Nurture: Closing the Feedback Loop

An interview with Dave Neville, CEO & Co-founder of Nurture, by Joe Gorman NDRC Programme Manager

From left to right: Padraig Hogan, David Neville & Daniel Paul of Nurture

Dave Neville keeps a close eye on his notifications. When his phone pings with a message from Podge Hogan, his co-founder at Nurture, he quickly notes whether it is WhatsApp (“which means it’s friend-related”) or iMessage (“work-related”). 

These are the little things that allow the two friends - who met in school - to keep work and play separate. And it’s going pretty well: Neville will serve as one of the two best men at Hogan’s wedding in a few months’ time, while Nurture is preparing a rollout to 1000+ schools.

Neville, Hogan, and third co-founder Daniel Paul are part of NDRC’s latest Accelerator cohort, but the Limerick-based team are no strangers to the startup scene.  Nurture is a startup that grew as an offshoot of jumpAgrade - Neville and Hogan’s first collaboration together. The idea for jumpAgrade germinated at a Google Startup Weekend in 2015, growing into a non-profit aimed at improving access to 1:1 tutoring for students from underrepresented backgrounds. They wanted to make grinds cheaper and more accessible by moving them online - something that became essential when the pandemic suddenly hit schools.

Dave Neville of Nurture

“During COVID, everything shifted online and jumpAgrade was supporting students with one-to-one support from teachers. The demand for that just kind of blew up,” according to Neville. “The classroom model has not changed in 100+ years. What excites me, when you bring in the leap forward that Gen-AI has brought in the last eighteen months, is actually thinking of what is now possible that wasn't before, rather than thinking of incremental shifts.”

Was it a case of ‘never waste a good global pandemic’? Neville is keen to note that while COVID was “very challenging for a lot of people”, it was a catalyst for removing some barriers in education. “It’s been proven that all teachers can manage digital in some shape or form - we can rethink and open doors to do things that teachers would love to do more of, but were completely hamstrung by being time-poor and overworked and stretched by not high-impact things”.

Nurture initially cropped up as an offshoot of jumpAgrade, until the team saw its potential as a globally scalable product. Nurture combines its research framework and a custom-built tool (deployed via Microsoft Teams and Google Classroom) to enable teachers to generate assessments and dramatically shorten the feedback loop for each student. Leveraging AI is a means of thinking “How can we do things differently” in the new digital teaching world rather than “just optimising bad practice” according to Neville. 

The Nurture team sees many schools developing and refining a hybrid educational model - it hopes to revolutionise how students receive feedback, initially on the island of Ireland before expanding globally. “Success looks different to every student, and how education currently works doesn't cater to that. We're excited about how we can help every student fulfil their potential and completely change how teaching as a profession is perceived.”

R-L: Dave Neville during NDRC Accelerator Investment Session (with our Head of Platform Menno Axt)

Both teachers and students have been impressed - even startled - by the results. One group of students at King’s Hospital School in Dublin, used Nurture to re-draft and improve their work, with 86% of the group seeing improvement of up to 40%. The ability to channel individual feedback through Nurture gives time back to educators for in-class teaching - one teacher highlighted how the Nurture Assistant provided personalised comments on students' grades, closely aligning with her own would-be observations. Impressively, it also detected the intricate difficulties encountered by students who had missed classes, offering tailored support.

There have been the usual bumps in the road which startup founders have to anticipate. The “hard times where you're staring down the barrel” helped to give Neville and his co-founders a thicker skin - he had no appetite to be a solo founder. “(Co-founders) are so important for the tough times and also, think of the good times you get to share with other people - it makes them even better. Realising the people that backed you, whether they're equity investors or people you work closely with; that those people saw something in you and were willing to support, there's lovely confidence that you can pull from that.”

Neville, whose mother is a teacher and father an entrepreneur, always had an interest in education but felt that going down the teaching route would be “too much of a cap on what I wanted to do”. The path he ended up choosing is now a project with serious ambition. “I love the idea of teaching being one of the most sought-after and rewarding jobs in the world. For education and teaching to be up there with the doctor and engineer professions - this is what I'd love for our kind of impact.”