In March 2020, Jon and Susie Seaton, co-founders of education provider Twinkl, made a fateful decision. As the UK went into Covid lockdown, and demand for home education resources soared, many of Twinkl’s peers raised their prices. Twinkl took a different path, giving away the entirety of their resources for free to help keep a generation of children engaged with education.
Though the decision was costly in the short term, it proved to be an inflection point for the firm’s growth – over the course of the next two years, Twinkl’s team size doubled. It has since doubled again, and the company is now expanding internationally at almost breathtaking speed, with tens of millions of users around the world. Twinkl is now seen as a rising star, perhaps the UK’s best hope of taking on American ‘Big Tech’ in the education sector.
Through our expertise in managing wealth on behalf of entrepreneurs and their families, including advising on business and wealth succession planning, and business sales and acquisitions, we understand the day-to-day pressures on entrepreneurs and how this can impact their wealth management. In this dedicated series of interviews we hope to deepen that understanding as we get to know some of the UK’s brightest private business prospects.
For this edition we met David Angrave, COO and Director at Twinkl. Fast-talking, enthusiastic and disarmingly open, it was clear that, for him, Twinkl is much more than just a job. We began by asking about him about the firm’s early journey.
Education is a competitive market, yet Twinkl has seen stellar growth in a short space of time. How did you get your name out there?
There were four elements, which are all still relevant. First, teachers are amazing referrers when the product works. That’s a double-edged sword though – because if it doesn’t work, they’ll tell everyone, so that keeps us honest.
Second, educators move a lot, including between countries, so we gained organic growth from that.
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learn more Third, we have a phenomenal content production model and system that scales. For example, in the UK, when the national curriculum changed in 2015, we had products ready within three months, whereas traditional publishers took eighteen months.
Lastly, thought leadership is key – building genuine education leadership to understand the challenges educators face daily and enable discourse. That’s not just riding the wave but creating the wave.
It takes hard work, aggressive investment, learning from mistakes, and acknowledging those mistakes
You grew very quickly during Covid. Can you tell us about this period for the firm?
I literally was the person who locked the door to our head office when the UK was put into lockdown. I remember calling our CEO [Jonathan Seaton] and saying that schools around the world were closing, and that we needed to decide what to do. Many in the education sector were raising their prices, but John said, “Just make it free.” We gave it away to millions of people over six months. It cost us millions, but from a commercial brand awareness perspective, it was priceless.
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learn more At that time, we had 519 team members globally. Many months later, when I reopened the office, we were over 1,000 people. We doubled in size during COVID and have doubled again since. We’re now over 2,000 team members. We’ve also continued to grow 30% plus year on year, both top and bottom line.
At Lombard Odier, we work with a lot of entrepreneurs, including private and family-owned businesses, and we’ve seen first-hand that rapid growth can create difficulties. What challenges have you faced as you’ve expanded?
There are many challenges to scaling across 30 or 40 countries. To be honest, we haven’t always got it right. It takes hard work, aggressive investment, learning from mistakes, and acknowledging those mistakes.
When it comes to building culture, that’s where ‘mission’ becomes incredibly important. No matter where you are – in Romania writing content for a Romanian teacher, in our Porto development hub, or answering calls for Australian teachers – you’re part of the mission: ‘to help those who teach’. That blend of mission and commerce is what drives our success.
COVID must have changed the education landscape dramatically. Has it left any lasting legacies for you and the wider sector?
The lockdowns reconnected parents with what was going on in their child’s education. Parents realised they could be a participant, they just needed the tools. Teachers and schools had the same realisation – that they’d love parents to be participants in their children’s education.
A fundamental part of our strategy over the next five years is not only building content and services for teachers, schools and parents, but also making sure that those three things all connect – that’s what we call closing the ‘educational triangle’. That improves educational outcomes, which is fantastic, as far as I’m concerned. It satisfies that missional component of making sure that educators and schools are empowered to do the very best, but it also fulfils a commercial objective of building a stable, scalable revenue base.
We’ve never been afraid to forward invest, deploying capital and focussing not only on what the customer needs now, but on where their future needs will be
As advisors to entrepreneurs, we know that seeking or accepting investment is a major decision, and must be thought through carefully. In 2023 you had significant investment from Vitruvian Partners – what was the thinking behind that partnership?
We had this phenomenal opportunity to scale both in the UK and internationally. We didn’t need the capital – what we were looking for was support as we expand into the US, which is a huge market.
