YouTeachMe

Thirty years after it was first identified as a barrier to education transformation, teachers working in mainstream schools remain unable to educate all children in their local communities. 

This is the systemic problem we are working to solve.

Global education is facing a triple learning crisis; one of equity and inclusion, one of quality and one of relevance.   

A crisis of equity and inclusion

School remains the only place where quality education can be delivered, and an estimated 250 million children are out of school. 

Of those children who are in school, the most vulnerable are systematically failed, with the most grave consequences for many.

A crisis of quality

Recent estimates indicate that 617 million children and adolescents are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. Despite annual governmental spending approaching $5tn, education underperformance continues to affect all nations, both developing and developed. 

A crisis of relevance

Billions of learnersacross the world are not getting the education they need to thrive in this challenging and rapidly changing world, creating a existential threat to the future of humanity itself.   

There are numerous reasons why these crises exist:

1. Quality teaching and learning is currently only possible in a school 
2. No teacher is able to meet the learning and inclusion needs of every potential learner
3. Teachers are physically disconnected and cannot easily learn from one another
4. Education is organised in silos and collaboration between sectors is virtually non-existent 
5. Many learners speak a different language to their teacher
6. Parents are excluded from their child’s education so cannot support learning at home
7. Systemic change is slow and cannot keep pace with our fast changing world

Teachers are our best hope for building a sustainable and socially just world. However, teachers lack the support, skills and continuing training they need to ensure that they are able to teach every child, including those with complex learning and inclusion needs. 

Finding ways to directly support individualised teaching through teacher collaboration, especially cross-sector collaboration, is the key to solving this problem.  

“Technology holds tremendous potential for both teaching and learning so long as it is put to use in ways that are supportive of teacher inputs over its pedagogical use, the integrity of the profession and is equitably integrated,” 

Kersti Kaljulaid, Co-Chair of the UN’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession, February 2024

We hope that this application will demonstrate how our technology empowers teachers to share their collective knowledge and expertise for the benefit of all.   

YouTeachMe is a cloud platform that enables every teacher to enhance their daily teaching with asynchronous videos.     

Relevant in all contexts and especially in remote locations, YouTeachMe transforms teaching and learning. 

They can share videos to support targeted learners; before, during and after lessons. They can make and share videos themselves, and also use videos created by teachers working in classrooms right across the system.    

Teachers can ‘follow’ teachers who’re making and sharing useful videos. They can send video recommendations to colleagues working in other schools, through professional networks they’ve made.  

YouTeachMe creates an entirely connected education system, then supports every individual within it.       

Why use video? 

Video is naturally inclusive. It’s low-demand, low-arousal, predictable and consistent. This makes it a powerful tool for supporting the learning of disabled and neurodivergent learners, while benefiting all learners. 

Adaptive teaching and inclusive learning 

Teachers can instantly share videos with one, some or all learners, at just the right moment to support learning. 

Teachers are able to share different videos with different learners, at different points in the teaching process.  

Some learners, especially those with more complex needs, may need significantly different teaching input to their classmates. This can be supported in the form of videos made by specialist teachers who may, for example, use Makaton signing throughout their teaching. 

Other learners will need the same teaching as their peers, adapted to meet their specific needs. For example: 

• A deaf learner in a mainstream school being supported during the lesson by videos where the teaching is in sign language. 
• A special needs learner being supported with a video shared the day before a lesson, so they can watch the key teaching many times, at home with their parent. 
• A group of learners who need regular prompts and reminders, being supported during a lesson by videos that scaffold them whilst the teacher works with other learners. 

YouTeachMe offers a significant opportunity for a team of specialist teachers to produce teaching videos to support teachers everywhere, and especially those working with SEN learners in remote and isolated areas.  

What can be taught?  

When a teacher makes a video that’s going to be shared with a single learner, their teaching is captured - pace, intonation, vocabulary choices, visual aids, progression of explanation and so on. 

The videos that are created are as diverse as the curricula and the learners being taught. Videos already created and used to support learning of everything from air pressure and African drumming for learners with profound disabilities, quadratic equations for deaf learners and independent living and employment skills for autistic learners.    

It’s this focus on meeting both the teaching needs and the learning needs of each child that’s the power behind YouTeachMe. The absolute inclusivity and flexibility of content and delivery means that every child can learn the skills needed to thrive in life. 

