School of Coding & AI has not only equipped thousands of students with career-defining digital skills, but it is also on an extraordinary growth trajectory destined to see it multiply many times over in size over the next few years. But the numbers only tell part of the story, as HENRY CARPENTER discovers when he meets its founder.
Before we delve deeply into the remarkable story behind School of Coding & AI, let’s look at some current facts and figures.
SoC, as it is usually abbreviated, is the largest computer science and coding school in the UK, seeing tens of thousands of students passing through the doors of its various campuses and online programmes.
It enjoys strong partnerships with three universities and is reporting annual revenues touching multi-million-pound revenues. It has set up two offices in India, opened a £2.5 million state-of-the-art tech lab in Birmingham, redeveloped its Wolverhampton headquarters, and launched a new international campus in Dubai.
In November this year it is launching a new facility in Telford, Shropshire, and has its eyes set on opening several more in deprived areas across the country over the next few years. Currently employing 300, it is expecting to grow its workforce to 1,000 employees within the next five years as it continues its expansion in the UK and overseas.
I am told all of this – and a great deal more – by School of Coding & AI’s founder and CEO Manny Athwal, a mild-mannered entrepreneur who, as we’ll discover, has instilled what he learned through his humble origins and challenging life experiences into the ethos by which SoC operates.
We are sitting in a meeting room just a hundred yards or so from the school’s Birmingham campus – Livery Place, on Livery Street in Birmingham’s city centre.
“We used to have 4,500 sq ft at Livery Place but we outgrew that and took on all seven floors,” says Athwal. “We are also taking another building in Birmingham city centre which will give us 120,000 sq ft in Birmingham.”
It’s obvious that this is some operation – certainly one of the most effective and respected coding and AI schools in this or any other region – offering tailored learning pathways and hands-on digital skills training. It’s no stretch to say it has gone some way to address the UK’s widening skills gap in technology, and been a key contributor to the region’s digital economy. It comes as absolutely no surprise to hear that Athwal himself was recently named Education Leader of the Year at the West Midlands Leadership Awards.
All of this is a far cry from Athwal’s situation no more than a decade ago. The transformation in fortunes from where he was then is one of the region’s more remarkable success stories.
Back in 2016 he was at the lowest possible depth of what was a heck of a rollercoaster of a ride in anyone’s eyes.
“I was a trained lawyer and worked for a hedge fund in New York,” he recalls. “When I came back to London I lost my job working in the City, and so came back to my home town of Wolverhampton to find work in financial services.
“But there was nothing. After a few months my money ran out, and I was down to my last £17.25 in the bank. My wife was pregnant with our first child and I had to take any job just to put food on the table.
“I found work picking up vans from one supermarket and dropping them off another for £50 a day.”
He reached his lowest ebb when he was marooned at Shrewsbury Station at 5am without the ticket promised by the company he was working for, and unable to afford his train fare home.
He boarded a morning train, hiding in the toilet to avoid his ticket being checked, and it was during the long walk home from Wolverhampton Station that he decided that he needed to make a change and take control of his life by working for himself.
He takes up the story. “I went to my in-laws’ house where there was a retired teacher tutoring to my niece and nephew in coding, and I asked him a question. Do you make money out of this? He said it was a hobby for him but surely there was a demand for it.
“On the way home, I picked up some books from the library on coding, and I locked myself away for a month. I fell behind with the mortgage and had to borrow money from my in-laws to buy food.
“I wrote the first curriculum for primary school kids on how to learn to code, and I learnt to code myself so I was able to teach them. I got some flyers printed at the library, put them through letter boxes in my local area, and then got a couple of customers to teach kids coding for £20 an hour.”
Trade slowly picked up, but it was given a real boost when Athwal saw the value of approaching tuition centres – places which, at the time taught the likes of maths, English and sciences, but not coding.
Suddenly the numbers swelled to about 50 children, but the real break came when he did a deal with a local primary school whereby for every child that did an after-school club with him, he would charge £6.50 and the school would get £3.
