Alumni profile: Individual learning for all

Tell us more about the idea behind Edicat

Across the world today, children are being taught in large classrooms at the same pace and in the same order to all students. The problem is that learning is a highly individual process that should be tailored depending on prior knowledge, ability and preferences.

This one-size-fits all approach can disadvantage some students. When a student misunderstands a topic early on, the class simply forges ahead, progressing to more advanced concepts that demand a robust understanding of the previous topic, thus compounding their underperformance.

Having amassed over 6,000+ hours of experience teaching K-12 Mathematics in schools, charities and one-to-one sessions, we have personally seen the significant impact that personalised learning can have on student performance. It's incredibly rewarding to sit down individually with a student and understand the process behind their answers. It opens the door to identifying the specific knowledge gaps that are holding them back and designing targeted remediation strategies to address them. It amazed us every time to watch them achieve grades they didn't think possible. 

This one-size-fits all approach can disadvantage some students. When a student misunderstands a topic early on, the class simply forges ahead, progressing to more advanced concepts that demand a robust understanding of the previous topic, thus compounding their underperformance.

We realised that while one-to-one tutoring is great, at an average household cost of £900-1000 annually, only 32% of advantaged students receive one-to-one tuition in England much less the 7% accessible to disadvantaged students. To democratise access to personalised learning to all students, we needed a more scalable approach. Hence, Edicat Learning was born with the vision to democratise access to high-quality personalised learning for all students, irrespective of their socioeconomic background.

How does Edicat work?

Powered by machine learning and psychometrics, our advanced assessments understand your child's needs in a comprehensive yet granular manner, allowing us to deliver deep insights and recommendations that allows them to maximise their learning progress and outcomes.

How have you gone about setting up your startup?

We’ve been lucky to have encouraging wins in startup competitions, trialling our prototype with users and securing interest to use our platform.

We face challenges every day at Edicat Learning and our solutions-focused mindset has allowed us to rise to the challenge of addressing them. Our biggest challenge has been recruiting a capable and passionate team of technical experts to implement our vision. Our solution requires the use of cutting-edge technology combining psychometrics, machine learning and cognitive science, so it is critical to ensure we have the in-house resources to develop a scalable, impactful product that will truly enable individualised learning for students. We’re glad to have recruited a team that exceeded our expectations. Our culture fit and ability to work synergistically with one another taught us the importance of fostering the right culture, where members are creative yet critical, relentlessly passionate yet flexible.

What is the next step for you?

Once we have developed our MVP, we plan on launching our ‘Returning to Learning’ campaign where we will engage 150 disadvantaged students that have severely underperformed due to the pandemic and allow them full access to our product under the supervision of our senior tutors; this will allow us to derive insights about the student’s most fundamental knowledge gaps, design a personalised curriculum for them and initiate remediation to ensure they can confidently progress to the more advanced concepts in the coming academic year.

We aim to conduct impact assessments with these students to quantify the improvement in learning outcome mastery when students use our platform. Once validated, we will extend product access to GCSE Mathematics students, allowing parents to keep track of their child’s progress. In March 2022, we aim to launch to schools and universities who have already expressed interest in using our product on development. This will allow us to refine our product to ensure that it maximises student performance and effectively integrates into the classroom. We aim to fully monetise our platform in September 2022.

How did your time at Imperial help you?

Firstly, studying Business Management at the Business School has allowed us to create productive workflows and manage functions such as business strategy, finance and marketing effectively. Furthermore, talking to the team at the Imperial Edtech Lab provided us with insights into how to develop our product to meet the needs of large institutions. Their expression of interest to use our product on development reassured us of the demand for the product we are building.

We are very grateful to Imperial College London for continuing to support us; we were one of seven teams in the Imperial Enterprise Lab Summer Accelerator. This provided us with the opportunity to learn about the drivers of product-market fit, enabling us to refine and deliver an impactful product, as well as pitch practising sessions which allowed us to fine-tune how we pitch our start-up in a clear, concise and compelling manner. Finally, we are strong believers in the power of community; we took great energy and knowledge from exchanging ideas with other cohort teams and we look forward to supporting one another on our entrepreneurial journeys.