Information for prospective trustees

DrFrostMaths (www.drfrostmaths.com) is an online platform with a two-fold aim:

• An online component where teachers can set and monitor work, and students are provided with instant feedback. These are built around two sources of questions: a large bank of past paper exam questions (50,000 in number to date, thanks to collaboration with a number of exam boards), and a ‘Key Skill’ platform with random question generators for currently 700 different types of questions. There is also a suite of online tools, including a classroom game involving mobile/tablet devices, a Virtual Whiteboard allowing connectivity between teacher and student devices, and the ability to create and export collections of questions. There are also a large number (500+) of teaching videos. • Providing schools with teaching resources for Mathematics (as well as Computer Science). These resources are predominantly PowerPoints and worksheets.

The site has enjoyed enormous popularity of recent:

• To date there have just under 9 million downloads of the teaching resources, and several major publishers (including Pearson, Oxford University Press and Harper Collins) have been in touch to discuss potential collaborations. • 110 million questions have been answered on the online platform. • Students and teachers from 7524 different schools have logged into their online account within the last year, in 133 different countries. • The site receives just shy of 3 million page views a day and growing weekly. Traffic has at least tripled each year for the past 5 years, with 257% growth from Jan-Dec 2019 to Jan-Dec 2020. Anecdotally the site and resources are used in some capacity by over three-quarters of all English secondary schools.

The site has had a particularly integral role during the lockdowns, providing schools both in the UK and internationally with a means for delivering lessons, assessing student understanding and technology to improve student engagement.

Some screenshots are provided at the bottom of this information pack. A further overview of the platform can be found here: https://www.drfrostmaths.com/misc/DFM-InformationForEnquirers.pdf .

About Me:

I have taught maths for 8 years; I was previously a PhD student at Oxford University working in AI (winning a Teaching Excellence Prize and the Microsoft Research Prize for my undergraduate dissertation), prior to which I coded trading algorithms for an investment bank. I won a Gold Pearson Teaching Prize, appearing on BBC2's 'Britain's Classroom Heroes'. I also reached the Top 10 for the Global Teacher Prize, in which I represented the UK, and was awarded the Global Teacher Prize Covid Hero Award (along with $100k in prize money) in special recognition of "someone who has gone above and beyond to keep young people learning during the COVID-19 pandemic". My passion is to inspire and engage all maths learners across the ability spectrum and regardless of financial background, and both my resources and online platform continue to be completely free to all. I have had extensive media appearances, including BBC News, BBC World News, BBC Breakfast, ITV News, Channel 5 News, Sky News, The Times (including a Page 3 full-page feature), , The i, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Daily Express, TES, Evening Standard, and many radio programmes including BBC Radio , Times Radio and BBC Radio 5. I also delivered several home learning segments on talkRADIO. https://www.drfrostmaths.com/page.php?id=27

Current Plans

I am in the process of formally registering as a charity. The site currently makes some income from minimal online advertising to cover costs and pay for the involvement of a few ‘on-the-side’ members of staff, including Gaetan Dupont-Panon (a full-time teacher who runs the support email address, manages the question database and does some programming on the ‘Key Skills’ platform) and Dave Legg (a former undergraduate student of mine during my PhD days, who provides server support and is currently rearchitecting my codebase).

The intention is to keep the platform free after registering as a charity, although providing optional ‘ad-free’ subscriptions for schools. I am currently renegotiating my license with exam boards to enable me to do this (with considerable progress in this respect). There is also an idea to offer paid parental accounts, allowing monitoring of an associated child’s account. I am currently in discussions with senior executives at one international publisher regarding a possible collaboration that would involve rolling out DrFrostMaths in the (under the brand name ‘DrFrostMath’).

Once registered as a charity, the initial short-term intention is to have many contracted roles (rather than on pay roll), including:

1. Regional Question Database Managers: To liaise with exam boards in their respective country (e.g. SQA for Scotland) to add past paper questions to the system via the question builder engine. The current intention is to have a role for each of: , Ireland, NI, Wales, Scotland, UAE, USA, , Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia. 2. DFM Regional ‘Evangelists’: Positions likely held by teachers, who will liaise with schools in their area to help them get the best out of DFM in their department. This would also include running periodic training sessions via Zoom. These ‘evangelists’ will have access to an admin tool providing statistics of school usage. 3. ‘Key Skills’ Programmers: To code the logic for new procedural question generators.

The first two of these are particularly with a view to significantly expand in the UK, but also extend international reach, providing for overseas curriculums. Medium-term I also wish to list an operations manager to manage staff.

The key target for the next 2 years is considerable international growth. A core emphasis of the platform is to specifically support the curriculums of other countries; collaboration with exam boards internationally is of vital importance to this.

Hosting is currently provided by Amazon Web Services, which auto-scales based on traffic. Currently I receive some free credit in exchange for producing resources for Amazon’s ‘Maths4All’ programme. As the site grows in usage it may be more economical to invest in dedicated servers.

Please email [email protected] for more information. We are seeking a trustee particularly with experience in the tech industry, an interest in the education sector and with relevant experience to help in DrFrostMaths’ growth both in the UK and overseas.

Platform screenshots: