“I have always been aware of Education Perfect and admired their capability to deliver content across a full suite of subjects within their platform. We didn’t previously have a relationship other than admiring each other’s products.”
Mr Spitty, along with EA’s 22 employees, including Mr Spitty’s brother Troy, who is chief technology officer, will all move over to Education Perfect, following the deal.
EA is an online platform that provides schools with numeracy and literacy assessments, as well as software to track how well students and the school are going.
Education Perfect (EP) meanwhile, is a Certified B Corporation – or B Corp –, meaning it is legally required to consider its workers, customers, community and environment to balance profit and purpose.
Also developed by former teachers, it sells a digital teaching and learning toolkit for schools, and claims to be used by more than a million students, 50,000 teachers and more than 3000 schools around the world.
Former RMIT Online chief executive and Etsy Australia and Asia managing director Helen Souness, who is chair of EP’s board, said the addition of EA’s assessment capabilities to EP’s existing teaching content and data analytics capabilities would greatly expand the services it could offer existing and new clients, as it planned global expansion.
“We’ve been in touch with Andrew for a long time, and had conversations, building to this over the past year … I was in one of the first meetings and what we saw was a really brilliant fit,” Ms Souness told the Financial Review.
“Essential Assessment is incredibly strong in primary schools, while we are absolutely the market leader in middle school and moving into senior, and we saw this wonderful fit … also in culture, with a very a strong focus on teachers.”
The move into the tech entrepreneurial realm has paid off handsomely for Mr Spitty, who said he initially worked on EA as a side hustle, while he kept teaching in Kerang until 2015.
He hired his brother Troy at the start of the company as an independent contractor on an “as needed” basis to build a basic website and other components as they arose. A year after leaving teaching to work on EA full time, Mr Spitty hired Troy as a full-time employee.
Mr Spitty said it wasn’t an easy call to leave teaching, but he saw the opportunity ahead of him once he started building EA, which he said has been profitable since very early in its life.
“I taught at Kerang Technical High School from 2011-2015 and I phased out teaching as the financial capacity of Essential Assessment increased to take over my teacher’s salary,” he said.
“I then made a call that I couldn’t do both and had to change to continue to develop Essential Assessment further. I have always had an entrepreneurial mindset and was really on a mission to build out the model, so this was the natural path forward for me.”
Over one-third of primary schools in Victoria and NSW already use EA’s platform to assess student performance and improve achievement, and Mr Spitty said combining with EP would let him think about developing the best holistic solution for education from K-12 in all subjects.
Mr Spitty’s successful exit will serve as an inspiration for other would-be tech entrepreneurs about the possibility of building a profitable tech business, without venture capital backing, and away from the traditional inner-city start-up hubs.
He said he had recognised problems as a teacher and put in the hard work to address them, by keeping a focus on schools’ problems in his mind.
“There have been many challenges and milestones along the way. Working as the sole salesperson, customer service, marketer, business manager and content developer for the first five years for up to 500 schools was very challenging,” he said.
“Working with my brother Troy who was employed as the sole developer on the platform has been rewarding. Keeping up with the demands of the platform has been challenging at times, growing the right team has been challenging and rewarding also.”
Ms Souness said she had high hopes for EA’s successful integration into EP, and said teacher-led education technology firms represented an opportunity that would be commercially rewarding, while making a positive difference to teachers’ jobs and educational outcomes.
“I think Andrew is a really exceptional person. Education Perfect has tens of teachers working with us and our product team spends a lot of time in schools with teachers, and that’s the magic,” she said.
“Three key things for us is that we’re saving teachers time, we are able to assess students and give insights on their progress, and then use that to give personalised learning pathways.”
