Founder Jonathan Seaton tells how his wife’s frustration at poor teaching materials birthed an edtech empire that now supports teachers in 200 countries
Twinkl could reasonably stake a claim to delivering more impact on teaching and learning in our schools than any other private company in the past decade.
Yet the main man behind it, Jonathan Seaton, remains somewhat of an enigma.
The company he co-founded in 2010 with his wife Susie – in their back bedroom in Sheffield – now has over 1.5 million different products and services, downloaded billions of times a year across the globe.
They include the Department for Education-approved systematic synthetic phonics programme, Twinkl Phonics (also rolled out in the US and Australia), the Rhino Readers decodable book collections and Ari AI tools, plus the firm owns companies including Educake and Natterhub.
Some see their global empire (with around 1,200 staff in this country alone), as the UK’s best chance of beating US Big Tech in the education space.
Unlike many British edtech companies, it’s also profitable. The company made £24.3 million last year, up from £22.2 million in 2022.
This year, the couple joined the Sunday Times rich list, with a reported wealth of £485 million. They’ve sold a 40 per cent stake of their firm to private equity group Vitruvian Partners, which also owns slices of Just Eat and Skyscanner.
I meet Seaton in the spacious communal brainstorming area of Twinkl’s plush offices, just off Twinkl Way, which they got to name after buying the site of Sheffield’s historic Sheaf brewery in 2019 (home of the famous Ward’s Brewing Company).
When staff are present (which isn’t often, as many work from home most days), they can have their tensions eased on a massage chair or play Street Fighter on a retro arcade machine.
Seaton rarely does so himself. “To be honest, I tend just to work… or get forced on holiday by Susie, which does happen from time to time.”
But he says it “doesn’t feel like work. I’m in a job where I’ve got a lot of people we can help.”
Communication problems
Twinkl’s meteoric rise over 14 years saw Jonathan, a commercial lawyer, and Susie, an early years teacher, grow the small online teaching resource hub they initially worked on part-time into a global edtech empire.
How many schools Twinkl is used in is hard to say, says Seaton, as “a lot of subscribers are individual teachers who often use personal email addresses”. What he can say is that global users are “into the tens of millions now”.
“With a strong UK base, it’s likely there are very few schools where Twinkl isn’t used somewhere,” he adds.
Indeed, even my 10-year-old son, when I tell him I’m interviewing the head of an edtech company, asks: “you mean Twinkl?”
Schools Week has been badgering to profile Seaton for a while, so why did he agree to be interviewed now?
“If there’s nothing in the public sphere,” Seaton says, then “people will make it up”. The company does “a hell of a lot of stuff that nobody ever knows about”. But “properly communicating” those ventures is one of its “biggest challenges”.
It now has 400 different lines of content, each with thousands of individual pieces of teaching materials.
Seaton concedes that “maybe we’ve missed [communicating] that a little bit. I don’t regret it, but we could’ve done more of it.”
He is disarmingly polite and charming. He prefixes the answer to almost everything I ask with, ‘that’s a great question’ (which is very kind, because it’s hard to prepare questions for someone so elusive).
“We’re reasonably private,” he explains, “and that’s reflective of our customer values, getting on with hard work and supporting education.
“The only thing I care about is delivering the mission.”
He chalks Twinkl’s success in cracking the schools market (which many fail to do) down to this, and to “customer obsession”.
“Edtech is incredibly difficult to do well, so only the solutions which really matter to people running schools, or aid educators, are ultimately successful.”
He also says schools “can’t afford to be putting in solutions which aren’t quite right”.
Computer geek
Seaton believes he was “destined” to run Twinkl. From the moment he got his first computer aged six, growing up in Cambridgeshire, he spent “all” his time on it.
He got a first in computing from the University of Sheffield and his first taste of edtech came from running computer systems at St Joseph’s College, a private school in Ipswich. After that, his career took some odd turns.
Because he “thought it would be fun”, he took a master’s in law back at the University of Sheffield.
It was at that time he met Susie, first at a house party where “she basically ignored me” and then again at a coffee shop, where he had more luck.
They were soon married (in 2009), and just five months later they launched Twinkl. Susie had been searching for teaching materials when the couple realised what was out there was “not of the quality you’d expect”.
He spent the next two years working as a commercial lawyer by day, and building Twinkl at night and weekends.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that we didn’t do anything else for two years. I’m surprised I’m still married. But the sacrifice was worth it,” he says.
In 2012, still keen to pursue legal endeavours, Seaton took a postgraduate diploma in notarial practice in law, specialising in the “very niche” area of document authentication for overseas use. Meanwhile, he continued growing Twinkl while mentoring students as an enterprise ambassador for Leeds University.
