Renaissance are Company of the Year!
By Chris Jarosh
To many of us, 23rd March 2022 was a normal Wednesday. Partway through the Spring term, you might have been counting down to the Easter holidays, or making plans to enjoy the unseasonably beautiful weather.
But for us at Renaissance, that date is going to go down in history. Because it’s the day we were named Company of the Year at the Bett Awards!
By day: the Bett Show
Bett – that’s British Educational Training and Technology – is a huge name in education technology globally. The evening of the 2022 Bett Awards ceremony followed the first day of the 2022 Bett Show held at the London ExCeL: a huge exhibition that over 400 edtech providers attend every year (COVID-permitting, of course). This year, we used the show as an opportunity to introduce our newest teaching and learning solution: Nearpod. We are so proud of how much our product offering is growing and enabling us to reach even more students and teachers than ever globally. And it certainly felt fantastic to be back at Bett, meeting hundreds of educators in person again to show them what we’ve got!
We met so many fantastic educators at the Bett Show!
By night: the Bett Awards!
Alongside the show, Bett also hosts an annual awards ceremony to name the winners of the Bett Awards. These awards celebrate companies, products and schools who are leading the way in the industry. Winning a Bett Award is one of the most prestigious achievements in edtech!
We have entered the Bett Awards for the past two years, and while we have appeared on several shortlists, until this year we were yet to win a single one. But this time around, we worked harder than ever, pulling together a cross-functional team with colleagues from across the whole Renaissance UK and Global operation to make sure every one of our highlights, achievements and successes was included. After weeks spent fine-tuning our entry, we submitted it and were announced as finalists in the Company of the Year category!
“And the winner is…”
Twelve of our colleagues attended the awards ceremony, held in central London, including some of our Executive Leadership Team who had flown over from the US to join us. When Renaissance was announced as Company of the Year in the Over £3m Turnover bracket, we were absolutely over the moon. Our International Managing Director, Joan Mill, said: “This is the first time we have won this award and it is a huge team achievement. A hunger for success is part of our Renaissance DNA, demonstrating our commitment to Accelerating Learning for All as we reach more students in more places.”
We’d like to say a huge thank you to the judges of this year’s Bett Awards for recognising our achievements and hard work.
Renaissance colleagues accepting our Bett Award for Company of the Year.
From London to Abu Dhabi!
We barely had time to get back to the office and find a space in the trophy cabinet before it was onto our next important event! Later that week, some of our Global team hopped on a plane to Abu Dhabi. It was time to sign the exciting new agreement between us, the UAE Ministry of Education, and Knowledge Hub – a leading provider of learning solutions in the Middle East – launching an innovative project to improve English reading standards for the 380,000 students in primary and secondary Emirati schools!
This five-year agreement will drive the continued improvement of English literacy standards in the UAE in line with the UAE Centennial 2071 and the Ministry’s strategic vision of an innovative education. It marks the largest myON governmental implementation ever – a historic moment for our cross-curriculum digital reading platform. The signing ceremony, which took place at the Ministry of Education in Khalifa City, Abu Dhabi, saw three powerful women from the three leadership teams coming together, along with representatives from the Emirati Schools Establishment. The agreement was signed by Joan Mill, Renaissance International Managing Director, Dr Sameera Alhosani, Curriculum Director for Humanities and Languages at the UAE Ministry of Education, and Surekha Kembhavi, CEO of Knowledge Hub.
Not only did we use this opportunity to make the partnership official, we also decided to launch a new nationwide competition to kick it off! You can read more about this fantastic new partnership in another blog post coming very soon.
Signing the new agreement at the Ministry of Education in Khalifa City, Abu Dhabi.
Winning together
One of our core values at Renaissance is ‘Winning Together’ – and we’ve never taken it so literally! From Bett to Abu Dhabi and everywhere in between, we’re going to keep seeking out exciting new collaborations and working together with educators and organisations globally to continue to fulfil our mission: to accelerate learning for all.