Phenomenal demand for smart online education solutions has seen a Staffordshire business boom

Staffordshire-based online educational training specialist Go Live is a pandemic boom success story (@jbasketts).

As it celebrates its third year anniversary this month, its founder Joe Basketts has revealed that the pandemic has seen the bespoke consultancy expand “exponentially” as its been called in to support the creation of extraordinary digital learning experiences for education providers across the UK.

This “phenomenal demand” for the consultancy’s expertise began back in April last year and in the last 12 months Go Live has been involved in the training and support of 1500 educators and school leaders – with the majority of support delivered remotely – across the UK.

This incredible surge in business on the back of the pandemic, has seen the specialist firm, based in Stoke-on-Trent, rapidly expand to recruit four additional staff to create a five-strong team, pictured.

Go Live has expanded organically through word of mouth

And what’s unusual in this day and age is that Go Live has grown organically through word of mouth rather than through actively pursuing sales.

With a client list already spanning across Staffordshire, Berkshire, Essex, Merseyside, West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Surrey, and Cheshire, the online specialist’s growth shows no signs of letting up anytime soon with founder Joe even revealing further plans to expand in the pipeline early in 2022.

Joe, of Stone, said:

“The business has grown totally organically and via word of mouth – we have no sales people.

“Our focus on building partnerships rather than supplier/client relationships means each partnership we’ve developed has started off small, and then we have found that they have come to us more and more as time has gone on and they learn about what we can provide/help them with.

“I am absolutely delighted with the growth of the business so far, and we are now receiving support from Staffordshire Growth Hub and Staffordshire Chambers to continue this progress.”

Schools are recognising teaching and workload can be improved with digital support

Amongst the wealth of packages Go Live now provides is the cutting edge professional development training programme Edtech Leaders, which is thought to be the only UK programme of its kind and is another key to its success story.

Joe added:

“Since lockdown we’ve expanded the amount of training and support packages we offer, and our flagship training programme, Edtech Leaders has also been taken on in the UK by the Tablet Academy – a global provider of teacher training and Microsoft’s Global Training Partner of the Year.

“In addition, Edtech Leaders has already been incorporated into the Primary Goal Digital Champion apprenticeship programme as an offer to all of their senior leaders.

“We’ve also become a Microsoft Global Training Provider, and a Google Cloud Partner, in addition to becoming a sponsor of Naace, the education technology association. It’s due to this expansion, that we have plans to expand the team further in early 2022.”

Demand for digital programmes in education continues despite the pandemic easing

And, despite the worst of the pandemic hopefully being behind us, and we’ve returned to face-to-face learning, demand for Go Live services continues to grow – but why?

“Now, we hopefully have the worst of the pandemic behind us, schools are realising that if they take the best bits that they developed during lockdown they can actually improve their teaching – even when students are all back in the classroom,” explained Joe, who is a Google Certified Trainer, Apple Teacher, Certified Microsoft Innovative Educator, Online Safety Mark and Naacemark assessor, and CEOP Ambassador.

“Tools such as Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams have so much to offer here – from handing out, tracking, returning and marking work, to enabling seamless continuation between work done at school and at home.

“And Cloud technologies such as Google Drive and Microsoft Sharepoint/OneDrive are also helping to break down the traditional school barriers by enabling staff to access documents from wherever they are, and on any device.

“Due to these reasons, the time is right for schools now to investigate how they continue to improve using the technology they have invested in during lockdown.”

Go Live was founded in October 2018 and recruited its first member of staff in May 2020. It now has staff based in Southport, Merseyside; Huddersfield, Kirklees; Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire and Chippenham, Wiltshire.