Our History

See how Sparx Learning's journey has unfolded...

• 2010

  After a conversation at the school gate with another parent, our founder Mark Dixon made it his mission to make a difference to learning outcomes - starting with a subject very close to his heart - maths. Meanwhile, HegartyMaths is founded by two maths teachers scratching their own itch.

• 2018

  Sparx Maths was launched to all schools after Mark and his early team spent 8 years in schools researching and developing a system that was proven to help students and teachers.

• 2019

  By this time, HegartyMaths had grown to support over 1,900 schools and 1.8m students in the UK, and in September 2019, Sparx Maths and HegartyMaths joined forces to help support even more schools and students.

• 2020

  Sparx Learning responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by supporting schools to teach remotely completely free of charge. Over 200 schools worldwide made use of this technology.

• 2021

  As our community of schools grew, we started to identify other challenges we could support schools with, so we launched Sparx Learning, a way for us to be more than maths and support more students.

• 2022

  • We made the decision to retire HegartyMaths after 3 years spent incorporating its best features and learnings into Sparx Maths - our most advanced and impactful mathematics learning system.
  • We launched our latest innovation looking to create a love of reading - Sparx Reader.

• 2023

  • At the beginning of 2023 Colin Hegarty (founder of HegartyMaths) was announced as CEO of Sparx Learning.
  • We launched the Sparx Maths Curriculum, a totally free resource for every school utilising the awesome content in Sparx Maths.
  • We launched our latest innovation - Sparx Science - with a small number of research schools as we look to help students build their scientific knowledge and understanding.

• 2024

  5 billion questions have been answered across Maths, Literacy and Science.

• 2025

  • We now support over 2,700 schools and we have delivered over 100 million hours of learning Maths, Literacy and Science.
  • We became a B-Corp.
  • Sir Charlie Mayfield started as Chair in October to help shape our next chapter of impact.