This is how YouTeachMe makes learning more inclusive and equitable, while improving outcomes for all learners.

A short product demonstration can be found here. 

Our solution serves every stakeholder involved in systemic education:

• Learners in school - they receive quality, relevant, individualised teaching, when and where they need it. 
• Learners unable to attend a physical school - they are able to receive the same teaching materials as their in-school peers, enabling them to learn at distance. 
• Learners with cognitive disabilities - our innovative approach to using video to support the teaching of independent life skills, developed with specialist teachers, gives them the best possible chance to lead an  independent life. If their teacher feels it appropriate, they are able to access all key teaching before the lesson starts, enabling them to watch it as many times as they need, with their parent or carer. They are supported in all areas of learning, increasing the likelihood that they will reach their academic potential. 
• Learners with sight and/or hearing loss - accessible versions of teaching materials are available for them to access - BSL translations and Audio Described versions.
• Learners who do not speak the same language as their teacher - teaching materials can be shared in multiple languages’ local language, mother tongue and an international languages are all possible (NOTE: this functionality is built but we currently lack the human and financial resources to implement and scale it).
• Learners who have to migrate to a new country - when a learner moves from their school, they can take their account with them. This means that, should they move to another YouTeachMe using jurisdiction, they can be ‘plugged in’ in their new school, where their new teacher is able to see what and how they’ve been taught and then build upon it. 
• Parents and carers - they can see exactly what and how their child is being taught. For parents who missed out on education, or who struggled in school, they get enabling them to learn alongside their child and supporting them to become literate and numerate too. 

• Teachers - teaching are isolated, unsupported and demoralised. YouTeachMe brings them ongoing support, workload reduction, the knowledge and expertise to teach every child effectively and the increased professional status that will follow.   

• Trainee teachers - watching experienced teachers teach is the most effective way to support teachers in training. Enabling them to embed experienced teachers’ teaching into their own lessons improves outcomes, reduces workload and job stress. 

• School leaders - no longer have to be the lead teaching professional in the school (which does become a significant issue once they no longer teach regularly). Outcomes improve and their teachers are supported to become more effective. Every school is supported and differences between schools are minimised. 

• Business owners - by contributing useful video materials they are able to sustainably influence the educational development of all young people and help develop the workforce that they need in the future. 
  

YouTeachMe grew out of our founder’s experiences of leading rapid school improvement. The insights he gained kickstarted our journey, but it was when we began working closely with teachers and leaders in every phase and sector of education that we came to understand the depth and diversity of challenges ‘the education system’ faces. 

 At every stage, over a period of more than 10 years, the iterative development of our solution has been guided by education professionals working on the ground. We’ve worked with teachers and leaders in every education sector to deeply understand the challenges they face and then iterate our solution to help them overcome them. 

We are rooted in education, with plans to become ever more so. This is one of the reasons why we feel we’re well positioned to deliver this solution. 

Another reason is that we proactively seek support and partnerships. The challenges ahead of us are too great to achieve on our own. We know this and we embrace it fully. 

Microlink PC UK (Ltd) is a growing force within inclusive education in the UK and globally, bringing over thirty years of experience gained in supporting workplace adjustments for over 300,000 disabled people into the education domain. Microlink has successfully delivered government school improvement programmes to establish Assistive Technologies in mainstream classrooms, supports a community of over 700 primary and secondary schools to secure better outcomes for children with a wide range of vulnerabilities and needs, has grown strategic relationships at national level in some jurisdictions, and has the back office capacity and leadership to support the core YouTeachMe team to deliver successfully at scale. 

We currently have one full time Teacher Collaborator (TC) who has worked for the company for a number of years. They work directly with teachers and other professionals in the range of schools with whom we work. He works with them to create and share teaching materials covering the full range of knowledge, skills and attributes that are taught in each school. The materials are designed by the teachers, created by the teachers with the TC’s support and then edited and uploaded by the TC to ensure that teacher workload impact is minimised. 

Our solution emerged during our work in education, has developed under guidance from education professionals working across the education system and so remains fully rooted in education. This will always be the case because it’s our superpower! 

We are a growth solution, because the platform has been built over seven years, has been thoroughly beta-tested, and, in partnership with Microlink, we are well placed for rapid and sustained expansion.

In the development of YouTeachMe we have worked with 12 mainstream schools, 3 special schools, 2 deaf schools, 1 hospital school,  3 General Further Education colleges, 1 Specialist Further Education college, 1 University teacher training department and 1 school based teacher training organisation. 

In doing so we have so far supported approximately 10,000 learners, plus their parents or carers, 400 teachers, 25 school and system leaders and 1,250 teachers in training. 

Our business model is now a decade in development and continues to develop, as is our product - language translation is the latest addition which we are still iterating. 

Given the recent high level recommendations for governments to develop YouTeachMe’esque platforms (Recommendation no. 28), we have decided that our model should shift to selling to systems, jurisdictions or at government level, rather than individual schools and colleges. 

Our work is fuelled by a vision of a world made fair and equitable through inclusive education for all. 

We are aligned to Solve’s values and global ambition.

We are ready for the next phase of sustainable growth, and seek the acknowledgement and seed funding to enable us to move forward at scale and at pace.  

We are applying to Solve’s Global Learning Challenge because a successful bid will bring with it an acknowledgement of our education solution. It will bring credibility and endorsement, and the reputational boost that will open doors and create possibilities for deployment at system, jurisdiction and national level. YouTeachMe and Microlink cannot do this alone: but with the acknowledgement, endorsement and support of Solve, the shift change will open doors and create possibilities that hitherto did not exist. 

We also believe that with support from MIT and your partners we can together accelerate global progress towards SDG4.

YouTeachMe addresses the micro and macro needs of education. 

The micro needs are those of the individual; each learner with their own interests, abilities and challenges can be supported with individualised teaching; each parent/family can see what and how their child is being taught; each teacher is able to draw upon the knowledge and expertise of other teachers in areas where they need it most. The technology makes this level of inclusive practice possible.

The macro needs are those of systemic improvement, and we see education as a global network made up of national systems all trying to achieve similar objectives; inclusion, equity, quality and relevance. YouTeachMe fundamentally enables connection and collaboration within and across education systems. 

To make this practically possible, we drew inspiration from online applications that have already changed the world; YouTube, Facebook and Twitter/X. We applied their principles, of video learning, network building and followership, to transform the way that teachers work together, as well as the way they teach. 

In doing so, we’ve created the possibility of building a global community of practice that’s also an online network for education. YouTeachMe becomes ever more powerful as it grows, and enjoys network effects just like the applications that inspired it. 

The YouTeachMe network will empower a global movement from equality to equity…tailored solutions for individuals to enable them to achieve and secure better outcomes, in particular, those within neurodiverse communities and with learning needs.

We believe that YouTeachMe would perfectly complement existing initiatives, such as UNICEF’s Giga project. As Giga connects each new school to the Internet is the vital first step, YouTeachMe would bring them immediate access to curriculum, pedagogy and learning resources from contributors around the world, enabling instant teacher collaboration and impact on learning. This would increase Giga’s impact and value for money.  Without doubt, this possibility would enable further investment in and growth of the YouTeachMe community of practice.

YouTeachMe has the scalability and flexibility needed to be implemented in any nation and exceeds recent recommendations to governments worldwide:

 “…(all) governments should foster local, regional and international teacher collaboration through partnerships between educators and schools to share best practices and resources; develop repositories of open digital educational resources; and develop and maintain digital platforms that connect teachers, researchers, policymakers and organizations.”

Recommendation no. 28

United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession, February 2024

It offers the opportunity for national development and multilateral collaboration to develop side by side. For example, the best way to teach for peace or to understand and respond to climate change is by sharing the work of those teachers whose lives are most directly affected by it. Teaching videos could migrate from the classrooms of small Pacific Islands, into the hands of teachers everywhere: true understanding, empathy, urgency and meaning can be achieved. 

SDG4 is a global challenge that needs a global solution. We believe that YouTeachMe can scale to be the solution that creates a multilateral approach to inclusive, equitable, high quality and relevant education.

YouTeachMe connects teachers across all phases and sectors of UK education. Each teacher can watch and learn from videos made by fellow teachers working in their own school and other schools across the nation. In particular, the videos have been made and shared with learners to support their social, emotional, physical and academic development. All ages, abilities and learning needs are supported. 

Our immediate goals are to increase the amount of cross-sector teaching collaboration, the ability for individual teachers to effectively educate all children in their class and the levels of parental engagement in learning.

These goals link with our long-term outcomes including making teaching a collaborative profession, providing high quality and relevant education to every child and the empowerment of parents to support their child’s education. 

