The millionaire swapping his salary to be a teacher
After a lucrative tech career, Joe Nicholson tells Julia Llewellyn Smith why he’s now going back to school
Come next Wednesday, Joe Nicholson will be climbing on his bike and cycling 15 minutes up the road for his first day at his new school. But Nicholson is very different from the average new boy. Aged 54, he has a long, impressive career behind him as a computer software developer, which has made him a multi-millionaire.
Yet now he is going back to the bottom of the ladder as a trainee computer-science teacher at Ark Walworth Academy off Old Kent Road. Along with a former barrister and a former partner from a City law firm, Nicholson is one of 75 middleaged professionals who’ve been persuaded to ditch their high-flying jobs to start again as teachers in “challenging” inner-city schools.
Are they bonkers? “Some people say we must be, but most think what we’re doing is fantastic,” Nicholson smiles. “What we all have in common is we’re coming to the end of our careers, our kids may have flown the nest, but we’re still fit and healthy and we want a challenge, something to stimulate the grey matter before we start eyeing up motor homes.”
After years of earnings in seven figures, Nicholson will now be on less than £25,000 a year. “The salary drop is huge,” he confirms. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m retiring financially. But I’m not doing this for the money.”
Instead, Nicholson, from Dulwich, south-east London, is driven by a desire to nurture a future generation of potential British Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses; technical innovators desperately needed if the UK is to thrive in a post-industrial world.
His decision was inspired by a radio report – randomly tuned into when driving to a golf game – about Britain’s chronic lack of computing teachers, meaning that half of our secondary schools are unable to offer computer science GCSE. “Someone from the British Computer Society was talking about how many teachers don’t have the skills to teach GCSES, let alone A-levels,” says Nicholson, who discovered, to his horror, that of the 24,000 trainee teachers who signed up in 2014 not one was a computer science graduate. “It really struck a chord.”
Nicholson understands well the benefits of computer training, both for the individual and the wider economy. The son of a builder who died when he was 11, he attended a comprehensive in Wimbledon before studying computer science at University College London.
In 1988, he and three friends set up Anvil Software, specialising in financial trading systems, which soon became the go-to firm for several major international banks, employing 100 people in London, New York, Toronto, Sydney and Malta.
In 2006, they sold the company to ION Trading, with Nicholson staying on as managing director, overseeing the opening of offices in the Shard and Park Avenue as staff grew from 300 to 3,000. But he quit on his 50th birthday. “It became too big for me,” he says.
Next, Nicholson embarked on a freelance consultancy career, advising all sorts of hip-sounding start-ups: “If you study computing at university probably the last thing you do on graduating is become a teacher; these people are snapped up by Google or Cisco or Facebook,” he says. In contrast, Nicholson – assured of a comfortable living – was now in a position to share his knowledge and experience. “I have stuff in my head that I remember from university, that I’d used all the time during a highly technical career. Either I could pass it on or I could leave it rotting in my brain and start talking to myself.” Encouraged by his wife, a primary school teaching assistant (“She sees all the pressures”) and children (“They’re proud of me”) he contacted recruitment organisations who were delighted to hear from him. But Nicholson was still unsure which route to follow, until he found Now Teach, a charity set up by journalist Lucy Kellaway, who left the Financial Times in 2016 after 31 years to become a maths teacher.
“Now Teach made the process so much simpler,” Nicholson says. “You were asked four questions designed to see if you could think on your feet, probing into all the things that are not sweetness and light about teaching.”
The application procedure might have been straightforward, but selection was no less stringent than it is for 20-something graduates, meaning fewer than one in five of the 442 original applicants will start training next week.
At the same time, of the 47 professionals who made up last year’s initial intake, including the former chief executive of a hospital trust and a former Labour treasury minister, only 33 will be embarking on their first day as qualified teachers. Even Kellaway has admitted teaching – although stimulating – is also often “brutal” and “humiliating”.
“We’ve met that cohort, who have warned us their job is to try to dissuade us at every step. But with me it obviously didn’t work,” Nicholson says.
To ensure he knew into what he was embroiling himself, Nicholson spent some time observing lessons at Walworth Academy, where 67per cent of pupils receive free school meals and a high proportion speak English as an additional language. He’ll be joining a Now Teach graduate, a former Royal Marine and banker, who revealed recently how a 12-year-old at the school told him to “get out of my f------ face” after he asked him to remove his coat.
“That’s not entirely in my comfort zone and I have a healthy degree of trepidation. But if I’m going to make a difference, I’m more likely to make it in a school like that,” Nicholson says calmly. “I come from humble beginnings and I can identify with some of these pupils. I remember the teachers we had were horrible and we were in the top stream, but I also remember the teachers you would not mess with. I think and hope that I will be on the stronger end.”
Now Teach also asked Nicholson how he’d feel being bossed around by younger colleagues. “Working in start-ups, I’m used to working with CEOS who are half my age,” he laughs. “I know that most people I work with don’t understand the jokes from TV shows I grew up with, because they weren’t alive then. But in some cases you become a bit of an oracle.”
Already he’s used his connections to find work experience for two sixth-formers. “Many schools don’t have those, they also don’t realise how many jobs are open to you with computing qualifications – it’s not just being a software engineer, there are hundreds and I know what they are.”
Nicholson is also unfazed by warnings from experienced teachers of endless box-ticking and assessments, which Now Teach has admitted was the main reason for recruits either leaving or deferring.
“I’m not there to fight the system, I’m just there to teach,” he says phlegmatically. “I’ve no interest in management, I don’t want to be a career teacher, I want a career in teaching.”
He hopes he’ll be far from the only one. “I can think of at least two or three people who could be tempted. They say ‘I’d like to do that, though maybe first I’ll see how you get on,” Nicholson smiles. “This could be a revolution.”
‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m retiring financially. I’m not doing this for the money’