The space around a student: Building Education Angel Group

The question behind Education Angel Group is not how to build one more place for students to log in.

It is how to make the support around a student easier to understand, participate in, and sustain.

I keep returning to the space between the people involved. A student has an experience at school that their family may only hear about in fragments. A teacher sees effort that never becomes part of a grade. A parent wants to help but is unsure what would actually be useful. Someone in the wider community might have something to offer without knowing where they fit.

I do not think a platform can resolve all of those situations. I do think there may be room for tools that help people notice more of what matters and act on it together. That is the work I am trying to develop through Education Angel Group.

Why education keeps my attention

My work with young people is part of why I keep returning to this area. I am interested in the experiences through which a student begins to see themselves as someone who can contribute, improve, and make decisions about their future.

Those experiences do not have to be dramatic. They might involve taking responsibility for a small part of an event, helping a team, finishing a project, or explaining something they have learned to an adult who is genuinely interested.

I think about school fundraising in that way too. Alongside the money, there can be an opportunity to understand a shared goal, make a contribution, and see other people respond. The experience is less meaningful when participation becomes a measure of how much money a family can provide.

I would like to create more opportunities for the first kind of experience without reproducing the second.

That is not a claim that earlier generations had school life figured out. Plenty of students have always felt disconnected, and young people today still form strong interests and relationships. I am more interested in which opportunities we should make dependable than in deciding which generation had things better.

Participation in a different environment

The generational difference I keep thinking about concerns how easily a person can direct their attention somewhere else.

For students growing up with a phone close by, an alternative activity or audience can be available during almost any quiet moment. That does not make the activity worthless. Online spaces can be part of a person's real friendships, interests, and creative life. I do not think it helps to treat everything on a screen as unreal.

Still, I wonder what happens to the small, unplanned experiences through which a student might become involved in school life. An initial obligation can become an interest. An unfamiliar task can become a source of confidence. Those possibilities need time and an invitation to participate.

My concern is not that young people have lost the ability to care. It is that we should think more carefully about the conditions in which something becomes worth caring about.

The OECD's 2025 career-preparation report, using PISA data through 2022, describes substantial uncertainty and unequal access to useful career-development experiences. It gives me another reason to take exploration seriously, without treating it as proof of a particular explanation about smartphones or generations.¹

Incentives that lead somewhere

When I talk about rebuilding incentives, I do not mean paying students to behave or attaching a prize to every worthwhile activity.

I mean making the connection between effort, recognition, responsibility, and opportunity easier to experience.

Self-determination theory offers one useful perspective. It emphasizes autonomy, competence, and relatedness as important conditions for motivation. The role of a reward depends on its context, including whether it supports participation or feels controlling.²

That fits the distinction I want to make in this work. A student should have some choice in what they pursue, a way to notice their progress, and people who respond to more than the final result.

A small reward could help someone begin. But I would hope the experience eventually provides its own reasons to continue: enjoyment, skill, a useful responsibility, or a relationship. I do not want students to feel that learning becomes pointless the moment the external reward stops.

Fairness matters here. Any incentive system needs to make room for different abilities, circumstances, and forms of progress. A student with more money, more spare time, or a larger network should not automatically become the example of who is trying hardest.

Where Runstr fits

Runstr is one expression of this thinking. The idea is to let students share parts of their academic and extracurricular lives with people who want to support them, including through recurring subscriptions.

What interests me is the possibility of a continuing relationship. A supporter could understand what a student has been working on, notice effort, and have something more specific to ask about than a grade.

The intended value extends to the school community too. I want student participation and school support to reinforce one another instead of existing as separate activities.

Those are aims, not outcomes I can assume. The important test is whether the experience feels worthwhile to students and supporters in practice.

I would not want a student's worth to become tied to subscriber numbers, financial support, or the polish of their updates. Nor should support create an obligation to perform a continually impressive version of themselves. Meaningful participation has to include ordinary progress and room to be unfinished.

More context, with appropriate boundaries

The transparency I have in mind goes beyond assignments and grades, but it should not extend to every part of a student's life.

A helpful update might give an adult enough context to encourage a student, ask a better question, or recognize that additional support could be useful. It should not turn ordinary development into a constant reporting requirement.

Shared participation also does not mean shared access to everything. A person who supports a student should not automatically gain access to private school, counseling, or health information. Students and families need understandable boundaries, and the tools should respect the different responsibilities of the people involved.

I want parents to have meaningful ways to participate, schools to have manageable expectations, and students to gain more agency as they develop. A system that makes any one of those groups responsible for watching everything would work against that purpose.

Why the work has taken time

Education Angel Group has taken longer to take shape than a short description of it might suggest. Part of that has involved working through what belongs together, what needs to remain separate, and what a useful first version should actually do.

AI has added both opportunity and uncertainty. It creates new ways to prototype and reconsider an approach, but it also makes it tempting to keep changing direction because another possibility has become available.

I do not want to confuse that movement with progress. New capabilities are worth considering when they help the people involved. They are not, by themselves, a reason to redesign the purpose of the work.

Care also has to result in something people can use. Taking longer does not automatically mean doing better. I want to release work in manageable forms, learn from the people using it, and improve what the experience shows needs improvement.

The standard I am trying to apply is the same one in my decision framework: serve the underlying purpose, not the appearance of having a comprehensive answer.

For Education Angel Group, that purpose remains fairly simple. Help more students experience a connection between what they are doing, the people around them, and the possibilities ahead of them. Whether the work succeeds will depend on what those students, families, and educators actually find useful.

Sources and notes

1. OECD. The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation. 2025. ↩
2. Self-Determination Theory. Theory overview. ↩