Company - About Us

The History of
CRAIG'N'DAVE

Craig Sargent and Dave Hillyard have been teachers of ICT and Computer Science in England for over 25 years. Working in a variety of contexts, from challenging community schools to grammar schools.

Craig has a degree in Computer Science and spent time in the industry as a programmer for the Ministry of Defence. Later, he discovered a passion for inspiring young people and became a teacher, going on to lead Computer Science in his school, in addition to being a Computing at School Master Teacher.

Dave also has a degree in Computer Science and worked as an analyst programmer in the civil and military aviation sector, but had always wanted to be a teacher, having been inspired by his own teachers at school. Dave also became the leader of Computer Science at his school and went on to be subject leader at the University of Gloucestershire for initial teacher training in addition to senior leadership, Chair of Governors and Vice Chair of a Multi-Academy Trust.

Today our YouTube videos have attracted over 22 million views, Smart Revise, our course companion has over 200,000 users and our classroom resources are used in over 1000 schools, but it hasn't always been that way.

In 2014, the world of computing education in secondary schools was changing. A new national curriculum said goodbye to ICT and introduced Computing. Teachers who had previously not needed to teach their students how a computer works or how programs are made were suddenly expected to become educators of this new discipline.

Through the University and local networking, Craig and Dave became friends. They both shared a passion for wanting to deliver the very best lessons and often traded resources they had created. In 2014, not only was the national curriculum changing, but A Level specifications were too. Having attended an exam board training course together, Craig and Dave both recognised the substantial amount of new content that now needed to be delivered to students and thought, “if this is all new to us with our backgrounds, how will new teachers with a background in ICT cope?” So, one afternoon waiting at London Paddington for a train to take us back to Gloucester, Craig‘n’Dave was born.

Launching Craig‘n’Dave created a golden opportunity for us to find new ways of teaching too. Dave recognised that his learners were becoming bored with traditional teaching styles. Coupled with the fact the new specifications included significantly more knowledge to teach, he felt there simply wasn’t enough time in the curriculum to deliver the course content effectively. On the lookout for innovative ideas, Dave researched contemporary teaching practices from around the world – and discovered the flipped classroom.

The flipped classroom approach requires students to watch videos for homework, so armed with an iPad and the Explain Everything app, we divided up the content and created a video for every bullet point of the new specification. These were an instant hit with our own students, and since we had shared them on YouTube to help other teachers, they rapidly became popular all over the country too – much to our surprise!

New classroom activities were required to support the new learning style, so during evenings, weekends and holidays, we set about creating a suite of teaching resources to support our videos. It was hard work. Teachers began asking for our resources, and we gladly shared them. Over time, we began to realise we were spending every waking hour making materials primarily for the benefit of other teachers, so we started selling them instead as compensation for the time we were investing.

Following the success of our videos and classroom resources, students were enjoying our lessons again. However, we realised we could still raise attainment further – if only we could solve a few basic classroom problems. Then Smart Revise and Time2Code were born…