LONDON, UK: Dev Clever Holdings has entered into definitive heads of terms to acquire The Inspirational Learning Group Limited (TILG), a profitable and established UK-based educational business.

Under the definitive heads of terms, TILG will be acquired for a cash consideration of £200,000 and the issue of 6,000,000 new ordinary shares in Dev Clever, subject to a phased two-year lock-in period. In addition, the Company will be issuing 500,000 new ordinary shares in lieu of introductory and professional service fees.

The proposed acquisition will complement Dev Clever’s existing career guidance and development platforms and naturally enhances the Company’s content offering. This is expected to be earnings accretive from year one. Furthermore, it is expected that the TILG acquisition will complete by the end of August 2021.

Founded in 2016, TILG owns and operates various programmes designed to engage, inspire and motivate young people, including The National Enterprise Challenge (TNEC) which is sponsored by organisations such as PWC and NatWest Bank. Every year, circa 50,000 children from schools across the UK enrol in TNEC, whose aim it is to inspire career aspirations in young people. The event concludes with a competition that has been previously supported by industry leaders such as Sir Alan Sugar and Theo Paphitis.

Dev Clever recently commissioned independent research which highlighted the impact of COVID-19 on the career sector, specifically the ability to deliver and manage work experience programmes for young people and the subsequent opportunity this gives companies in identifying future employees and apprentices; vital to ensuring businesses can nurture the talent and skills required for their future workforces.

Following completion of the acquisition, Dev Clever plans to launch its own National Career Challenge (NCC) combining TNEC directly with virtual work experience and assessments in late Q4 2021. The NCC will be available to all students in the UK and will enable more organisations to deliver bespoke post talent assessment with immediate work experience programmes using Dev Clever’s proprietary platform.

Moreover, young people will be incentivised to participate in the NCC for the opportunity to gain guaranteed apprenticeship placements and scholarships provided by the sponsoring companies.

Dev Clever intends to deliver the NCC program in India, where it has a well-established partnership with the National Independent Schools Alliance (NISA), in H1 2022. The Company will invite all 1.5 million public and private schools to participate and thus has the potential of reaching c. 280 million students to participate in what will become known as the Indian National Career Challenge.

Subsequently, Dev Clever expects to use the Career Challenge initiative to enter additional large emerging market territories over the next three years.

Chris Jeffries, CEO Dev Clever, said: “The add-on of the Career Challenge initiative with Dev Clever’s leading career guidance and educational content platform further enhances our proprietary ecosystem. Our ability to efficiently connect employers with relevant pre-selected talent is going to be significant all-round and should result in much reduced friction for students identifying, finding, and securing their first job.

This is a substantial development and we are very much looking forward to swiftly integrating TILG’s operations and bringing the Career Challenge in the first instance to the UK and India and thereafter to other large emerging market territories.”

Michael and Ben Dyer, co-founders, The Inspirational Learning Group, added: “We are delighted to be joining Dev Clever which will supercharge the collective offering to young people and will be a great step towards bridging the skills gap.

The work we have done at TILG over the past 5 years has seen us go from an innovative idea to the largest schools’ enterprise challenge in the UK. The work that Dev Clever is doing is revolutionary and bringing our expertise together in this marketplace will allow us to offer schools and employers all over the world an excellent offering in careers guidance and educational content.”

Dev Clever Holdings PLC LON: DEV

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18 Jun, 5:37 pm GMT+1 ·Disclaimer