A diploma in global business and business management from Oxford University followed, and led on to an executive MBA, also from Oxford. But he has “had to pause” the latter because “there’s so much going on”.
Seaton describes his company’s rapid growth in its first decade as “Twinkl time”, and recalls staff returning from a week’s holiday to find “the whole business” had changed.
Seaton’s own business interests extend outside of education, too. He has invested in start-ups including Eargym, which trains brains for better hearing, and Aptap, which helps people manage bills. He was previously chief executive of healthy energy drinks company Brite Drinks, and Grandworker, a recruitment provider for the over-50s.
He and Susie “like to find other founders and support their mission to make the world a better place”, he says of these endeavours.
Twinkl free
With Covid came Seaton’s proudest career moment: Twinkl became the first education platform to make all its content free, for a six-month period.
It was a chance to prove the words of Twinkl’s motto, emblazoned across its office walls: ‘We help those who teach’.
But he was unsure if the gamble would pay off long-term. Twinkl only furloughed a couple of facilities staff, so there were still roughly 700 salaries to pay.
The move had the effect of expanding Twinkl’s user base to parents who now “felt empowered to be more involved with their children’s education”, which Seaton believes has been “hugely important”.
But the pandemic was a “stressful time” which he has “tried to forget”. The website was “crashing all the time”, with “huge spikes”.
Going back to being a paid-for service was “not the world’s easiest decision” either; some thought it should remain free.
World domination
Twinkl has moved from producing “traditional” teaching content to branching out into increasingly varied digital services, snapping up several other edtech firms in the process including the secondary assessment platform Educake.
Its assessment data can be used to compare results between departments and with other schools.
It’s also just bought online safety learning platform Natterhub. And its accelerator hub TwinklHive supports startups including TeacherTapp (a daily survey app for teachers), Learning Ladders (student progress tracking system), Erase All Kittens (gamified teaching of coding skills) and Crysp (a compliance management system).
Seaton’s six-year-old son Phoenix spends his mornings on Twinkl’s Learn & Go platform, which Seaton sees as “the Netflix of interactive content”.
Twinkl now supports educators in over 200 countries, with resources in 85 languages and translating on average 600 resources a month.
But Seaton wants to ramp up its global footprint. In the year ending April 2023, Twinkl’s turnover was £66.6 million (up from £55 million the previous year), 39 per cent of which was outside the UK. Its recent private equity investment is aimed at helping the group “find new ways” to help teachers “worldwide”.
Like rock stars, British edtech entrepreneurs often dream of conquering America. And like rock stars, most flounder.
“If you want to be the hero and do it in five minutes by spending a bunch of money on paid advertising, you’re going to be sent home sad.”
Instead, Twinkl is again relying on its values. “We’re going there with an attitude of service and humility. We want to help a bunch of teachers who need support.”
They haven’t conquered the home of the brave yet, but “we’re doing well from a growth perspective”. Thirteen per cent of its 2023 turnover came from outside the UK, Europe and Oceania.
Big tech assault on concentration
Beyond his and Susie’s different but complementary skill sets (he “can’t do what she does” with content creation, for example), Twinkl is a broader family affair. Jonathan’s younger brother and sister work in Twinkl’s technology and finance departments.
But when it comes to Phoenix, he’s very careful about exposure to online content. He only has access for “short windows”, because Seaton believes there’s “a lot of value in activities which allow kids to concentrate fundamentally”.
He says there’s “very clearly” been “an assault over the last 20 years by certain technology companies on everybody’s ability to concentrate”. “Attention has been hijacked in a way that isn’t useful for anybody.”
And when it comes to AI, “we need to find the right balance,” he says.
Elevating teacher supply
Seaton is also concerned about all the young people now leaving school without qualifications. At present, Twinkl targets content at the “birth-to-18” range, but given the “huge challenges in terms of skill sets coming through”, he’s looking at providing content for adult learners too.
Another problem on his mind is the recruitment crisis. This year, he launched a teacher supply agency, Elevate Supply, in the belief that “the market wasn’t delivering a fair enough deal for teachers and schools”.
Twinkl has spent a “long period building the right foundations” as the supply agency model “isn’t simple to build from the ground up”. It’s “still very much a pilot” right now, but the aim is to launch it fully next year.
Seaton believes that Twinkl saves teachers “many hours” when preparing lessons, which he thinks can only help with staff retention.
“This business delivers an insane amount of value to society, and I’m very proud that it does.”
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