Can This Education Publisher Make Money Helping Whistleblowers?

Education media group EducationScape is diversifying out of journalism and investing in technology that cuts legal risks for companies far outside its sector.

Suppose you’re a 17-year-old apprentice getting bullied by your boss. You’ve never been in a workplace before, you don’t know how to flag the abuse to your training provider without getting backlash and now you’re considering quitting the role.

There is, as of this month, an app for that—co-owned by EducationScape, the publisher of Schools Week and FE Week, two UK B2B titles targeted respectively at senior leadership in schools and at “further education” institutions (i.e. providers of academic or professional learning after the age of 16 but before university).

“Training providers in this country have a challenge on their hands because they have a legal duty to ensure the safety of their apprentices,” Chief Executive Officer Shane Mann told AMO. “But they’re in the workplace, in settings that they’ve got no control over.”

The app, SaferSpace, is both for workplaces and educational settings, and aims to help whistleblowers report concerns including sexual harassment and racism. It is also an internal tool for organizations to use to show they’re complying with government requirements around tracking concerns, rather than an external service that might expose it to legal liability. The app has been launched in collaboration with two longtime education sector professionals, Sunita Gordon and Ruth Sparkes.

The business plan is for institutions to purchase licenses for SaferSpace. “We’ve got a couple of calls lined up with some pretty significant players,” Mann told AMO, laughing a little nervously. “I have no idea how we’ve managed to engage them so soon, so we’ll see how it goes.”

The app launch is part of a plan to diversify EducationScape’s event-dominated, £3.5 million ($4.7 million) annual revenue with new services for its audience. The company is currently also developing a networking app for educators, which Mann described as “a LinkedIn-style platform but without all the noise.” The app will be free to download, and host premium communities that require subscriptions.

Schools Week and FE Week are EducationScape’s flagship products, winning or getting shortlisted for journalism prizes for scoops in recent years about crumbling school infrastructure and kids cast out of the education system. These un-paywalled titles each contribute about 15% of annual revenue, Mann said. They do offer paid subscriptions for e-editions, which carry features and opinion content earlier than the website, but advertising comprises around two-thirds of their revenue.

“If you look at the teams in isolation, we don’t make a profit from the journalism,” Mann said. “The money we’re making from the advertising and the subscriptions is reinvested in the teams.”

The company employs around 35 people, he said. “We continually try to grow the teams. We pay well, we look after the team, and I have a particular passion for investigative journalism in the education space. So our mission is to have all the other bolt-ons to help support it as a whole ecosystem.”

The biggest “bolt-on” is the Apprenticeships and Training Conference, which Mann said makes up a third of the business, followed by a Festival of Education which he estimated contributed between 20 and 25%. The latter event now has editions in the U.S., China and Thailand.

Journalism remains an integral part of why the events work, Mann said. “If you look at an events business, a core cost is marketing and promotion. We have a very active and engaged readership that we can advertise to.”

The business is profitable, he said, without disclosing further details. “A couple of years ago we gave 10.5% pay rises to the team. All of those things have added up, so the margin has reduced. But every business is facing a tight margin at the moment.”

The company was approached for acquisition around three years ago, Mann said, but “it became very apparent that it would have become part of a wider group, and we wouldn’t have had editorial sign-off. They said that they would have been able to spike a story if it didn’t favor a particular partner or whatever, and I said I can’t sell that to my journalists.”

It wasn’t the first time such a tension had arisen: Mann said he had “had advertisers pull advertising because the editors have written a negative story about them.

“But they’re doing their jobs. So if we were ever to seek external investment, it has to be the right fit for the team. Some of the journalists have been with us for a very long time.”

Mann has owned 80% of EducationScape since last year, when he bought out most of the company from founder and former FE Week editor Nick Linford. Linford retains 20% of the company, and has stayed on as a “silent partner,” Mann said. 

Another prominent education sector brand, TES Magazine (formerly the Times Education Supplement), is something of a competitor to EducationScape, but Mann said the other title had more of a focus on rank and file teachers. “We don’t really cover the pedagogical side of teaching and learning—it’s much more the business and policy end…

“Some of these academy trust CEOs [in EducationScape’s readership] earn several thousands of pounds a year, and they’re responsible for organizations turning over hundreds of millions of pounds a year. They’re serious machines nowadays.”

Notably, TES also went down the route of building up tech solutions for its readership: in the 2023/24 financial year it reported revenue of £107.1 million ($145 million) and adjusted EBITDA of £72.1 million ($97.6 million), of which £75.4 million ($102.1 million) was generated by its suite of staff management tools. (It earned a further £400,000 from “safeguarding”—training which the company offers, like SaferSpace, to help schools satisfy their compliance requirements.)

Mann thinks “there is potentially a gap in the market” for EducationScape in higher education and more junior readers. But he acknowledged: “Setting up a newspaper requires a huge capacity, so on the editorial side, it’s definitely increasing that, maintaining and building upon our reputation.”