We have undertaken video interviews with teachers working in different phases and sectors of education, allowing us to explore the impacts on them, their learners and their learners’ parents so far. The feedback we received indicated that teachers feel their knowledge and expertise positively benefit from collaboration with a wide range of their peers, learners of all ages, abilities and learning needs make accelerated progress and parental engagement in learning dramatically increases, especially for young learners and those with disabilities.  

You can hear the thoughts of teachers and leaders here!

Our work has been driven by the desire to understand and solve the myriad of challenges faced by learners and teachers all phases and sectors of UK education. 

It has been driven by on the ground work in schools and not by the SDG's. 

That is not to say that our work does not align with the Development Goals; it absolutely does. Rather we have not refined our processes for measuring progress towards them. 

Currently our work most closely associates with 4.5 and 4.6. 

4.5 - By 2030, eliminate gender disparities in education and ensure equal access to all levels of education and vocational training for the vulnerable, including persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples and children in vulnerable situations. This has been our greatest impact focus, which has seen us developing teaching and learning functionalities and videos that meet the needs of even the most complexly disabled learners, their parents and their teachers.  

4.6 - By 2030, ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy. 

The sharing of teaching knowledge and expertise is powerful support for teachers in training. Therefore, there are close links with 4.c, although this is not currently measured.   

By 2025 we are aiming to support a minimum of 1,000 schools, 50,000 active teachers, a team of 25 specialist teachers on secondment to create 250 specialist videos a week, and mother-tongue language in place for a minimum of 90 languages.  

These impact goals build on what we've already achieved as we scale horizontally to more schools and vertically in terms of inclusive content for increased numbers of teachers to use and increased impact on learners as a result.  

YouTeachMe is a standards-based web application running in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

The core code is loaded and runs on the AWS ECS (Elastic Container Service)  service which allows ease of deployment and scalability. The back-end code is written in PHP and runs on an Apache web server. The AWS ElastiCache service is implemented to handle client sessions in this serverless environment.

Front end code consists of legacy code written in vanilla HTML, CSS & Javascript with more recent developments utilising modern client-side development frameworks VueJS and ReactJS. 

Data is stored on a MySql database which is hosted on a dedicated virtual machine running in AWS EC2.

Video content is uploaded to the site and transcoded using the AWS MediaConvert service.

The YouTeachMe Team

2 x full time

1 x part time

2 x specialist educational advisors

The Microlink Team: 

Microlink employs over 100 staff. Executive Leadership includes legal and finance specialists as well as HR capacity. Microlink prides itself on being a leading employer in terms of inclusive practice, winning many accolades and awards for its sector-leading diversity within its workforce and principled employee support. 

Specific support for the YouTeachMe initiative will come from the Education Leadership Team which has at its disposal 30 Education Coaches and SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) whose expertise and experience is available on flexible contracts.

Our founder began developing the concept that became YouTeachMe whilst working as a headteacher twelve years ago. He left headship and began working full time on developing the platform ten years ago. Fellow team members and advisors have joined within the last five years, enabling the continued growth and Beta-testing of the platform and its capabilities. 

Microlink have become engaged with YouTeachMe in the last year of operation. We are now ready to deliver at scale. 

The YouTeachMe Team 

The absolute focus of the YouTeachMe team and their partner Microlink is on removing barriers to learning for all learners, and especially those with complex needs.

The barriers to learning we have overcome so far are many and varied. For example, when specialist Teachers of the Deaf began to support learning at home using YouTeachMe, they found that most parents were unable to support their child because of their limited knowledge of sign language. We worked with the deaf teachers and a deaf-led organization to develop and implement a language translation solution. As a result, hearing parents are now included and have the support they need to be able to help their child’s learning at home.

Barriers are specific to the context in which the learning is taking place. However, we often find that there’s crossover with similar barriers in other contexts. In the example above, we have since broadened the solution so that it has the potential to support multicultural schools who are struggling to overcome spoken language barriers between teacher and learners and between school and home.     

As we grow, we will demonstrate the same level of commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in the employment decisions we make and the policies we implement.  

The Microlink Team

Microlink is a national leader in workplace adjustments and supporting diversity, equity and inclusivity in businesses and corporates nationally and internationally. Microlink has a long track record of supporting new Assistive Technology providers into the market place, especially if they disrupt existing hegemonies and produce tested and verified high-impact solutions at reduced costs to businesses and schools. This is a critical driver in terms of creating a more equitable world by removing systemic barriers to living, learning and working. 

