Laura, Alex and I launched Teacher Tapp at researchED in September 2017, as a project we hoped would run for maybe a few months. I don’t think the strange story of its birth is written down anywhere, so I’m taking this birthday celebration as an opportunity to indulge in story-telling.

When people ask me what I do in life, I never, ever tell them I’m an entrepreneur. I still think of entrepreneurs as being like the majority of people we meet on the entrepreneurial scene: young-ish, male and willing to be an entrepreneur of ‘absolutely anything that anyone will give them money for’.

I didn’t want to be an entrepreneur. I just wanted to know the truth about why new teachers found the profession so challenging that they frequently chose to leave. I thought we could do this truth-seeking about the daily lives of schools by loading up 21 questions to an app on a Sunday afternoon. Once it was born, Teacher Tapp quickly became a little more demanding than that.

Funding (a version of) the truth

I used to be a full-time academic and I’m still a part-time one. Academics set out looking for truths. Sometimes they find some, but often they find they have to survive on stories. Journal reviewers and editors are humans who like a good story (hence publication bias). Journalists will give them ‘research impact’ and profile if they tell a good story.

Research funders want a good story too – ideally one with a well-defined beginning, middle and end that can be set out in a funding document. Truth-seeking isn’t easily fundable by a large grant because the truth fails to adhere to the plans you made for it. And yet, we managed to start Teacher Tapp on two tiny grants, thanks to two amazing (and trusting) people within grant-making organisations.

Early in March 2017, Michael Mann – now a teacher and author who I had known from his ARK days – called me up from Nesta and said: “Strange question, but we’ve got a tiny bit of cash in our grant fund that needs to be signed off before the 31st. I don’t suppose you have a tech-related education idea that doesn’t need much money?” I told him about my failures to survey trainee teachers by email and my desire to ask them questions every single day via an app. There was no time for a proper research proposal. He noted down my ideas and told me that if I could find a matched grant-giver, the cash would be mine.

A week later, I emailed Jenni French at Gatsby and said: “Strange question, but Nesta are willing to give me a small amount of money to build a survey app for teachers if we can find a matched grant provider. Would Gatsby consider it?” Gatsby Foundation has funded a large proportion of the research on teacher labour markets in England and, critically, they have a living founder (David Sainsbury) which affords them much greater flexibility in the decision-making process than other grant-awarding bodies.

It’s funny to look back at the original grant letter that Michael Mann wrote because it looks nothing like Teacher Tapp! Once it was born it developed a life of its own; it had other plans in mind for itself. It’s hard to force a living entity to conform to the letter of a grant.

Entrepreneurship makes it hard to hide from the truth

Recently, I listened to the entrepreneur Kunal Shah talk on the podcast The Knowledge Project. He said something like: ‘entrepreneurs have to relentlessly seek the truth, even if it is inconvenient to them.’ Running Teacher Tapp has forced us to face up to the daily truths of what teachers think, do and feel. This has been hard and as a researcher, it has been paralysing at times. After all, how can we make any research claims about ‘what teachers need’ when they are so diverse?

Within the app itself, we’ve had to engage in the bizarre truth of what teachers want. Of how to write questions they love to answer; of why only the teachers who are already knowledgeable about cognitive science want to read more blogs about cognitive science (!); of why teachers love streaks and badges as much as the next human.

And now, as we move towards helping headteachers survey within their own schools, we have to deal with the reality of how heads feel about knowing the truth about their schools. The truth can be tough to handle, so it’s best served up in small fortnightly doses rather than an annual avalanche of feedback!

Kunal Shah said that great entrepreneurs are great philosophers and great enquirers. (Well, maybe he would say that… he is one, after all!) He explained how entrepreneurs have to be capable of living within multiple mental models of the world and of human behaviour to achieve success. Academia rewards sitting tightly within one discipline and one theoretical framework. I left that mode of thinking so long ago that I can barely remember how it felt to see the world solely through the prism of economic theory.

Kunal Shah also said this need for truth-seeking explains why older people most often make successful entrepreneurs. Young people come with the built-in human optimism bias (thank God, because life would be draining and soul-destroying if we weren’t). They learn through pattern-spotting; their youthful ego telling them they can find straightforward answers. Those strange education policy documents put out by think tanks? They are usually written by youngsters. If you stick around in the field for a while, as we have in education, your optimism slowly gets ground down by the same ‘solutions’ to the same problems getting presented, enacted, failing, re-invented, again and again.

Becoming a sceptic sounds terrible – and it is. But it is only when your simplistic pattern-seeking behaviour is subjected to repeated failure that you learn to accept the multiple and complex models of human behaviour that are essential for running a business successfully.

Luck is more likely to fall where people are 

I know we were very lucky to have created Teacher Tapp. But luck falls in places where people are scratching around looking for ways to do interesting things together. Lucky breaks are enormously improved by just getting to know a lot of people. When you hit middle age and have worked in the field for a while, you finally know enough people for plans to fall into place.

I was lucky to have known Michael Mann and Jenni French well enough for them to seek me out and trust me with their money. But the money they provided us wasn’t enough to build an app with any of the typical app-building companies we went to. Teacher Tapp never would have happened without data champion, entertaining tweeter and generally nice guy, Tom Forth. One day in April 2017, Tom was interviewing me for a project of his about the National Pupil Database. After we’d got through the obligatory survey questions, I asked for his advice about building a survey app. “Oh, I’ll build something for you”, he said. Two months later, we had the version of the app we launched in 2017 and that served us well for the first couple of years or so (powered by CSV files… Ah! The simplicity!). 

Then we come to the story of Alex Weatherall. Once we’d built the app, I quickly started worrying about data infrastructure – I’m that kind of person. I knew I wouldn’t have time to build it all myself and so in July 2017, Laura and I went up to Leeds to show Alex the app and persuade him to come on board. How did we know him? ResearchED, of course! Before Teacher Tapp, Alex and I used to have a dropbox of project ideas called ‘The WeatherAllen Projects’. They were good ideas. One day we’ll have time to execute them.

Finally, there is Laura. Laura has already told the story of the time we first met in a blog post. But that might have come to nothing were it not for the very first researchED conference in 2013. Laura gave a talk about Touchpaper problems, and I told her we should get some teachers together to think about them. And so we hosted the first Touchpaper problems party whilst she was over from the US for a flying visit and I was very heavily pregnant (Alex was there, of course. He’s a joiner-in.). We will hold the second Touchpaper party when we retire.

Sure, it was luck that Laura felt like getting her teeth into something new in 2017 when the idea of a survey app was floated. The name was her idea, of course. And she decided we should go for broke and survey all teachers, not just new teachers. But this good fortune that she was ready for a new challenge came at the tail end of a lot of less good luck – we’d been endlessly trying to find ways to get into the same institution as each other from 2014 onwards.

Why did Laura and I want to work together so much? Well, you’ll have to ask her why she wanted to work with me. But I liked her because she was smart, ambitious, fiercely independent, and utterly unwilling to ever fall into one of the ‘camps’ in education. A relentless truth seeker.

If we had known what we were getting into, I am not sure we would have had the confidence to go ahead. Every week we look back and laugh at how naive we were! Today we know so many more truths, but there are still so many more to learn about. Truth-seeking is sometimes painful, but it is more often a lot of fun.

So, Happy Birthday to Teacher Tapp and here’s to another five years!