Future Skills with Ed Halliday: learn the Fire Tech model of tech education for children

Credit: Fire Tech website

Fire Tech was one of the first companies to offer experiential technology training to children aged between nine and 17 years old. More recently, the company started to implement programs that allow students to engage in “real life” projects. In this interview, Ed Halliday, Chief Operating Officer at Fire Tech, talks about the motivations to start the company, learning models and methods, and the challenge to scale up the initiative. On July 14, the GFCC is releasing a new report, Future Skills: Lessons and Insights from a Review of Innovative Skills and Development Initiatives. The launching will happen during the Frame the Future of Talent conversation. This publication is part of a sequence of materials featured in the report.

GFCC: Could you please introduce Fire Tech and tell us when and why was it created?

Ed Halliday: Fire Tech today is the U.K.’s leading provider of tech education experiences for 9 to 17-year-old and, in fact, probably Europe’s leading provider at this point. We started in 2013, when our founder Jill Hodges, wanted her own children to learn about tech skills. Back then the only providers who would do it were only offering Web 1.0 content, so she decided to quit her job and do it herself. She recruited some tutors from local universities and ran a pilot at Imperial College London. And since then, we’ve grown and built all sorts of different curricula.

GFCC: This is super inspiring. And.. where do you stand today?

Ed Halliday: As of 2021, we have reached more than 80,000 students during camps held online, and in classrooms in 20 locations across the UK as well as locations in Europe, Australia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Since 2020, Fire Tech has reached over 65,000 young people through their online courses, including in partnership with major tech companies, organizations, and governments, including Amazon, Google, Nesta, and the Saudi Space Agency. The way that work is broken down is that our core business in the U.K. is camps and tech clubs. The majority of those, at least until recently, were in-person holiday camps in school holidays structured around our 40 pieces of tech education curriculum in coding, robotics, AI, cybersecurity, creative design, how to set up your own YouTube channel, all sorts of different content with tech at its core. We have pivoted in 2020 to become an online education business, with live and blended, self-guided tech courses available to students across the world, and now aim to become the leading education platform for STEM education across the world.

GFCC: Who actually delivers the camps, your team or the schools?

Ed: Our camps and programs are delivered by our expert tutors who are recruited and trained from some of the U.K.’s leading universities The idea is that this is education that is relevant and cutting edge in a way that schools don’t have the means, the resources to deliver.

GFCC: What do you mean when you say it is cutting edge? What is distinctive in your approach to the school IT or robotics class?

Ed Halliday: We want our students to discover the latest technologies and learn in a way that is completely different from school. Our courses are structured in small classes, maximum of eight students per class, and centered around challenge-based learning. Challenge-based learning is very rigorous, true to real-life applications of these technologies. Students learn from expert young innovators — design engineers, AI engineers, and PhD researchers from the UK’s leading universities — who are just a few years ahead of them, so are very relatable and inspiring.

GFCC: Your model looks super cool, but it seems to be hard to scale it up. How are you addressing that?

Ed Halliday: Now we’re at a point where we’re really looking to scale it up. Our goal is to build a global subscription platform for STEM education, combining on-demand learning content with access to live tuition from expert instructors, that provides K12 students with the inspiration, skills, and experience to become tech innovators of the future. There’s a huge pressing demand across the world and we are forming partnerships with corporations such as Amazon in the U.K. We’re working with Arm which is a big hardware and tech company, WPP, Barclays, a few others, and governments like the Sultanate of Oman where we are running an online program for 15,000 young students.

GFCC: What innovations you see coming up in children's tech education and training? Anything that you are doing?

Ed Halliday: Yes, definitely. This possibly the most exciting thing we are doing. What we are working on is a kind of three-sided marketplace that Fire Tech — and our curriculum and tutors –the students and then employers themselves to create virtual work experiences. This is something that’s actually very hard to access particularly, you know, dependent on socioeconomic background. We deliver [work experiences] virtually to help students build a portfolio which would then make them relevant to future employers… and they can do this at age 15.

GFCC: Could you explain a bit more about the virtual job experience?

Ed Halliday: First thing: this is a very early stage. We are just prototyping how this is going to look and opening that up to partners. This is about contextualized learning. For instance, a student can choose to work for a video game studio — we’re in early discussions with Epic Games who’s the creator of Fortnite and Unreal — and they could, for example, sponsor that whole experience.

GFCC: How does that work in practice?

Ed Halliday: It is very oriented toward doing things, real projects. Over the course of a week, participants would meet up with a boss, a person from the industry sector, and then be commissioned to work on different projects. What we’ve been talking to Epic Games about are projects in 3D visualization or engineering, animation, operations. You could pick a series of projects or challenges and build your own work experience, plan, or project-based on those. And then, over the course of a week or two weeks, or however long your work placement would last, you set challenges and complete them virtually.

GFCC: That is ambitious. What’s the age range for participants?

Ed Halliday: We haven’t really nailed down exactly who this is for, but provisionally it would be for 14 to 17. And then we could look to expand beyond that.

GFCC: So you are building in order really to deploy this full-fledged, do you need a roaster or a consortium of the industry partners?

Ed Halliday: Potentially, we could do it ourselves, but actually it really comes to life in partnership because we want it to be real, we want it to be tangible, and we want it to be relevant to employers. Ideally, a whole consortium of employers will get behind this.

GFCC: Do you imagine participants working alone or in teams or both in this new model?

Ed Halliday: The idea is to basically structure each day like a stand-up meeting as if you are working in a dev team. Then you actually feel like you’re part of a group because work is not like this. Usually working remotely means independently. This is working with others. We want to build that in as a core component of the experience.