“We did a trial and immediately picked up 20 children. We quickly went from one evening a week to five evenings, but I realised that if I wanted to grow then I needed to get some staff on board.
“I hired final-year computer science students from University of Wolverhampton to become tutors and I gave them the syllabus to teach. Soon, at around 2018, we had built the largest after-school coding provision in the country, teaching 600 kids per week.”
Athwal decided to set up School of Coding (the AI came later), and one of his first missions was to improve what he believed was a pretty poor standard of computer science teaching in schools, with GCSE students in particular being failed.
“We put a proposal to a couple of schools and said we would do teacher training. We had a massive impact on the local school market.
“We also signed a contract with Shropshire Council to deliver digital skills programmes to those who are out of work. The deal was that we would train up 800 people who would then try to get an apprenticeship or a job. We got 600 people back into work as a result, and that made national news.
“At around the same time we put together a curriculum for GCSE and A-level students which we took into Europe. We contacted the British Council UK and the European Council in Brussels because they funded research projects on improving education across Europe. Consequently, we set up a research arm of the business.
“We applied to Ofsted to get a licence for an independent school with a focus on children with special educational needs, but we were also doing a lot of adult education.”
In just three short years from starting in a pit of despair, Athwal had created an enterprise which was doing meaningful, relatively lucrative work with a turnover of £400,000.
Then the Covid pandemic arrived, and all after-school provision was wiped out. However, Athwal took a decision which came to prove that nice guys can finish in first place.
“I decided that we would carry on delivering our coding classes to kids online for free. Parents who had paid us in the past needed our help. This made national and international news – and I even received a letter of congratulations from Her Majesty the Queen.
“Suddenly we had kids during the pandemic who were learning to code from us in France, Germany, Saudi Arabia and so on.
“We were teaching about 800 children every week and when the pandemic was over about 40 per cent of parents said they wanted to carry on and were happy to pay. So we picked up about 400 kids on a subscription model and we also had local authorities who respected our intervention for digital skills for adults and gave us further contracts.
“It was at this time that we really dug deep into technology and how technology can assist education, and as a result we changed our name to School of Coding & AI.”
The next pivotal move was partnering with universities to deliver computer science and other degree programmes. This really stemmed from Athwal’s instinct to help those who would not only struggle to get into university, but wouldn’t want to be there in the first place – people who, often through no fault of their own, were finding it hard to improve their lives through learning.
It worked brilliantly, first at Wolverhampton University who were staggered by the uptake; some 2,000 people applied to the programme and SoC were able to take 800 undergraduates in one go. New degree programmes were introduced, and the team introduced AI into traditional courses to make them much more fit for the modern world. It also opened its doors at weekends, allowing workers to carry out their degrees on Saturdays and Sundays when all public universities are closed.
It wasn’t long before Harper Adams and then Brighton University – both similarly impressed – also became partners.
Business, as mentioned at the top of this piece, has boomed. Athwal seems to have discovered a knack of making the right choices at the right time. However, he is quick to impress on his team the importance of never losing sight of SoC’s core identity.
“We never see it as a business, but a platform, a platform to improve ourselves. Values of our staff are key and they must align with the SoC’s values: we want to make sure that people are always inspired by the work that we do, and also that the staff believe in what they are doing. Titles here carry responsibilities, and our staff must never forget that.
“We also have a pledge. We give one per cent of our revenue – not profit – to our foundation, which then goes into communities and helps people out of poverty and onto the path of education.”
The plans for Athwal are relatively straightforward – to keep growing providing quality for students. The aim is to open more schools for children with special education needs, create more pathway programmes, and open campuses in areas where there’s a concentration of adults out of work.
“There are a lot of deprived areas in our country where we need to go focus to provide higher education, give people that right degree and set of skills, and we’re doing that in partnership with employers,” he says.
“There is no barrier to age – we have people in their mid-50s on programmes so they have the skills to compete with the younger generations.”
This is a success story with a very strong and clear conscience – all of which comes from its founder’s background.
“This is the DNA that comes from my childhood,” he says. “I lost my father when I was eight years old and we lived through real poverty.
“We know the value of education because education has given us everything.”
