Welcome

I am an educational entrepreneur, edtech specialist and investor. The views expressed here are my own and are often blunt and irreverent.

 

Rebuild schools or go virtual?

The current controversy over schools closed due to buildings using RAAC (Reinforced Autoclave Aerated Concrete) is an interesting one. Of the UK’s 22,000 schools, around 5% have so far been identified as using RAAC but the overwhelming majority of buildings with RAAC are in the other parts of the government sector, particularly hospitals, and the […]

23 days ago Education More
 

VAT on private school fees

I have been trying to write something sensible about the Labour Party’s policy of applying VAT to private school fees and removing their charitable business rates discount (80%). But after reading several long and boring reports, tracking the issue back to 1997 and writing over 5000 words, I’m still struggling to find clarity. Stepping back, […]

1 month ago Education More
 

What would Jeremy think?

In 2019 the Labour Party, then led by Jeremy Corbyn, pledged at its annual conference to, ‘abolish private schools and integrate them into the government sector’. This spawned an extensive social media campaign with the hashtag #AbolishEton’, which was for a short time led by an activist teacher from London called Holly Rigby. Ms Rigby, […]

4 months ago Education More
 

The lack of innovation in edtech

A week ago Oak National Academy announced the world’s first totally open source curriculum, as well as promising to open up their underlying source code. I could bore you with the minutiae of Open Government Licensing and how it’s the UK equivalent to Creative Commons By Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) as well as about the MIT […]

4 months ago Education More
 

The voyage from POP to POPEYE

When I started investing in early stage edtech I didn’t have a specific model, financial or otherwise, to judge who received my small investments. I have spoken and written about what I subsequently developed, although my models and their underpinning are neither scientific, mathematical or grounded in any accepted business thinking. I started out by […]

7 months ago Education More
 

Child labour and edtech

We should always ask how the use of any particular edtech helps the learner and educator. Sadly, most of the edtech I have seen over the last 25 years appears to do little for either, one reason so many educators are cynical about the promises of edtech creators and vendors. Having been involved in the […]

9 months ago Education More
 

Is BESA stuck in a Jam?

BESA (British Educational Suppliers Association) are likely to seek a Judicial Review of the government’s decision to fund Oak National Academy (Oak), but only if their members fund it. This may play well with their edtech and publisher members, but is a non-issue for the many companies who supply things like furniture, pens and paper, […]

11 months ago Education More
 

researchED 2022

For the second time, I shelled out some of my own hard-earned cash to attend researchED 2022. Instead of last year’s schlep to Stratford, this year was an 88 bus from Westminster straight to Parliament Hills Schools in Hampstead. Arriving early allowed me the luxury of breakfast and coffee at a local independent deli, something […]

1 year ago Education More
 

Don’t waste your time reading the DfE’s latest edtech report

Making sense of the business of edtech has always been a challenge. It’s why I set up the Assignment Report in 2005 and why I read the DfE’s most recent edtech report, published in June, with interest. Business Intelligence (BI) is weak in most education and edtech companies and is too rarely integrated effectively into […]

1 year ago Education More
 

1520 600gm Mangos (what it means in China)

For governments worldwide, education is a major policy and spending area, so it’s inevitable they try to influence it as much as their remit allows. In most Western countries, scope is often limited by the structural and segmented nature of learning, e.g. Pre-school, K12, HE, FE, corporate learning, etc.  In China, however, the government (the […]

1 year ago Education More