These days, I try much harder to take time out in nature, get some physical exercise and create some headspace. My regular walk takes me down a gently sloping lane into a valley. I pass the last houses as the slopes become steeper on either side.Then I step away from…

These are difficult times. Every day, we learn of huge global events. Once they may have seemed remote from, even unrelated to our ‘everyday’ lives. Now increasingly their impact seems to reverberate instantly for all of us, like rising fuel bills and interest rates. Or else they loom large as…

In the current economic storms, there’s a lot of advice flying around for start-ups. Much of it is coming from investors (including venture capitalists). In what seems like a blink of a base rate, they have switched from the growth, growth, growth message that has dominated various theses. Now they…

Most of us remember tests as part of our schooldays and sometimes beyond. Not all of those memories are positive! Amongst educationalists, there’s an ongoing debate about the value of ‘teaching to tests’. This is where teachers focus on specific items in order to ensure that their students achieve higher…

With budgets tight and teacher’s time stretched to the limit, it stands to reason that any education resource must be trusted to deliver. This goes for edtech too, especially since it can sometimes be a major purchase to replace an old solution, or else is targeted at a very particular…

Nuturing | female leaders and backable businesses These days we often ask the question: why do women get less overall support and recognition as they build businesses and appear to find fundraising a bigger problem than men? One of the regular, first-base replies is: because the majority of investors are men. (That’s a story in itself). It…

Collaboration | when size shouldn’t matter Sometimes, and almost certainly not often enough, a big organisation takes a chance on a small one and together they create something special. This happened earlier this year, when the global giant that is the British Council entered into a partnership with our company, Little Bridge, to deliver online English…

COVID-19 has reminded us all that we live in a connected world. By the very nature of its person to person transition, the virus is challenging the view that we’ve retreated into digital bubbles at the expense of ‘real world’ contacts. And conversely, it’s boosted the huge and empowering technologies…

Like many people, a few months ago I watched Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist, speaking at the UN Climate Change COP24 Conference. Her passion, her calm conviction, her clarity of vision, the pure intensity of her message, is truly awesome. Both she and what she has to say…