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The innovative business changing education for the better
The innovative business changing education for the better
Written by
UnLtd employee
UnLtd position
The innovative business changing education for the better
Written by
UnLtd employee
UnLtd position
now>press>play is an innovative education social venture that uses audio resources to bring the curriculum to life. Each child is given a pair of wireless headphones and becomes the main character in a story. The immersive experience allows children to discover places, meet people and solve problems, while staying engaged with the curriculum. Alice Lacey along with two friends, a teacher and ethical financier, founded now>press>play in 2012 in unusual circumstances. ‘We started off with the solution’ says Alice, ‘I was a theater director and I was looking for new ways of telling stories, I’d come across silent discos and wireless headphone technology. I took it to a teacher friend of mine who said that this would work really well for children.’ Inspired by a great idea the founders took it into schools and after seeing the effect realised that there was the potential to solve two key problems in Primary education – engagement and life experience. now>press>play sessions are so immersive and experiential that teachers fed back that they had never seen their children concentrate for so long. ‘Engagement is a huge problem – so how to keep children attentive, focused and enthusiastic for 8hours a day, 5days a week’, says Alice, ‘we’re giving every single teacher a way of engaging every child in their class and it works every single time.’ Sparking the imaginations of children who, often living in deprived areas, do not have much experience outside of their school-life and home-life has been a key impact. ‘We’re giving children opportunities and imaginative adventures. Opportunities that they otherwise would not have. There was a child that took part in one of our focus groups and she said “It kind of gives you more of a lifeâ€, which is a brilliant way of expressing it. It gives children with limited life experience more life.’
In an economic climate where the education market is increasingly competitive with shrinking school budgets and a number of education startups offering products to schools, now>press>play’s has scaled up impressively – in April 2014 they were working in seven schools where an estimated 1,750 pupils had access to their products, now they work across the UK in 75 schools and 25,000 children  have access to now>press>play in lessons. Initially the three founders spent most of their time running workshops in schools themselves, but they soon realised in order to grow their impact, they would need a change of business model. ‘We realised that we had a very powerful learning tool and that its impact could be huge, but that the current business model just didn’t work, or at least wouldn’t work at scale’, says Alice, ‘so that’s when we started developing a subscription model, which is way more exciting – you have teachers delivering sessions and it offers better value for schools.’ Alice and the other co-founders had big ambitions to scale their impact, ‘we knew that to have the biggest impact we would have to reach the largest number of schools. We knew that to do this we needed to raise investment rather than rely on grant funding or loans.’
""I can’t imagine where we would be if we hadn’t been on the Big Venture Challenge programme.""
In April 2014 now>press>play successfully applied for the Big Venture Challenge programme. For the next 12months they received strategic and practical support to get their venture ready for investment, as well as match-funding from UnLtd. On a personal level Big Venture Challenge was important for the founders; it boosted their confidence in themselves and their venture, while providing them with some of the practical skills that allowed them to grow. The numbers are stark; according to Alice, ‘in the last 12 months, since we actually received the investment, we’ve gone from 30 schools to 75. In terms of percentage, it’s pretty good.’ It wasn’t just that investment helped the business to scale, the team at now>press>play were able to get the sort of investment that they wanted. ‘It’s not just that we raised money, it’s that we raised the right money from the right people. That took a long-time. We went down some dead avenues’, Alice says, ‘I’m really pleased with the money we did raise and the people we raised it with. **It’s meant that we haven’t had to compromise on what we wanted to do but, we are able to do it.**’ The plans for the future that Alice lays out are ambitious and focused on securing sustainable social impact. ‘Over the next year we’d like to be in another 100 schools, but our big focus is around maintaining schools’, Alice states, ‘**We don’t want this to be a yearlong intervention, we want this to be integrated into the way that schools teach on an ongoing basis. That’s what we want to see, we want to change the ways schools are teaching.**’ ‘It’s about sustainability. It’s kind of been like a 5-year gamble that I’ve taken, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. We’re getting to the point where we’re going to have a really nice business model which requires a lot of work and a lot of looking after. But then that becomes really nice, we become a company that supports schools which is what we always wanted to be.’ Find out more about how this year's Big Venture Challenge winners are changing society for the better. BVC 2016 Winners