Raising standards

Matt Jones has combined his vision for effective education with an inherent entrepreneurial flare to create one of the UK’s most successful online learning colleges. JON GRIFFIN meets the genial founder of Oxbridge.

Matt Jones – founder of Birmingham’s biggest online college with a 100,000-plus student intake over the last eight years – sits in his comfortable canalside office reflecting on frustrating days at a comprehensive school in Walsall.

“I remember times when I put my hand up in a lesson saying I really don’t understand what you have just shown us there. Specifically, I remember sitting A-Level maths, looking at the stuff on the board and it was just gibberish.

“Shut up and get on with it, I was told. I had a great upbringing, a two-parent family, I had everything. But actually if you are not naughty or not exceptional in mainstream schools, you kind of get ignored.

“If you were like me, middle of the road, didn’t really cause any fuss or drama and just got on with it, you were pretty much ignored in that environment. Looking back, you think that was really bad teaching.”

Jones never forgot those distant schoolday lessons – and around a quarter of a century later cites his classroom experiences as part motivation for his Oxbridge online college enterprise which has brought new meaning and satisfaction to the lives of tens of thousands of learners at home and abroad.

“Yes, that was a little bit of a motivation for our college. I thought wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could go into one of our classrooms and you have got all the resources you could possibly want.”

Today, Oxbridge – based in 21^st-century offices at Aston Cross Business Village, a few hundred yards from the former homes of Brummie icons such as HP Sauce and BRMB – is testament to the educational vision of this genial Brummie who was once given such short shrift by his maths teacher.

The online college, founded by Jones back in 2015, today offers a vast range of courses from accounting and bookkeeping to animal care, childcare, criminology, diet and nutrition, and psychology with 45 staff and 120 tutors and teachers providing learning opportunities for around 10,000 students a year.

Jones, now 42, says Oxbridge offers the ultimate in ‘ultra-personalised’ learning, a one-stop educational shop which provides bespoke tuition for students whose ages range from nine to 94. It’s all a far cry from being shouted down by stressed teachers trying to control a classroom of dozens of comprehensive school teenagers.

The Oxbridge founder – who hails from ‘multiple generations of Brummies’ – partly attributes his latter-day business success to the example of his parents who ran a luxury goods manufacturing business in the Jewellery Quarter for 30 years.

“They were two really strong role models. They used to supply people like Harrods and Marks & Spencer. It was all traditional items like leather goods, gold-plated stuff, coin-holders, wallets. I was the only kid at school with gold-plated marbles – everyone else had steelies.

“I think I was always expected to do something by myself, either as a founder or get involved in business somehow. The majority of my family run their own businesses. I come from a family tree of entrepreneurs and founders.”

Jones, an only child, was soaking up business practices from an early age, helping his parents prepare employee wage packets.

“I learned all about money by counting everyone’s wages for Mum and Dad’s business. Unbeknown to the staff, I would have counted the wages for them. They were always perfect – I was only six or seven.”

Jones had clearly inherited good business genes and enjoyed a varied career in entertainment industry lighting, web design, sales and running a correspondence course company before taking the plunge with Oxbridge eight years ago.

Pre-Oxbridge, he says a spell with Vodafone had instilled in him the importance of a sales background for any successful entrepreneur. “It taught me some really good skills and I think any founder or any business owner should have an ability to sell, whether it is selling themselves, the products or services.

“That served me really well but it was never enough for me. Hitting targets was really motivating but I always wanted more.”

That desire to use his sales skills to greater purpose in a learning environment led to him co-founding a traditional correspondence course business.

“You would enrol with me and I then send out a load of books. You would study those books and post back assignments. It was apt for the time back then but you couldn’t really deliver much to them digitally.

“We built a really thriving business and it grew fantastically. We reached 2015 and it went through an MBO. I was made an offer that I couldn’t refuse. I got the sale of the business under my belt and that was obviously a really nice feeling. By the time I left, we had a couple of hundred courses.”

Jones, an early enthusiast and advocate of digital technology, was keen to embrace the new opportunities provided by the internet era – and Oxbridge was born, one man’s vision for an online learning operation which would mushroom over the years into a multi-million-pound turnover operation and become one of the top three businesses of its kind in the UK.

