How does one follow on from fifteen years in the best job in the world?

During the 15 years I have worked in education, having founded the education leadership movement Teach First in 2002 and co-founded the global network Teach For All in 2007, I have been incredibly privileged to visit hundreds of schools, seen thousands of lessons taught by dedicated teachers and met tens of thousands of the most extraordinary young people from every imaginable background.

My travels have reinforced to me again and again what is so obvious in any maternity ward — that every child is born with enormous potential and that it is up to all of us to ensure that this potential does not die on the vine. At a minimum, ensuring all children have access to a great quality education is one of the most important markers of a fair and just society that we should all prioritise.

After helping to build a movement that is now the largest graduate recruiter in the UK and operating in over 47 countries around the world, I stepped down as CEO of Teach First in 2017. I had never thought I would spend fifteen years in one role, and I loved every moment of my time there. Yet, I was ready for my next challenge.

I spent most of last year working through what that next challenge would be.

I missed the exciting, semi-chaotic, sense of possibility that existed during the start-up phases of Teach First and Teach For All. I looked in myself and realised that I still had the energy to go back to that and had no desire to move on to another large organisation where too much of my time would get sucked into processes and small, incremental improvements. I was looking forward to building something else that was more of a blank slate.

I also knew that I was excited about growth — both in the UK and globally. Teach First had gone from a crazy idea to one of the largest charities in the UK, working in over 1,000 schools across England and Wales and — through Teach For All partnerships — now having an impact on over a million young people around the world. I wanted my next project to have similar possibility to take off. I also realised that the world had changed in the 15 years since I wrote the business plan for Teach First on my large desktop computer and understood that in 2018, this meant my next idea had to have a digital core and be able to lean on well-developed exponential growth concepts in order to have a hope of scaling.

Finally, I knew that I wanted to continue to push forwards the bounds of educational equity and to find new ways to help children and their parents access opportunities. After helping to disrupt the idea of teaching and leading in schools in disadvantaged circumstances, I wanted to find another area that needed similar disruption to improve opportunities for children.

I travelled, spoke to experts around the world, went to conferences, read and thought deeply about which area in education needed this push.

As I was doing this, I gave a number of lectures on the lessons I had learned from Teach First, many of which I wrote about in my book Success Against the Odds, and I kept on getting the same question — “if you were able to do it over again, what would you have done differently?” While there were many, many operational mistakes I made over the years — for the most part I felt that we had strategically made the right moves — except for one area that I think we initially missed.

When we started Teach First, we focused all of our energies on helping to improve secondary schools in disadvantaged areas. We felt at the time that this was the area that additional great teachers and school leaders could have the greatest impact.

Now I know that there was more to it than that.

Sure, great secondary schools can help even the lowest performing children to thrive. I have seen countless examples of young people who succeeded against the odds because of great teachers and school settings in their teenage years. It would also be incredibly depressing and inaccurate to believe that a twelve-year-old who has fallen behind because they have not yet accessed good quality education is a lost cause. However, the more schools I visited, the more I realised that many young people were entering secondary schools far behind from where they needed to be. It was obvious that the gap that existed between them and their more advantaged peers was already a chasm, which even the best teachers and schools struggled to bridge.

So, in 2008, I pushed for a small group of Teach First teachers to work in primary schools , though I wish I had done this sooner. Over the past decade, I have seen incredible primary teachers working tirelessly to ensure not only their pupils’ basic academics, such as literacy and numeracy, are ready for higher learning, but also focused on building skills, experiences and networks that could open up the world to the children as they get older. Primary school aged children are incredibly open and interested in learning — and much smarter than most people realise.

However, over time, we realised that more was needed from an even earlier age.

I remember attending a year one class full of 6-year olds in a small coastal community in the northeast. Groups of them were noisily playing shop — buying and selling from each other and learning key maths, social and communication skills in the process under the watchful support of an outstanding teacher. Yet, amidst the hubbub, a half dozen others sat on the outside looking in. The teacher was struggling to get them engaged. At break time, I asked about them. They had had very limited experience playing pretend games before, communicating with peers or even participating in any conversations. They were part of a large group of children entering school each year virtually pre-verbal, struggling to even interact with others much less participate in phonics or other more academic lessons.

Aristotle stated “if you give me a child of 7, I will give you the adult.”

While this hugely underestimates the power that great schools, teachers and other influences can have on children — and young people’s self-agency on their own development — I could see more and more the power of this sentiment.

So, I started to look at the early years space — what was and wasn’t working for young children, their parents and — from my experience at Teach First — the crucial adult practitioners who are leading in this space.

I saw that in most countries around the world, the solutions that exist do not work well for any of these three groups. There are nannies that are far out of the price range of most parents and which often don’t help children develop key social and cognitive skills. Informal care arrangements, such as relatives and friends may be less expensive, but also may not cover enough hours of the week and can be quite solitary for the child. Finally, nurseries often have the advantage of a qualified lead, but can be inconvenient for parents and often don’t provide the family-style conversational opportunities that are so important for children’s cognitive development.

At the same time, I was introduced to two other individuals who also had experience making change happen. The first, Edd Read, was co-founder and CTO of graze.com and was a key force behind the growth of that snack brand. The other, John Newbold, the founder of 383 has made a career of designing elegant and simple online solutions for thorny problems — helping to ensure technology can be used by anyone. Both of them were looking for an opportunity to make greater social change in their next start-up. We’ve been joined by experienced early years practitioners, including Annaliese Hendry who was also a research fellow at policy exchange, Sarah Read, head of early years at Action for Children and Jo Lee who joined me from Teach First.

Together, we have created tiney.co, a B-Corp that is a business driven by a purpose to benefit all of our stakeholders. We are working to use technology to reimagine early years childcare and unlock the potential of every child — helping create tiney home nurseries that will ensure easy access for all to an exceptional, affordable children focused community that works for everyone. We have just launched and are piloting with a small group of British-based practitioners, parents and children in the coming months. I look forward to keeping you up to date on our journey…