About Skills Factory

Love teaching but hate the paperwork? It was this very sentiment that drove the creation of The Skills Factory in 1999.

Geoff Broadbent, a deputy head teacher frustrated with the endless amount of paperwork and the lack of time to teach, developed a system to save teachers time. Mal Broadbent, Geoff’s software engineer brother, then transferred the ideas into an easy-to-use software tool called Literacy & Numeracy Complete.

A few years and two BETT awards later, feedback from thousands of users shaped the software into Primary Complete – an all encompassing admin tool which cuts through the paperwork involved in lesson planning, record keeping and reporting. A KS3 version was also developed – the KS3 Professional Series.

And it wasn’t just the resources that were changing. In 2003, the 6-person Skills Factory team moved from their office in a Pennine mill to the Manchester-based offices of their new owners, Granada Learning. The extra resources quickly resulted in an exciting new addition to The Skills Factory’s software range – schoolcentre.net, an online self evaluation and school improvement tool.

However, one thing hasn’t altered, namely The Skills Factory’s central aim - to develop tools that make school and lesson management so much easier.