But also, we’re doing this now on a global scale. We operate in 195 markets and in 17 different customer segments. There’s a level of organisational maturation and evolution that needs to take place. That’s why we sought out a partner – someone who was going to give us that support to scale and be sustainable for the next 15 years.
We’ve never been afraid to forward invest, deploying capital and focussing not only on what the customer needs now, but on where their future needs will be. The discipline working with Vitruvian has been fantastic – they understand that to grow, especially in education, you need an investment-first mindset.
Artificial intelligence (AI) must be a big deal in schools. What’s your approach to it?
Everyone’s saying, ‘I’ve got AI, now how do I apply it?” The strategy we apply is, actually, ‘What’s the problem to be solved? What are the needs of our customers, and is AI part of the solution?’
We’ve invested aggressively in AI, but very much within an experimentation-led and customer-led framework. We say, ‘Try these tools, let us know if they work. And if they do solve some of your problems, how they can be improved?’
We do have revenue-generating AI tools, though. Last year, around 1.2 million school reports were created by our AI Report Writer. For me, that’s fantastic as it gives educators more time to work with students or have conversations with parents.
Leveraging [our] partnerships is essential to our success and commercial strategy. We’re genuinely proud to enable meaningful industry engagement in education
Twinkl also collaborates with some big names to produce engaging educational material. What’s the purpose of this?
The child education market is flooded with solutions, more often than not they sit in a bucket called ‘edutainment’. It’s almost like tricking your child into learning, but it’s disconnected from what the child is doing at school.
Our key differentiation lies in strategic partnerships. For example, we are one of the few education content brands partnering with Disney, Sony, Universal, Netflix – all major studios. This allows us to create truly curriculum-mapped educational content linked to their intellectual property, not just edutainment. This is new, and we’re proud to be leading it.
For example, to help children struggling with physics and maths, we partnered with Ferrari, to create curriculum-mapped resources around the Formula One car. Then we took eight kids – who had used the resources for two weeks – to the British Formula One Grand Prix. Two of them explained tyre friction to a Ferrari race engineer – the teacher said she’d been trying to teach them friction for years without success, in ten days they’d understood.
Leveraging these partnerships is essential to our success and commercial strategy. We’re genuinely proud to enable meaningful industry engagement in education.
Going back to the ‘mission’ side of the business, can you tell us more about combining the commercial with the mission?
Over the last five years, we developed specific Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) lines. Our modular content means for every lesson there are 17 different ways to teach it – that differentiation is a core pillar for teaching SEND pupils.
But dedicated SEND pupils and schools form only a small part of the inclusion market. Most of our peers forget that 85% of SEND pupils are in mainstream education – there isn’t a single classroom in the UK, for example, that doesn’t have pupils with special educational needs. We help keep pupils with disabilities and special educational needs included. That’s a core part of our service strategy: a fully differentiated, inclusive offering.
Through our wealth management for entrepreneurs, we help entrepreneurs deal with myriad elements of wealth planning…so they can continue to focus on their business safe in the knowledge that their personal and family situation is secure
An entrepreneurial outlook
As we bring the interview to a close, we’re struck by the common experiences that all entrepreneurs share, regardless of the sector in which they operate. Like Twinkl, at Lombard Odier we believe the commercial must align with the ‘mission’ – commitment to the mission is essential for achieving sustainable commercial success over the long term; so, too, commercial success is essential for delivering the mission.
As a privately owned business, managed by entrepreneurs, we have a deep understanding of the challenges entrepreneurs face as they seek to deliver their mission and scale their business, whether through organic growth or acquisitions, and whether or not they seek external investment partnerships.
We understand that entrepreneurs are often single-mindedly focussed on business success and building a legacy, and that this can sometimes come at the expense of personal wealth management. Through our wealth management for entrepreneurs, we help entrepreneurs deal with myriad elements of wealth planning, including private wealth management, retirement planning, and business and family wealth succession planning, so they can continue to focus on their business safe in the knowledge that their personal and family situation is secure. We also help with structuring business sales, to optimise the conditions so that a sale acts not as an endpoint, but as a springboard to the next step in an entrepreneur’s journey.
It is with this entrepreneurial outlook that we are excited to be getting to know some of the firms that make up the UK’s flourishing private business landscape. We look forward to meeting more the country’s most exciting and innovative businesses, and to following Twinkl on their journey ‘to help those who teach’.
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