gladiatorial world of Australian politics, where all that matters is the media cycle and opinion polls, if Ms Gillard remains as Prime Minister (until the election or after) she would do well to remember George Danton quote that, ‘In revolutions authority remains with the greatest scoundrels’.

I was one of the organisers and a judge at the recent Start Up Weekend Education London. For those who have survived one of these 54 hours marathons you will know all about the heady mix of inspiration, frustration, elation and exhaustion.

In 2011 Night Zookeeper won the first ever London Start Up Weekend Education and then went on to win several other events including a place in the first cohort of companies in the Wayra’s London incubator. Since then the Night Zookeeper team of Paul, Mathieu, Josh and Buzz had been keen to organise another event as a way of contributing back to the UK edtech community. With the help of Deborah Rippol from Start Up Weekend HQ (and many others), they managed to plan and run this hugely successful event at Google’s London HQ, even though they had Wayra demo day just three days later plus BETT 2013!

On Friday night the 90 participants pitched 47 ideas, from which 15 teams were created and during which an astonishing amount of pizza and beer were consumed. On Saturday, the teams bonded, coalesced, pivoted and generally worked themselves into a frenzy with the support of 17 experienced edtech mentors. But to survive 54 hours takes more than pizza and beer, so high profile online caterer HouseBites were hired to provide two days of breakfast lunch and dinner. Not only was the food terrific, but as a tech start up themselves, the HouseBites team ended up being very active participants in Start Up Weekend Education.

On Sunday most teams stayed until 4am and were back by 10am to hone their ideas and to get ready for the all important pitch competition. Starting at 5.30 pm each team had just 5 minutes to explain their concepts and to survive 2-3 minutes of grilling by the judges. With changeovers, more beer, comfort breaks and a few technical glitches this session lasted almost 2.5 hours, although if seemed more like 30 minutes. Afterwards while the teams decompressed over beer and curry, the judges had to start earning their keep. Having several forceful personalities on the panel didn’t make this an easy task, but after 45 minutes we finally managed to agree the winners. It was then back to the main auditorium to announce the winners, thank the sponsors, mentors and organisers and for the important post-event celebrations to begin.

The winners of Start Up Wekend Education London 2013 were:

1. Useedu (@Useedu) – educational and motivational content for screens/displays in schools. Team led by Stephen Lockyer, a deputy-head teacher
2. Word Wars (@WordWarsEDU) – a competitive word game (based on word lists set by teachers) designed to address the issue of word poverty amongst K-6 students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Team included an inspirational Teach First teacher
3. Eduudle (@eduudle) – MOOC aggregator with strong social and curation elements (think Spotify meets Expedia for HE).

Honourable mention – Musomic (@musomic) an exciting graphic comic book and music business that aims to promote literacy and creativity

Kumbaya (of sorts)

The world of edtech isn’t for the feint hearted and while I have a reputation for being blunt and unsentimental, I would have liked to give an award to every team for their sheer hard work and enthusiasm plus their ability to remain good humoured when few had more than 10 hours sleep over three days! The point of Start Up Weekend isn’t about forming a fully functioning start up in 54 hours, it’s about showing people they can be entrepreneurs and change the world (even from inside organisations).

Without the support of the international and our local sponsors there would have been no Start Up Weekend Education London. So thank you again to The Technology Strategy Board, OCR, Macmillan Digital, TWIG World, MediaCore, busuu.com, Cloud 66, Bootlaw, Plymouth University, the assignment report, Lucraft Hodgson & Dawes and finally Google UK. Similarly, the mentors who all gave up their weekend to support the event and teams, also deserve special recognition.

Long after the teams and judges had departed the Night Zookeeper’s and the indefatigable Edd Stockwell were still at Google cleaning and emptying bins, helping the HouseBites team shift their equipment, etc. This tiny team of tireless volunteers were the DNA of Start Up Weekend Education London 2013, without whom none of us would have experienced an unforgettable 54 hours.

At a basic level the index is built using Onalytica’s sophisticated data analysis tools, which are used by companies like Microsoft, Samsung, SAP and HP. In the last year they have been developing various indices and together we decided to apply this to various areas of education with blogs being the first.

In the first phase we have analysed 800 blogs and hope to include another 3000-4000 in the next iteration. At this stage we hope to have data, which is searchable by level (K-12, FE and HE), area covered (e.g. maths, professional development, etc.) as well as including details like Twitter accounts and contact. Once we think we have enough validated data the index may then be able to be used with Onalytica’s new Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) solution.

Rather than trying to explain the underlying maths and science behind the index, there is a brief overview in the PDF along with details about who to contact at Onalytica for further information.

Perhaps unsurprisingly all the top 10 blogs are from North America, with Dan Meyer’s dy/dan at number one, followed by Audrey Watter’s Hack Education at number two. In the UK Ewan McIntosh’s blog leads the European pack at a very respectable 15th (just behind Tom Vander Ark’s Getting Smart blog). The rankings are already causing some controversy and I have already had to explain to one well-known blogger why they didn’t make the top 100.

There have been no yellow buses operating in New York for a month because many of their drivers and matrons (aides to help disabled children) have been on strike. It’s the first strike in 34 years and it has polarised parents, teachers, politicians and voters. New York’s school buses transport about 150,000 children each day almost one third of who have significant special needs. The total cost to local taxpayers is $1.1bn p.a., about $7,300 per student per annum or $40 per student per day for the 180 school days each year. It’s a sizeable sum and far more on a per-student basis than it costs to run similar programs in other major US cities.

What Mayor Michael Bloomberg is attempting is something no other political administration has dared to tackle for thirty years, to open up the school bus market to real market competition. In a nation that prides itself on free markets this may seem an anomaly but it’s something neither the former Mayor Rudolph Gulliani nor his schools chancellor Joel Klein (now running News Corp’s Amplify education business) or their predecessors ever dared attempt.

A proposal to restructure 1100 bus routes for special needs children has been cited as the trigger for the strike. However, the more likely cause is that the Bloomberg administration put two new contracts out to tender without Employee Protection Provision (EPP). EPP protection for school bus drivers, matrons and mechanics came into force in 1979 after the last strike over school transport, which lasted 13 weeks. This strike started when the then schools chancellor (later mayor) Edward Koch (who died last week) ended the monopoly of a company called Varsity who supplied the buses for 2000 bus routes.

In both disputes the union at the centre was Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Having a union involved is hardly surprising, however Local 1181 is hardly your typical workers collective. In 2006 the US Federal government and FBI brought RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act) charges against senior members of the Local 1181 who, according to prosecutors, were closely linked to the Genovese crime family.

However, it’s not just the unions who seem straight from central casting. On the business side you have people like Dominic Gatto, a Vietnam veteran and CEO Atlantic Express, one of the biggest school bus companies (supplying about 25% of all NY’s buses). Aside from admitting to paying bribes to Local 1181 union officials, including imprisoned former boss Salvatore Battaglia, Gatto is also currently an ‘employer trustee (of Local 1181’s) health, pension, and welfare funds’. According to the New York Times, during a 2010 meeting with education department officials to discuss contract extensions, Gatto pulled a pistol from his briefcase and was charged with menacing, harassment and reckless endangerment. Gatto was released without bail and is believed to have only had to pay an administrative penalty. While Gatto had the necessary licence to own and carry the pistol, why he felt compelled to bring one to a meeting with education bureaucrats (let alone to produce it) is unclear.