Helen Fulson is chief product officer at Twinkl, an educational publishing company. Helen started out her career as a primary school teacher, initially joining Twinkl part time whilst she was still teaching, writing content, progressing through various roles in the company before taking on her current role in 2017. In April 2018, Twinkl received The Queen’s Award for Enterprise for the company’s work in International Trade, and was awarded a second Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2020 for its Innovation.
“There is so much research out there showing that children can internalise gender stereotypes from an early age, and it’s so important for all children to see, recognise and be able to celebrate the achievements of girls, particularly in areas in which they aren’t traditionally as visible.”
From teaching to publishing
I qualified as a teacher in 2001 and worked as a primary teacher in different year groups in a variety of schools, from a three-form entry inner city to a small rural school, in London and in Yorkshire. I was a key stage lead and a special educational needs coordinator.
I came to Twinkl in 2013 part time while I was still teaching, to write content for the 2014 curriculum. I progressed through various roles at the company before taking on the chief product officer role.
My role at Twinkl
I do a lot of coordinating between different departments and looking at priorities, making sure we know what our customers need and getting it to them when they need it.
What teachers need changes more than you would think on a day-to-day basis. It could be responding to something in the news, a popular trend, or new guidance from the Department for Education that we can help teachers navigate.
I also oversee our ongoing collections of resources, so I meet with people to look at our new reading scheme books, the interactive Go! resources, the content of the Twinkl apps, the English resources we’re making in partnership with various publishers, and many more collections.
Supporting teachers and parents during COVID-19
In the short term during COVID-19 we did what we do every day — looked at what our customers needed and reacted to it.
We had a two-pronged approach at the start of the pandemic as we adapted our resources to be easier to use online (e.g., making PDFs interactive so they could be used remotely and completed digitally) and supported teachers with ways to share our interactive resources with their classes, but we also made everything easier to navigate for parents, who were having to try and support learning at home.
We did this by collating suggested resources for them, removing ‘teacher jargon’ and creating a home learning hub that both teachers and parents could use.
The ups and downs of COVID-19 in education
It’s undeniable that despite everyone’s massive efforts at home and in schools, children had over a year of disruption to their education and that will have had an impact. I think this will be particularly felt in the early years where the classroom environment provides so many opportunities to enrich language learning that would be very difficult to recreate at home, especially amongst all the other challenges present during the pandemic.
In terms of positives, I think teachers and children are more confident with technology and have had their eyes opened to more ways of learning, some of which will be adopted into normal practice.
Let’s celebrate the achievements of girls!
International Day of the Girl is an important date for gender equality, which is something we are passionate about as a company.
There is so much research out there showing that children can internalise gender stereotypes from an early age, and it’s so important for all children to see, recognise and be able to celebrate the achievements of girls, particularly in areas in which they aren’t traditionally as visible.
It’s nice to have a day to put it at the front of people’s minds, but we are also passionate about working on inclusive representation across our resources to be used all year round so all children have opportunities to find people they relate to and who can inspire them.
This Day of the Girl, we want to…
…encourage our customers to take part in any way they can, whether that be from the comfort of their own home, with the power of digital activism, or in schools, where we are encouraging the Twinkl community to celebrate the day with events, film screenings and class activities and discussions.
I am particularly proud of the teacher-made resources that have been created to support educators in raising awareness and teaching the next generation the importance of gender equality.
Through PowerPoints, comprehension activities and mindful colouring exercises, the resources encourage conversations on gender equality and the importance of taking part in the International Day of the Girl.
The importance of making educational materials accessible to pupils
At Twinkl, our mission is to help those who teach, and we do this by listening to teachers and supporting them with relevant teaching materials.
Some events don’t naturally fit with the national curriculum and could be time-consuming for teachers to research, so having ready-made resources available to stimulate discussion and thinking around important topics helps teachers be able to easily bring it into the classroom.
So much going on!
It might only be September, but we have big plans for Christmas, with an exciting partnership that we can’t reveal yet.
Black History Month in October is an event in the calendar that draws attention to important issues, but again is something that isn’t less important for the rest of the year, and we’ve been creating resources around it for a while as part of our pledge to ‘Learn. Educate. Change.’
We’re very proud of our new Reading Scheme and we’re adding new books to the Rhino Readers app all the time.
We’re also massively expanding our digital library with original children’s books in our Twinkl Originals collection.
With the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference coming up, we’ve been really lucky to work with WWF and other charities, such as Oxfam, Fairtrade Foundation, and The Climate Coalition to combine the expertise of these charities with the teaching knowledge of our team and produce a range of free educational tools, providing the means to inspire children as future decision-makers.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-fulson-133805a6
