Meet the teacher - Joe Wolfensohn
Biology teacher Joe Wolfensohn left school at 18 unsure as to what he wanted to do with his life. He did however know what he didn’t want to do.
“Both my parents were vets, but that wasn’t for me. I was one of those students that midway through Year 12, I was aware of conversations among the teachers about being someone they thought could go into Medicine. There was so much talk around me about how I could apply for medicine, it just kind of became what I did. The application process is intense and when I finally got to the interview stage, I was like, ‘you know what? I just don't want to do this. I don't want to be a doctor. No part of me wants to be’. So, I didn’t.”
Taking a breath and assessing his next step has been a theme of Joe’s life and career so far - and not just because he’s big into climbing.
“My birthday is in July, so I finished my A-levels a week before my 18th birthday. That weekend, I packed a bag and went to visit my sister in London. I told her, ‘I don’t know what I want to do, but I am going to get a job and figure it out’. I worked in hospitality and retail for a while, but didn’t love it.”
“I started climbing during my gap year, when I was 18. And then through university I was climbing a lot more and I really enjoyed it. So, I did my instructor and coaching qualifications and then I decided to go back to education and applied for university. I wanted to stay in London, and got a place at Queen Mary doing Biochemistry.”
“I was always good at Maths and the Sciences and I’d done those as my A-levels. Maths was what I enjoyed the most, and my intention was to study Further Maths as well. I sat my A-level Maths at the end of Year 12 and got a B, I think at that point, I thought ‘is that it?’ and I decided maybe I don't want to do Further Maths. That was when I then started to think more about Biology and Chemistry.”
When Joe finished university, Joe combined his love of climbing and coaching with his retail experience and got a job that combined the two. From the outside, it looked like Joe was living the dream, but the reality was slightly different.
“I was a climbing coach and I worked in a climbing shop - I’d turned my hobby into a job”, he rues. “You have to be really careful when your hobby becomes your work, because it can become all you do’. I was basically surrounded by climbing all day, every day, that's all I did.”
While the love of climbing was in danger of slipping, through the coaching Joe discovered a love of imparting knowledge which in turn led to him considering training to be a teacher.
“I really enjoyed the teaching element and I saw that doing your PGCE teacher training was being incentivised with a tax free bursary, so I thought it would be worth doing to give myself something else to fall back on in the future. The idea was to train, qualify and then re-assess again and maybe do something else and come back to teaching later,” he explains.
“After the year of training, I did a year of teaching to become fully-qualified, and while I was doing that Covid struck and the opportunities to get another job shrunk. I enjoyed what I was doing, and the senior people in the school I was working in were great, so I decided to stay. I learned a lot, really quickly, and very soon I was progressing into ‘Head of’ roles”.
Alongside the professional rise, Joe felt he was contributing to something valuable, “working in inner‑city London schools shaped my view of social mobility. Strong communities - at home and in school - supercharge outcomes. Access to expert teaching is uneven and where it’s missing, students lose out. I have always believed that education should be available to absolutely everybody. It should be completely equitable because it’s vital to creating a better world.”
Having experienced online learning through Covid and seen the difference that a great teacher can make to children’s lives, Joe started to wonder if technology could offer a way to help more children access a high-quality education.
“A few years ago, I had a bottom set Year 10 class, who’s big target was to get a grade 4 in their GCSE Biology exam. When we started in September, they weren’t really bothered, but over time I was able to spark a bit of curiosity and interest, and they started asking these really interesting questions. You could sense a new inquisitiveness and excitement for studying Biology, and that was really nice to see.”
“It always felt unfair to me that some students have access to great teachers, real experts in their field who know how to engage and interact with students to share their knowledge - but some don’t. With modern technology, why would we limit brilliant teachers to say 30 students? That’s what attracted me to MyEdSpace. Here, we can teach hundreds, even thousands of students at once. I had over 4,000 students at a GCSE revision session last year, I’d just taught more students in three hours than in my whole career - it was eye‑opening and exciting.”
“In an ideal, perfect world, we would have nice small, 15, 16 size classes and there would be an expert teacher for every single class. But that is not the world we live in. So, the ability to open up expert teachers to more students, in the way MyEdSpace does, is so important.”
And, as he helps students navigate their GCSEs and A-levels en route to an as-yet-undefined career, one lesson from his own school days keeps coming up, “I have a lot of conversations with students worried about what the next step and the next step is. Often they say things like ‘everybody says I should be a Doctor, or a vet, or a lawyer, or whatever’. I say to them ‘OK, I get it, I was in the exact same position as you, but if we ignore the voices around you for a minute, what do you want to do?’”