The UK now has as many education technology companies as those in the financial technology space – and the country attracts a third of all Europe’s ed-tech investments, according to research for this year’s London EdTech Week.
Learning is close to the hearts at Clarity. That is why the company last year selected the UK Electronics Skills Foundation (UKESF), which encourages young people to study and work in the electronics sector, to benefit from pro bono communications services.
And, in the last few years, we have helped many of the emerging crop of ed-tech startups spread their message. But every student graduates, so what have our ed-tech alumni been doing since working with us?
Firefly Learning
Firefly is a learning platform, school intranet and Virtual Learning Environment that helps boost education digitally, by helping students, teachers and parents to easily create and share a range of material.
And it made a great story. Joe Mathewson and Simon Hay started the company in 1999, whilst themselves studying as pupils at St Paul’s School, London, in a bid to digitise their homework and assessment processes.
Now the platform is up to version six, introducing self-marking questions, advanced assessment workflows, smart lesson plans and, because education shouldn’t all be done on devices, a projection mode, for teachers to easily show their content on a large screen.
Home Learning College
Learning, like society, is going through a revolution. Many people believe that traditional teaching methods, like a teacher addressing a room of silent children from the front of classroom, belong in the Victorian era.
Home Learning College aimed to change all that. With its online community now numbering tens of thousands of students around the world, its founders really know how to make digital learning materials engaging for everyone. In fact, it was clear they felt elearning didn’t just have to be as good as in-person learning – it could be far more effective.
Since working with Clarity, the company has gone on to become the UK’s largest online provider for professional qualifications, has clocked over two million learning hours per year, for more than 3,800 companies and has even rebranded to the snappy-sounding “Avado”.
Primo
When Primo emerged in 2014, the “learn to code” mantra was still a little left-field. But, by the time Primo founder Filippo Yacob, a former engineer and university drop-out, had finished doing a tour of UK news channels to spread the word, the country was slowly switching on to the necessity for play things that helped children learn logic.
Cubetto is Primo’s wheeled wooden character that rolls along the floor when a child, aged three and up, inserts shades in to a board in the correct pattern.
Since working with Clarity, Primo has gone on to be featured in an Amazon Video documentary about entrepreneurship, to become pivotal to education programmes in places like Illinois and Belgrade, and to raise $781,823 through Kickstarter for a new product line – eight times what it sought.
We love the story Primo tells about its mission to intervene early in children’s education, and think you’re going to see Cubetto on more living room floors in the years ahead.