Aid will fuel rocketing teaching firm

Apr 8 2009 by Karen Dent, The Journal

AN online learning company is aiming to expand its schools business by a quarter after securing £200,000 from a new Government-backed scheme.

Creating Careers, of Seaton Burn, near Newcastle, develops and supplies vocational qualifications online such as IT, sports, work and life skills for the over-14s. It currently works with 4% of UK schools and has set itself the target of winning business with 25% within three years.

Chief executive Neil Moult said: “We’re doing a lot of work with schools across the country, at the rate of four or five schools a week. Two years ago, our turnover from schools was nothing and it is now touching just over £1m in the schools sector alone.”

The company, which supplies similar qualifications to the further education sector, is on target for annual turnover of £2.1m to £2.2m this year.

“We have worked with the further education sector for years and adapted that product for the schools market. The learning platform required a bit of work, but we weren’t starting from scratch,” Mr Moult said. The business has been running since 2000 and has 29 staff working for its two brands – vision2learn, for further education, and vision2learn, for secondary schools.

It received the £200,000 to expand the schools product from The Royal Bank of Scotland under the Government’s Enterprise Finance Guarantee.

Mr Moult said: “With this extra funding, we can plan for significant growth in turnover through the continued expansion of our vision2learn brands in both schools and colleges.

“It also enables us to invest more in technology and we will also be advertising for several new full-time job positions because of this.”

Creating Careers has already created a couple of jobs after securing a major contract with qualifications provider Edexcel to provide 45 modules.