Resolving the triple education crises is amongst the highest priorities facing governments around the world. 

YouTeachMe is a SaaS platform with limitless scalability and network effects. 

It is able to support governments in their efforts to provide practical, sustainable support to teachers and ensure high quality and relevant education for every child, especially those with SEN and those in isolated and remote communities. 

As revenues/grants allow, we will begin offering secondment opportunities to teachers who not only using YouTeachMe, but are proactively creating and sharing teaching videos. These secondments will provide the time to focus on creating increased numbers of videos, plus time to co-create videos with other teachers. 

The benefits of this approach are numerous. Teachers are incentivised to create and share videos, teachers on secondment have access to many more of their own videos when they return to the classroom, the collaborative creation of videos will produce videos that neither teacher could create on their own, and of course, the repository of videos available to all teachers continually grows. 

The ever-increasing video repository ensures that existing teachers receive ongoing and ever-improving support. This is likely to lead to increased teacher retention rates, along with an increased ability to attract, train and retain the millions of new teachers needed to achieve SDG4 by 2030. 

The YouTeachMe Team will continue to hold the core platform management and development function, including quality assurance. This will keep staffing overheads low and ensure that investment is targeted effectively. For example, as and when funding will become available, the core YouTeachMe Team will devote attention to the incorporation of multilingual cloud-based AI tools to support translation services integrated into the existing application (in a similar manner to inclusive apps such as Helperbird making use of the Microsoft Immersive Reader suite of accessibility and translation functions).

Microlink’s legal, finance, education and contract management teams will have the capacity to manage the onboarding of customers, at micro and macro levels. Microlink has a vast experience in terms of onboarding corporate clients into WPA (WorkPlace Adjustment) solutions, and will apply this strategic wisdom, accumulated over thirty years, to ensure a smooth passage from initial scoping opportunities through pilot phase to full deployment.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) will be agreed.

The core YouTeachMe Team will then “train the trainers”, Microlink’s Coaches and Subject Matter Experts, to support customers at scale. Approximately 30 Education Coaches and SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) on flexible contracts are available, whose expertise and experience can be brought to bear as business opportunities grow or flex. These individuals can be commissioned and deployed to support content development, content management, staff training and professional development on demand and at scale, as opportunities arise. This team will also be responsible for supporting any seconded teaching staff from within the commissioning jurisdiction or system who may have content management and creation responsibilities. At all times, cost-effective and sustainable system design and deployment considerations will be at the forefront of business planning and growth.

In the decade we’ve been working on the development of YouTeachMe, we have adopted a lean and focused staffing model to keep overheads as low as possible.

Bringing new technologies into an education marketplace is not easy. Funding is scant, and even if the technology meets a need, education settings tend to adopt a low risk approach to trialing and implementing change. This is understandable, as children only get one chance through the system: innovation has to be proven, and has to be seen to have impact.

However, this began to change in 2020, when we applied to a COVID response competition launched by InnovateUK, the UK government’s innovation funding body. 

We were successful and received an initial £50,000 grant, which we used to build the back-end scalability needed to onboard education settings at pace and at scale. 

We currently have capacity to instantly serve over 100,000 new users before bandwidth increases would be needed. With regards to onboarding new schools, the ability to quickly onboard a school with 250 members of staff and 1,200 learners has been proven on the ground.   

Impressed with the progress we made, InnovateUK then awarded us a further £25,000 grant to support with our sales and marketing activity. 

This had limited impact due to it being 2021, when UK schools already had Teams/GoogleClassroom in place and no capacity to look beyond them, even though YouTeachMe offered a completely different and transformative service.

However, it's now clear that COVID awakened interest in technology for education and the urgency to deliver SDG4 is real, so we now feel very well placed to meet market need with our solution.

 We see financial sustainability being achieved through a mix of service contracts to governments, investment and possibly grant funding. With the Microlink central team devoting capacity and capability to contract management (at scale and on-demand), there are no Executive and Leadership fixed costs. The central YouTeachMe Team can focus exclusively on platform maintenance and development. Team of Subject Matter Experts again reduces the dependency on high staffing fixed costs: capacity can be commissioned in a focussed way and on demand.