“When I started developing the concept of Oxbridge, it was all about digital-first. It was about how do we give people an experience they normally wouldn’t get. My vision here is that everyone deserves a higher standard of education and as a society we improve if we are better educated. All of our courses at Oxbridge were designed to be online.

“We coined this concept of ultra-personalised learning. That’s just a fancy way of saying that the course runs at a speed to suit you. In that classroom you have got all the materials you want, you have a library next door you can access, and there is unlimited tutor support.

“You are sitting in your classroom and you have got a teacher standing at the front saying ‘do you want any help?’ That is a real departure from mine and a lot of my cohorts’ experience at school.”

Jones says the Oxbridge example is ideal for students of all ages who might not fit naturally into the traditional college experience.

“We have quite an eclectic mix of students here and that is kind of by design. We have a lot of single parents, single mums who can study while the kids are asleep or have gone to nursery, and they can fit in their little 20-minute blocks of learning.

“It’s all online – you can log into our portal at any time of day or night and get access to your materials. You can start studying, you can ask questions.”

Jones describes Oxbridge as a go-to college for non-mainstream people. “We deal with a lot of people with special educational needs because they don’t fit into that nine-to-five college experience,” he says.

The mix of students has helped boost the Oxbridge intake to around 10,000 a year. “Size-wise we are bigger than most of the colleges in this region but no one here knows about us – we are the best-kept secret of colleges in the area.”

Jones passionately believes the Oxbridge learning model offers good value for money. “We sell courses for on average anywhere between £400 and £2,000 for an entire course, which lasts somewhere between six months and two years. We are very cost-effective.”

Whilst the Oxbridge founder has seen his online operation flourish over the last eight years to challenge the more traditional environments of schools and colleges, he is acutely aware that technology remains key to its future growth, including the brave new – if highly controversial – world of artificial intelligence.

Intriguingly, for an individual who was an early convert to technology when his father bought him a computer at the age of 10, Jones recognises the potential pitfalls of pushing new generations into a bewildering digital maze whilst in the same breath highlighting the future benefits of AI.

“This organisation was kind of founded on this pursuit of ‘we can do things better with technology’. I was exposed to technology really early on. Technology is rapidly changing and I feel sorry for generations who are getting caught up in this.

“We are forcing a lot of people to do things they are not cut out to do. Take my dad for example. Although he can email and can browse the internet, he doesn’t want to. He wants to go into the bank and talk to someone. Stripping that away from his generation is completely unacceptable. I am a big fan of technology being there to help us – if you don’t want to use it, you shouldn’t have to.

“The technology we use here is as supplemental as we can possibly make it. We still have certain cohort students we send books out to. Everyone here has access to our digital platform but we want to be as accessible as possible to everyone. There are about 20 per cent of our students who still want to study with books and I get that.”

Notwithstanding such a balanced perspective on the pros and cons of the seemingly unstoppable march of 21^st-century digital technology, the Jones future vision for Oxbridge envisages a threefold expansion of the business over the next three years – with a significant increase in international students who currently comprise around 13 per cent of the post-Covid intake.

Meanwhile, the man who recognises the dangers for older generations of an all-conquering digital world is eager to embrace the myriad possibilities of AI and its implications for Birmingham’s fastest-growing online learning experience.

“We use AI here to supplement personalised learning. The holy grail for me is to have a system that adapts and builds a course around an individual. We are working on having materials that almost write themselves and present themselves to students based on individual wants and needs.

“Our AI has all the time in the world. It has read our course materials and exam papers, we can produce in-the-moment feedback to students. On average in our industry it takes 14 days to mark an assignment – we can do it within a few minutes. But we have absolutely no plans now or ever to remove jobs because of AI.”

Jones, a highly committed 15-hours-a-day entrepreneur who also runs a Jewellery Quarter based telecoms business (when his schedule at the online college allows), may be a passionate advocate of the benefits of technology – but you sense the software is an essential but secondary tool to the ultimate goal of providing lifelong learning for Oxbridge students.

“At the moment we are a best-kept secret. I take a lot of personal pride in what I do. I am not in it for a quick buck, I am in it for the long term. There are no exit plans with this organisation.

“I get a real kick from seeing people do well. We have had tens of thousands of students pass courses. It is really nice to sit back and think about all these people we have actually helped.”