UK Edition
Why Britain is top of the class for education technology
British companies are at the forefront of a classroom revolution that is transforming the way pupils learn
Far from the fusty IT lessons that parents of schoolchildren may remember, innovative technology is becoming an increasingly integral part of the classroom.
Teachers sweep through lesson plans on interactive smartboard screens instead of scrawling tasks in chalk, children use tablets to complete quizzes on their latest completed book and tap colourful smartphone apps to solve quick-fire maths challenges at home. There are even social apps for teachers to celebrate children’s achievements with parents throughout the day.
“There’s no point in hiding how much technology influences our lives now,” says one parent at Kent primary school Halfway Houses. “They still do all their work by hand, which is good, but the tech and apps benefit my son because it makes it fun and he knows how to use this stuff. They are the tech generation and everything is so accessible, so no point in shying away from it. Even my toddler has a giant iPad at nursery to play interactive nursery rhymes.”
Education technology, or edtech, is giving students a helping hand to students of all ages around the world. And be it mixed reality lessons, coding kits, digital textbooks or tapping into video gaming as a learning tool, British companies are taking a leading role in taking even more advanced tech to school.
Globally, education technology is set to be worth £128bn by next year, up from £45bn in 2015. And while the US and China are battling for supremacy – as with so many things – the UK has a booming edtech sector that shows no signs of slowing down.
With so much of our lives now operating in the digital world – and an IT skills shortage across the country – teaching our children digital literacy is as essential as any classical subject.
The UK market is set to be worth £3.4bn in 2021 – with £170m worth of edtech exports – while schools around the country spend about £900m on education technology. There has also been a growing flurry of investments in edtech over the past few years. According to Beauhurst, £90.9m was invested in UK edtech companies, up from £66.9m in 2017.
One of the beneficiaries of that funding has been Perlego, which has been dubbed the “Spotify of textbooks”. The London-based start-up, founded by Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, offers students access to a digital library of more than 250,000 textbooks for a monthly fee. The company has raised more than £10m from angel investors including Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman and LoveFilm founder Simon Franks.
“What excites me most is that the market is still in its infancy – the education market has been valued at $5 trillion, yet learning is still broadly delivered in the same way that it was in the Victorian era,” says Van Malderen. “EdTech can bring much needed disruption to the market in the same way that fintech has for financial services.”
Making textbooks more accessible is but one aspect of the ways that edtech companies are sparking the imagination of both students and investors. Kano Computing has raised a reported £34m in funding – including from Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff – since it was founded in 2013 by chief executive Alex Klein, Yonatan Raz-Fridman and Saul Klein. Kano sells kits, powered by Raspberry Pi, that teach you to build your own computer and then code on it.
Primarily aimed at children, Kano also sells licensed versions based on popular films such as the Harry Potter series, Frozen 2 and Star Wars. The latter teaches users how to code by making a lightsabre swing on screen.
A former journalist, Klein believes that the next revolution in computing is building and coding to become almost as easy to do as simply using a computer. Kano now sells its kits all around the world, including North America.
Kano is at the tip of the spear of a global push to introduce coding at a young age. One of John Lewis’ top toys for Christmas was US company Learning Resources’ Coding Critters, a storybook and toy set that teaches children as young as four to code simple commands.
It is, in part, a response to the growing IT skills gap that is reportedly costing UK businesses £6.3bn a year. Products such as Kano’s computers will encourage learning coding skills at a young age, while initiatives such as UKIE’s Digital Schoolhouse is looking to encourage more computing skills from within the classroom.
Run by the UK video games trade body UKIE and backed by the British arm of Japanese gaming giant Nintendo, Digital Schoolhouse offers participating schools free creative computing programmes and hosts a Super Smash Bros esports tournament to give students an insight into different career paths.
“Computing is wider than programming,” says Digital Schoolhouse programme director Shahneila Saeed. “There hasn’t been enough of a focus on the way we teach. The reason games engage students so well is that they bring together art, maths, creative writing and science so brilliantly and beautifully.”
Video games are widely used as a backdrop to engage children in STEM subjects, while mixed reality technology is also playing a growing role in education. At the Sevenoaks School in Kent, students used virtual reality headsets to experience 3D artworks while, in philosophy, students could put Descartes’ dream argument to the test in VR.
UK-based start-up Curiscope, meanwhile, has developed an augmented reality T-shirt that uses an app to let users explore the anatomy of the human body. The Brighton-base company raised $1m in seed funding to develop the “Virtuali-Tee”.
Artificial intelligence is also being touted as one way of improving individual tutoring for children, for example, allowing teachers to better understand their performance. Exeter based Sparx has developed an AI-based maths platform that offers students tailor-made class and homework assignments.
Sparx offers detailed insight on performance, with the company claiming that the reduced admin can cut a teacher’s workload. Already used in secondary schools in Exeter, Sparx received £20m of funding from local investment service Oxygen House.
But for all of the investment and exciting developments in the UK edtech sector, getting such technologies into school and the hands of children is more of a challenge.
Ty Goddard of the Education Foundation says there are “lots of words, little action” from the Government about an edtech strategy for the UK. At least until April, when Damian Hinds, then education secretary, announced a strategy for “leading tech companies to work with schools and colleges to cut teacher workload, support professional development and improve student outcomes”.
The edict pledged £10m to support innovation, although critics have pointed out that the figure amounts to around just £400 for each of the UK’s 25,000 schools. But there has at least been some progress.
“The strategy is OK and is slowly rolling out with plans for testbeds, demonstrator schools and colleges,” says Goddard. “But what we really need is cross Whitehall verve and commitment to the whole sector; it’s a skills, jobs and growth creator. Perfunctory and silo activity cross Whitehall will not properly harness export capability or the domestic jobs agenda.”
Perlego’s Van Maldern agrees that more needs to be done. “I will always welcome any action designed to support the sector’s growth and development. However, I have witnessed very little in tangible measures to date.
“Many start-ups run into difficulty when dealing with faculties, who operate on incredibly long buying cycles, and often utilise a multitude of sales channels.
“I’d like to see more done to incentivise usage of the domestic edtech sector – for example subsidising purchases from edtech companies.”
While the excitement is well-founded, providing opportunities for investors and schools to improve the quality of learning, edtech will need more sustained support to ensure that the UK remains ahead of the curve.
“We need a sector deal to nurture growing hubs all over the country and link and listen to educators,” says Goddard. “Edtech businesses also face procurement and investment challenges – the education market is a long, slow burn.”