Brent Hoberman: ‘Tech is a great enabler of levelling up’

The first 01 Founders campus opened six months ago in a converted office block just off Euston Road in central London. So far 65 students have enrolled, 40 more are being recruited by the end of the year and the building has capacity for 1,000 once the college is fully up and running.

With Martha Lane Fox in 2000 after they founded Lastminute.com

SHUTTERSTOCK

There are no lectures, seminars or tutorials. Instead students teach themselves – and each other – to code by solving problems set by the computer. Like in a video game, they have to successfully complete each task in order to move on to the next level.

The two-year course is entirely free, with graduates guaranteed a job at the end with one of the school’s corporate partners. Joysy John, the chief executive officer, admits that “it sounds too good to be true”, but there is such demand for software engineers that companies including Peloton, the chancellor’s favourite fitness trainer, are lining up to hire graduates before they have even started their training. Bosch, Marks & Spencer and Nominet, the tech infrastructure provider, are among the other businesses that are keen to sign up programmers.

Companies will be charged a recruitment fee of £20,000 – less than the average London headhunter’s charge of £30,000 for coders – meaning the college will be self-sufficient despite not charging its students for tuition.

The application process for 01 Founders is gruelling and unconventional. Candidates do not need any coding experience or academic qualifications, and the school takes no notice of degree, A-level or GCSE results. Instead, those wanting to join the programme have to complete a two-hour computer game to get accepted on to the selection panel. They then have to take part in a three-week programme of coding-based “quests”, which require them to help each other to solve challenges. Although competition is intense – 6,000 people applied for the first 65 places – collaboration is encouraged and candidates are not accepted unless they demonstrate they are willing to work together. “It’s screening for tenacity, logic, teamwork,” Hoberman says.

Most of the successful applicants are either recent graduates or people looking for a change of career. Some have lost their jobs during the pandemic. With the tech sector heavily male-dominated, the school’s aim is for half its intake to be women and half to be from disadvantaged backgrounds. Around 37 per cent of the current students are female – almost three times the average on computer science degree courses – and 55 per cent are receiving means-tested support. There are grants for living costs and transport, for those who cannot afford them.

As an employer, Hoberman, 53, is motivated by the need to train up more software programmers to fill the tens of thousands of vacancies that currently exist. That means shedding misconceptions about digital skills and broadening the recruitment pool. There is an impression, he says, “that things like computer science are out of reach for most people and you have to be a maths genius to want to choose them in school. I hope 01 can show people that you don’t actually have to be a maths genius any more and it’s much more approachable than that.”

Having been educated at Eton College, then Oxford University, and made his millions as an entrepreneur, Hoberman insists he is also driven by the “fairness impact” of investing in education. “Many of us have been very lucky and you look at lots of people who haven’t, so of course you want to bring those opportunities to more people. London is one of the best cities to do tech in the world, but it’s also an unequal city.”

Once the first school is established, his plan is to quickly expand around Britain, with an emphasis on setting up campuses in deprived parts of the country where there is little access to high-quality training. “We’re not politicians. We’re not deliberately saying it needs to be in the ‘red wall’ [the former Labour constituencies that were won by the Conservatives at the last election]. We are aiming to have them where we can do them effectively, where there is most need, where there’s good talent and good employers.”

The teacherless concept will, he suggests, make it much easier to quickly scale up the programme. “If you want to educate 100,000 young people, then to do it affordably this is clearly a great model. I’m not yet suggesting we teach English literature this way, but it’s empowering for the students. Whether you can be teacherless in every discipline is a much bigger question, but we know this model works. People come into this with very limited computer science knowledge, and they come out fully trained.”

Born in South Africa, Hoberman came to Britain from New York when he was ten after his parents divorced. His business inspiration came from his grandfather, who built a Cape Town clothing store into a 650-strong chain. Although he prefers jeans and navy blazers to the grey T-shirts favoured by some tech entrepreneurs, he has always seen himself as a disrupter who likes his ideas to go viral. At Oxford he transformed the French Club, a free social society with only 50 members, into a party hub business sponsored by L’Oréal with 500 fee-paying members. He launched Lastminute.com with Martha Lane Fox, now a peer, in 1998, then sold it in 2005 for £577 million.

His plan to set up coding colleges all over Britain within a decade seems equally ambitious, but he thinks it is “totally realistic”. “I always remember Martha saying in the early years of Lastminute.com, ‘We’re going to do a billion dollars in sales.’ I said, ‘Where did that number come from?’ You need to work with these big hairy audacious goals.”

