The Times Magazine 57‘I REMEMBER MARTHA SAYING, “WE’RE GOING TO DO
A BILLION DOLLARS IN SALES.” YOU NEED BIG GOALS’
Fox, now a peer, in 1998, then sold it in 2005
for £577 million.
His plan to set up coding colleges all
over Britain within a decade seems equally
ambitious, but he thinks it is “totally realistic”.
“I always remember Martha saying in the
early years of Lastminute.com, ‘We’re going
to do a billion dollars in sales.’ I said, ‘Where
did that number come from?’ You need to
work with these big hairy audacious goals.”
The 01 Founders school is based on
École 42, a computer programming college in
Paris funded by the French billionaire XavierNiel. It is open 24 hours a day, seven days a
week and has pioneered what it calls “peer-to-
peer pedagogy” and project-based learning.
There are no professors, places are free and
all the intellectual property that is developed
at the school belongs to the students. The
name is a reference to Douglas Adams’ The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which the
“answer to the ultimate question of life, the
universe and everything” is 42. With its novel
approach École 42 has been astonishingly
successful. There are now two campuses in
Paris as well as one in California, and the
model has been adopted in Romania, South
Africa, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Belgium, Russia,
Morocco, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Finland,
Germany, Australia and Canada.
Hoberman says many of these coding
colleges around the world have been
sponsored by dotcom millionaires, who are,
like him, acutely aware of the need for more
people to acquire digital skills. “There’s one
in Helsinki. Ilkka Paananen, the founder of
Supercell [the video games company], launched
the coding school there. Taavet Hinrikus, the
founder of Wise [the money transfer business],
has launched the Estonian version. And then
another friend of mine, Corinne Vigreux, the
founder of TomTom [the map reader
technology], launched the one in Amsterdam.
This model is really taking off. Lots of people
were very sceptical about it, but it’s working.”
Six years ago, Hoberman took 120
entrepreneurs to Paris to see École 42. “I was
hoping somebody would jump at it and take it
to the UK because it was surprising to me that
London didn’t have this. Since nobody bit the
bullet and helped to take it over, we looked at
it.” He could not afford to fund 01 Founders as
a charity as Niel does with École 42 – “He’s
in a different league,” Hoberman says of the
French billionaire who pours millions every
year into his school – so he looked for another
business model and came up with the idea of
charging a recruitment fee to the businesses
that hire the graduate. “There’s nothing wrong
with the profit motive because you want
something self-sustaining,” he says. “And I like
the fact that because you’ve got this close link
with corporates, you’re always adapting the
curriculum to what is really needed.”
While the first cohort is going through
the system, 01 Founders is being funded by
philanthropic backers, including Hoberman,
and the Capital City College Group, whichruns further education colleges around
London. “The key thing is that although it
is a for-profit venture, it’s free for the students
and you’ve got the guaranteed job at the end
of it,” Hoberman says. “It’s very meritocratic.
If you’ve had a traditional computer science
background, it doesn’t really help.”
The idea of teacherless learning was
first tested by an Indian computer scientist
and educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, who
conducted what he called the “hole in the
wall” experiment in 1999. His team carved
a hole in the wall between his university
in Rajasthan and the adjoining slum. They
installed a computer that was easily accessible
and free to use, with a sign saying “for
children under 15”. The machine became
very popular with the slum children, who
quickly worked out how to use it without
any instruction. Mitra argued that children
could teach themselves digital skills, as long
as they had the right technology and some
entertaining and motivating content.
Hoberman thinks the so-called peer-to-
peer learning model prepares students for
the world of work better than conventional
schooling. “It pushes co-operation,” he says.
“I think that’s something that the education
system in general misses. We don’t really rate
teamwork, except in sports, and in real life,
if I look at my career, I think it’s all been
about teamwork.”
Although the education at 01 Founders
takes place online, students are expected to
go to the physical campus so that they can
collaborate. “I don’t think just giving people
access to a Chromebook and sitting at home is
enough. I don’t think it’s motivational enough.
I certainly wouldn’t be able to do it myself,”
Hoberman says. “The physical space is
important. I’m an extremist for being together
and offices. Every creative leader I come
across agrees with me, to be blunt, because
people work better together. They’re more
motivated; they get inspiration from each
other. Ideas bounce off each other. On Zoom,
you don’t build relationships. In education,
it’s very similar. We are social creatures. We’re
inspired by others and we learn from others.”
When I visit the 01 Founders campus,
students are lined up at long tables, sitting
behind computers. They each have a diagram
on their screen, a bit like a solar system, which
shows the modules they have completed and
the future options available to them.With Martha Lane Fox
in 2015, and, left, in
2000 after they founded
Lastminute.com