Teachable Helps Teachers
Over £5bn was pumped into technology hardware and software for English schools (excluding staff costs) in the last decade, yet there have been precious few improvements in teaching standards or pupil achievement. The equivalent investment in the US is $20bn, with similarly limited results.
As a nimble, self-funding, grass-roots organisation Teachable can have a huge impact for a fraction of this investment.
A. Improving teaching standards
We believe the fundamental reason for limited improvement is that much of the technology does not actually help develop teachers. Children from backgrounds with high barriers to social mobility need excellent teachers, not fancy technology, to improve their chances. And better teaching is more about access to quality resources and collaboration with fellow teachers more than just initial teacher training.[1]
Current impact: assuming each download is used in an average of 3 classes, Teachable has improved 750,000 classes since launch
2012 target: to get Teachable resources used in over 2m classes
B. Boosting retention of the best teachers
A great education system must allow teachers to spend face-to-face time with pupils and retain the most inspiring teachers in the long term. Teachers site both loneliness and bureaucracy as leading contributors to leaving the teaching profession.[2] Anecdotally, many of our friends who started on teaching programmes such as Teach First have left the profession to find less frustrating occupations – driven out by a lack of support and flexibility. Teachable can help boost teacher retention by making their class preparation simpler, and reduce out-of-hours workload. This will boost the attention that individual pupils get.
Measured by: self-assessment of how much preparation time was saved by downloading a particular Teachable resource
2012 target: Saving an average subscriber over 40 hours a year (an extra week of teaching time)
C. Making school budgets go further
Teachable can improve the effectiveness of how the book / digital resource budget is spent. Schools and teachers currently have no way of comparing the best content, or access it when needed – so many purchases are wasted on unused packs of material.
“I have done tech support in schools, and it made me sick seeing boxes of software that were never even unwrapped because the IT coordinator didn’t have time to install it … but they wanted to spend the money otherwise they’d have lost it.” (IT Technician, England Primary School)
Measured by: number of files purchased through Teachable, multiplied by the cost of an equivalent resource elsewhere
2012 target: Save the average secondary school over £5,000 of resource budget per year (equivalent to an extra pupil worth of funding)
[1] Research for Action, 2007: http://pdf.researchforaction.org/rfapdf/publication/pdf_file/297/Useem_B_Closing_the_TQ_Gap.pdf
[2] Nutter A and Zhang J 2007: http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/4/2/5/4/pages142549/p142549-1.php
[2] UK spend on books and software was estimated at £350m in 2008 by the Publishers Association, and is shifting rapidly from books and DVDs to online educational materials. Based on teacher numbers, the equivalent international market is around £4bn.
