MyPocketSkill Online

Online engagement for children of work-from-home parents

Comment

The problem we are solving

There are 30.1 million households across the EU with working parents/carers and with children aged 5-12 working-from-home during the lockdown. However, children present a significant barrier to productive home-working.

Also, for 21.2 million students (aged 15-18) in the EU & UK0 (source: Eurostat), most have had studies and exams disrupted and will not continue education/training until the Autumn. Longer term, opportunities to gain experience and skills will become increasingly important particularly with the decline of traditional Saturday/weekend jobs (e.g. 140,000 jobs disappeared from the high-street in the UK in 2019).

Our solution (including technical details, architecture, tools used)

An digital innovation to repurpose our current platform, allowing working parents of young children to connect with young people online, providing educational/engaging activities; live interactive sessions in art, drama, dance & music as well as homework/academic help.

The solution will develop digital functionality: online verification, background-checking and connect users to fit around parents' needs, digital upskilling for young people (an onboarding process including subject-specific content) and other online functions, such as moderation and session analytics. Although the technology exists to serve-up online training/tutoring, our solution is safer/more structured than generic, platforms (Zoom/Skype/Hangouts), offers a more versatile and affordable alternative to professional tutoring services and, uniquely, offers students on the supply-side.

Digital tools to create the new functionality are industry-standard development tools, appropriate for flexible, scalable software development. (PostgreSQL, Python, Django, React, Vue). Specifically for this weekend, we have designed a webapp which responds to the needs of parent with children who are working-from-home. We have have created the ability for working parents to:

  • Sign up to the platform and create a profile / listings (Profile/Listing/requirements - in relation to online activities)
  • Connect with students who are able to meet the specific needs of their children online (Matching/messaging)
  • Book slots for educational/engagement activities (scheduling)
  • Payment & reviews function (Test data only at this stage).

What you have done during the weekend

  • Conducted online (Zoom) user research with working-from-home parents and students to confirm and scope the solution
  • Specified User Stories relating to making the platform relevant for online tutoring/online engagement
  • Developed the necessary changes to accomodate these functions (Django, Python, React)
  • Test with some trial user data and iterate.
  • Create a walk through video demo (Yey!).

Our solution's Impact

Our solution generates a double impact, both to work-from-home parents, whose working lives will be made more productive, buit also for students, who will be able to gain experience and earn small amounts of money from the experience.

  • For working parents, we expect our innovation to yield significant productivity gains (e.g. 2 x sessions per week of educatioj/engagement would help to make working parents more productive (we estimate a 6% productivity improvement to home-working).

  • For young people it provides an opportunity to gain skills, forge useful connections and become more employable.
    The negative environmental impact of additional electricity (laptop/tablets/servers) to provide this digital service will be more than offset by reductions in emissions saved through avoiding travel, required by traditional face-to-face models of tutoring/educational support. Hence a net positive environmental impact. This is highly comnplementary to the EU's Youth Goals, particularly in realtion to Connecting EU to Youth and creating opportunitiy for employment and learning.

The necessities in order to continue the project

We now have a scaleable solution that could be provided to 30m homes across the EU. BAsed on this week's feedback, the prototype has been well received.

To continue the project, we would like:

  1. Recognition from EU juding panel, which we could leverage into positive PR and help grow quickly
  2. Assistance more generally with distribution across the EU (e.g. employer or business networks)
  3. Connection to funders / investors to fund ongoing development and promotion activities. EU83,000 for example, would enable us to reach over 40,000 families.

The value of Our Solution after the crisis

Beyond the crisis, we anticipate that many of the online models developed over the past few months will remain in place:

  • We perceive a continued demand for online educational and engagement activities for work-at-home parents. Longer term, working-from-home is predicted to boom - and for working parents, there will be high periods of need for our service around school holidays and (in many countries a short school day e.g. 9-3.30). Our business model assumes charging work-from-home parents (or their employers) a small fee (20% commission) for every session delivered online through our platform. Based on 2 x sessions a week, this equates to an addressable market in the EU alone of £3.1bn.
  • Similarly, the platform gives a great opportunity for youth to widen their work experience, connect with employers and earn money. This has huge potential in term of the social and financial impact.
Share this project:

Updates