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About Us
We want every child’s learning to matter deeply to them.
We get children to live their learning: to go there, to do it and to feel it.
Values
We do things with:
Playfulness | From the stories we tell to the way we have fun as a team: playing, working and learning can be the same processes.
Care | The care we have for children’s learning extends to how we want to treat everyone in our community: we are human beings first.
Imagination | Thinking up new possibilities ensures we innovate at every level: innovation supports our pupils to keep expanding their horizons.
Integrity | We are a mission-led company: the way we do business must reflect the honesty and courage we promote in our storytelling.
Inclusivity | Every single pupil and every single school matters to us, and the same goes for our team members: we strive to include and represent them.
It started in March 2010 with an email from Alice: Re: Cooking
I am cooking up a project and I would like you two people to be involved. Is that enough to get you all to meet at a place that sells coffee early next week? Maybe Monday late afternoon? Alice X
The three friends – a theatre director, a teacher and a social entrepreneur – met up in Angel, London.
At the time, each of us had frustrations in our industries: theatre was unaffordable, austerity was hitting the worst-off hardest while the curriculum was squeezing out creativity.
Alice had come across silent discos at the Edinburgh Festival and was wondering whether this technology could be used to tell stories which the audience would participate in. She became fixated on the idea of driving an ice cream van to a park and instead of handing out ice lollies, we’d give out headphones. Louis was instantly hooked, while Oscar’s suggestion was: ‘Why don’t we try this with some of my pupils?’.
With the wind in our sails, we penned and piloted our first now>press>play Experience in a primary school in Whitechapel. Using mp3 players (bad idea…) we asked the children all to ‘now press play’ at the same time. What ensued next was generally chaos. But amidst the confusion, one thing stood out: teachers telling us ‘We’ve never seen them engage like that’.
Hanging onto this idea, we gradually refined the chaos until we had eight different Experiences that worked seamlessly – from history topics like World War II to science adventures like Mission to Mars. During our development, we saw the same thing every time: children’s eyes lighting up as they became completely immersed in their learning. In fact, it was often ‘that’ child (told before the session ‘If there’s any misbehaving you won’t be able to take part’) who participated best, with their hand up for questions at the end. One Year 6 boy told us, ‘Normally I don’t like school, Miss – but that was sick’.
Today, we reach over 100,000 children in the UK and beyond. We’ve learnt a lot about how to create experiential learning (including strange nuggets such as the precise number of seconds it takes for Year 2 children to cross the hall) but above all, we’ve learnt that if we make stories meaningful – with mission and an emotional punch – then every child’s learning starts to matter deeply to them.
Organisational Culture
Our work culture encourages:
Openness | Team reviews happen termly where people get to have a voice across departments and there’s a slight suspension of power hierarchies.
Balance | Our very generous holiday and flexible working policies support all our team to look after their families, wellbeing and grow their personal interests.
Connection | Regular team meets in person promote strong relationships, a supportive culture, and always involve a dollop of fun; highs and lows mean everyone recognises each other as real, holistic people.
Playfulness | We foster a playful environment to encourage experimentation and risk taking.
Trust | The structure of the company is built on responsibility and accountability for your own work not micro-management.
Growth | Whether it’s personal or professional there are structures in place to support everyone, like the personal goals and fun_room slack channels or yearly awards being handed out.
Empathy | From personal days to how meetings are run, through to sending home flowers, we are constantly trying to make now>press>play a better place to work.
Our Partners