The 01 Founders school is based on École 42, a computer programming college in Paris funded by the French billionaire Xavier Niel. It is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and has pioneered what it calls “peer-to-peer pedagogy” and project-based learning. There are no professors, places are free and all the intellectual property that is developed at the school belongs to the students. The name is a reference to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which the “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything” is 42. With its novel approach École 42 has been astonishingly successful. There are now two campuses in Paris as well as one in California, and the model has been adopted in Romania, South Africa, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Belgium, Russia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Finland, Germany, Australia and Canada.

With Lane Fox in 2015

SHUTTERSTOCK

Hoberman says many of these coding colleges around the world have been sponsored by dotcom millionaires, who are, like him, acutely aware of the need for more people to acquire digital skills. “There’s one in Helsinki. Ilkka Paananen, the founder of Supercell [the video games company], launched the coding school there. Taavet Hinrikus, the founder of Wise [the money transfer business], has launched the Estonian version. And then another friend of mine, Corinne Vigreux, the founder of TomTom [the map reader technology], launched the one in Amsterdam. This model is really taking off. Lots of people were very sceptical about it, but it’s working.”

Six years ago, Hoberman took 120 entrepreneurs to Paris to see École 42. “I was hoping somebody would jump at it and take it to the UK because it was surprising to me that London didn’t have this. Since nobody bit the bullet and helped to take it over, we looked at it.” He could not afford to fund 01 Founders as a charity as Niel does with École 42 – “He’s in a different league,” Hoberman says of the French billionaire who pours millions every year into his school – so he looked for another business model and came up with the idea of charging a recruitment fee to the businesses that hire the graduate. “There’s nothing wrong with the profit motive because you want something self-sustaining,” he says. “And I like the fact that because you’ve got this close link with corporates, you’re always adapting the curriculum to what is really needed.”

While the first cohort is going through the system, 01 Founders is being funded by philanthropic backers, including Hoberman, and the Capital City College Group, which runs further education colleges around London. “The key thing is that although it is a for-profit venture, it’s free for the students and you’ve got the guaranteed job at the end of it,” Hoberman says. “It’s very meritocratic. If you’ve had a traditional computer science background, it doesn’t really help.”

The idea of teacherless learning was first tested by an Indian computer scientist and educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, who conducted what he called the “hole in the wall” experiment in 1999. His team carved a hole in the wall between his university in Rajasthan and the adjoining slum. They installed a computer that was easily accessible and free to use, with a sign saying “for children under 15”. The machine became very popular with the slum children, who quickly worked out how to use it without any instruction. Mitra argued that children could teach themselves digital skills, as long as they had the right technology and some entertaining and motivating content.

Hoberman thinks the so-called peer-to-peer learning model prepares students for the world of work better than conventional schooling. “It pushes co-operation,” he says. “I think that’s something that the education system in general misses. We don’t really rate teamwork, except in sports, and in real life, if I look at my career, I think it’s all been about teamwork.”

Although the education at 01 Founders takes place online, students are expected to go to the physical campus so that they can collaborate. “I don’t think just giving people access to a Chromebook and sitting at home is enough. I don’t think it’s motivational enough. I certainly wouldn’t be able to do it myself,” Hoberman says. “The physical space is important. I’m an extremist for being together and offices. Every creative leader I come across agrees with me, to be blunt, because people work better together. They’re more motivated; they get inspiration from each other. Ideas bounce off each other. On Zoom, you don’t build relationships. In education, it’s very similar. We are social creatures. We’re inspired by others and we learn from others.”

When I visit the 01 Founders campus, students are lined up at long tables, sitting behind computers. They each have a diagram on their screen, a bit like a solar system, which shows the modules they have completed and the future options available to them.

Once they have worked their way through the compulsory central core, which gives them basic programming skills, they can choose to specialise in subjects such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity or gaming.

Yonas Million, 33, is learning the software language Go. A former football scout, he decided to retrain and started at 01 Founders in October. “Technology is the future,” he says. “This is free and you’re guaranteed a job at the end.” He finds the self-directed learning more effective than a traditional school. “You’re not just sitting in front of someone feeling bored and if you help other people you reinforce the knowledge.” Rachel Ajayi, 22, agrees. She started an engineering degree at university but switched to 01 Founders after a few months and has found the teacherless approach more stimulating. “When you are in lectures you might not retain all the information; you forget things. I’m learning much more now. If you’ve worked something out for yourself you remember it.”

