Welcome
I am an educational entrepreneur, edtech specialist and investor. The views expressed here are my own and are often blunt and irreverent.
Edtech, Pensions and Covid
Can pensions help edtech? The sad answer is no in the UK but yes in the rest of the world. And yes, Covid will have an impact. The Teachers’ Pension Scheme (England and Wales) (TPS) is a scheme (not a fund, as it has no assets) with a £432 billion liability to its 1.3 million members. […]
Taylor’s 10 2021
The first version of my simple test for anyone serious about edtech was published in 2014. This is the updated version, but for this is just a first filter and anyone who gets past it (no cheating on Google) then face the far trickier Taylor’s Secret edtech test! How many edtech unicorns have $1bn+ revenue? […]
Tall Poppy Syndrome and Oak National Academy
I grew up in Australia where the ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ is part of the national DNA. You criticise a person or organisation’s success in order to cut them down, deflating arrogance and pomposity. Unfortunately, it’s also about levelling down anyone who has the temerity to succeed. In the UK I have seen it in the […]
NTP FUBAR?
The story that the £160m Phase 2 of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP 2.0) will go to Randstad and not the Education Endowment Foundation’s subsidiary the National Tutoring Foundation Ltd, was broken by Will Hazel in The i on 9 May. Kudos to Mr Hazel and it seems that the NTP will make a formal […]
What a difference 12,000 miles makes
A few weeks ago I was able to attend (virtually) the Sydney Morning Herald Schools Summit. Now in its third year, the summit has become one of the most influential education events in Australia, one that more UK educationalists and edtech companies should pay attention to. As is the norm, the opening keynote was given […]
What Doesn’t Work in Education
The varied ability of teachers in schools is a well-known challenge in improving educational outcomes. The evidence is broad and pervasive and the best advocate of how to address the issue is the internationally renowned educationalist John Hattie (Professor and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Deputy […]
BBC blindness
Now that we are in England’s third Covid lockdown, you’d hope that we have a handle on things in K12 education in relation to content, exams and assessment, school attendance, and so on. Sadly, for most issues, the political and policy response has been chaotic, inconsistent or where big ticket (spending) programs have been devised, […]
The Endowment Effect: relying too much on the initial piece of information offered when making decisions
In my 20 years in the business of UK education, tutoring was almost always seen by governments as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. That political and ideological taboo has been shattered as a result of Covid-19, and in England we now have a state-funded, 3rd party-managed and 4th party-delivered National Tutoring Programme […]
Edu news or partisan spin?
Education remains a topic of interest and debate at every level of society. This should be positive but much of what I hear from well-known commentators is thinly-disguised politics or an attempt to make news rather than report it with any semblance of fact, depth or balance. Does this matter? Yes, I think so. Take […]
Apropos of nothing?
Should you pay to go to university or undertake an apprenticeship or other work-related training? This question stays in the public domain without much nuanced debate. Where governments take bold steps, such as Australia’s hiking arts degrees fees while simultaneously cutting them for STEM job-ready degrees, the outcome seems too remote to be relevant. Even […]
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