The Sentinel

Phenomenal demand for Go Live

- By LAURA WATSON Business Editor

AN ONLINE educationa­l training specialist has increased its workforce five-fold after experienci­ng ‘phenomenal demand’ for its services during lockdown. Festival Park-based Go Live was founded in October 2018 by certified Google trainer and Apple teacher Joe Basketts.

But in the last 12 months the company has recruited four new staff after seeing an incredible surge in business on the back of the pandemic.

In the past year, Go Live has been increasing­ly called in to support the creation of digital learning experience­s and has engaged with more than 1,500 educators and school leaders across the UK.

Joe, who lives in Stone, said: “The business has grown totally organicall­y and via word of mouth – we have no sales people.

“Our focus on building partnershi­ps rather than client relationsh­ips means each partnershi­p we’ve developed has started off small, and then we have found that they have come to us more and more as time has gone on and they learn about what we can help them with.

“I am absolutely delighted with the growth of the business so far.”

Go Live – which marked its third year in business last month, (OCT) provides bespoke support for schools, trusts and companies across the UK to help create ‘extraordin­ary’ digital learning experience­s.

It boasts a growing portfolio of clients spanning Staffordsh­ire, Cheshire and the West Midlands and beyond and has a team of staff based across the UK.

Now the company is gearing up for further growth in early 2022 after receiving support from the Staffordsh­ire Growth Hub and the Chambers of Commerce.

Joe said: “Since lockdown we’ve expanded the amount of training and support packages we offer, and our flagship training programme – Edtech Leaders – has also been taken on in the UK by the Tablet Academy, a global provider of teacher training. We’ve also become a Microsoft Global Training Provider and a Google Cloud Partner.

“It’s due to this expansion, that we have plans to expand the team further in early 2022.”

He added: “Now we hopefully have the worst of the pandemic behind us, schools are realising that if they take the best bits that they developed during lockdown they can actually improve their teaching – even when students are all back in the classroom.

“Tools such as Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams have so much to offer here – from handing out, tracking, returning and marking work, to enabling seamless continuati­on between work done at school and at home.

“And Cloud technologi­es such as Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive are also helping to break down the traditiona­l school barriers by enabling staff to access documents from wherever they are, and on any device.

“So now the time is right for schools to investigat­e how they continue to improve.”

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 ?? ?? Go Live founder Joe Basketts, centre, with the Go Live team.
Go Live founder Joe Basketts, centre, with the Go Live team.

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