Some of the students risked everything to get a place here. Arnold Mutungi, 29, left his job in sales to take part in the three-week selection panel. “I couldn’t get the time off and I was certain that this was what I wanted to do,” he says. “I’ve always had an interest in tech, but I thought I had missed the boat because I didn’t study computer science at uni.” Others have turned adversity into opportunity during the pandemic. Anne-Marie Hardie, 25, was freelancing at the BBC when Covid-19 hit, so she decided to retrain when the work dried up. “I really enjoy playing video games and I want to be a game developer,” she says. “I like it here. It’s easier to bounce off someone who is learning alongside you. If you understand something you can explain it better than a lecturer and you feel more comfortable asking for help.”

Chief executive Joysy John left a career in banking to go into education and was director of education at the innovation foundation Nesta before joining 01 Founders. She says she is determined to increase the diversity of the people working in tech.

“Twenty-five years ago, when I studied computer engineering, one in four were female. Today that number is less than 13 per cent in universities. The tech world has certain stereotypes; the big tech companies are all run by white men. You need more role models, and you need more relevant education. The way technology is being taught in schools is very outdated. It’s very theoretical, and so students don’t realise the value of technology in music and sports and medicine. A lot of girls want to make a difference so they go down the path of health or humanities. They don’t realise that if you learn to code, not only do you control your own future, but you can shape society.”

She is convinced the teacherless approach could be more widely applied. “Definitely for maths. We’ve been talking to one of the architects who wants to apply this peer-to-peer learning model to architecture.”

Hoberman hopes his innovative coding school might prompt a wider rethink in education to put more emphasis on teamwork, creativity and emotional intelligence. “There’s a danger when you look at the future of work that the computers are going to do all the repetitive tasks very well so they will replace workers doing that. So you have to think of doubling down on the things that computers aren’t going to be able to do for a very long time – the creativity, critical thinking and leadership, those sorts of skills.”

At the moment schools focus on a narrow form of academic intelligence, driven by the exam system, when employers need a broader range of skills – “things like emotional intelligence. You can be totally emotionally unintelligent and do super-well in school. The smartest people I knew at school didn’t do that well in life because they neglected all the other skills.”

There should, he suggests, be entrepreneurship classes, alongside grammar and algebra, “as a practical way of showing why maths is interesting”. Children would also be taught what it takes to succeed in business. “One of the key things is tenacity – how do you get over the hurdles and knock down barriers? It’s confidence and it’s salesmanship – which is the other thing we need in schools: how do you sell? There should be more emphasis on public speaking. And then it is lateral thinking, thinking outside the box, being a maverick. It’s the maverick stuff that I think schools do very badly on the whole, which is why so many entrepreneurs are dyslexic or dropouts of the traditional routes and have been brilliant in some other way.”

He thinks technology could help revitalise creativity and curiosity in schools. “There’s much more that you could do if you combine virtual reality and gamification techniques. Children get addicted to playing Clash of Clans, so you could do that with an educational game too.”

Parents are already worried about the amount of time their children spend on a screen, but Hoberman insists that the potential for education is huge.

With 01 Founders CEO Joysy John

SEB HIGGINS

“People are spending 50 per cent of their lives on screens anyway. I’m not saying we make it more, but of that 50 per cent, let’s use it in more interesting ways,” Hoberman says. That doesn’t mean all schools going teacherless, or pupils staring robotically at a computer all day, but it could be a way of opening up resources and levelling the playing field. He persuaded Eton to set up a platform with online courses in university preparation, entrepreneurship, communication skills and leadership. It has already been used by 800,000 state school pupils. “Rather than the Labour way of saying, ‘Just do away with these great institutions,’ keep what’s best of Britain but bring it to more people.”

When Hoberman was setting up Lastminute.com, he was warned that consumers would miss the personal touch of the travel company if bookings moved online. He would always reply that those businesses were dependent “on their worst call centre operatives, whereas if it’s a database, you’re talking about your worst line of code”. People who argue that education must be delivered by a teacher in a classroom “are not accounting for the discrepancy between the best and worst teacher”, he says. “Technology enables everybody to have the best lecturer or teacher, rather than so many people having ones that are not very good.” In the case of 01 Founders, that means having no teachers at all.
Rachel Sylvester chairs The Times Education Commission