Kids Active Media – Making an impact on early years education
Creators of the quickly growing in popularity children’s magazine ‘POPIN’, Kids Active Media are on a mission to make early learning fun for children and prepare them for school – and got support from the Backing Essex Business team and the Create South East programme to create a plan for sustainable growth. We spoke to founder Justine Maynard on the ideas and mission behind Kids Active Media, and about the impact that free support available has had on the business.
Established in 2010 and with years of experience in publishing and producing between them, Justine Maynard and the team at Kids Active Media are passionate about creating experiences and inspiring learning for young people with their art. From 2018, they had created bundles of children’s intellectual property – from fun characters and stories, to animations, plays and productions that make learning come alive.
The turning point for Kids Active came with the pandemic – changing their direction, with the identification of a problem for children and parents.
The Kids Weren’t Alright
To highlight the impact of the COVID19 pandemic on young people, the team behind Kids Active Media put on a production about the impact on teenagers and children during lockdowns. Schooled from home, unable to see their friends, with stressed parents and an entirely different world to experience, this production highlighted an uncomfortable truth – children had been suffering under everyone’s noses.
In attendance were other adults who themselves were shocked by the realisation – the conversations around the pandemic had focused on the impact on nurses, doctors, the elderly, parents, teachers and workers – but no one had thought to ask the children how they felt, or given much thought to the impact of being stuck at home had had on the development of the youngest in our communities.
Taking this realisation a step further, Justine and her team at Kids Active Media began conducting more research into this gap that children had fallen into in the previous few years – and came to realise that the impact was far deeper than anyone had anticipated.
Children were going to school and not at the expected level of learning development for their ages - unable to write their own names in some cases, not knowing the alphabet, not at the expected reading or writing level – and this could all be traced back to the pandemic, where some children had fallen through the gap. The impact of this was that some children could be left behind – starting school on an uneven footing compared to their peers, at a disadvantage for later education, as well as putting additional pressure on school staff to keep up.
A lot of this could be traced back to accessibility to the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) – a framework which sets the standards that early years providers and educators must meet to ensure that their pupils learn and develop well.
Kids Active Media found that out of 100 parents asked, 86% didn’t know what the EYFS was – which created the question, why wasn’t this more easily accessible for parents?
Justine and the Kids Active Media team realised this was their chance to make a real, tangible impact with their experience and creativity – creating something that would aid children and their parents with learning, all while being fun, engaging, and attractive for little eyes and hands to take part in.
“With our business, we want to develop it and create a really good magazine for children and parents, we want to deliver education.”
With changes seen in publishing trends and the rise of Print on Demand services, and a feeling that everything digital had been done and was an overcrowded marketplace, Kids Active Media started planning a magazine to take the shelves of supermarkets by storm.
Mapping out early years education, with POPIN
The team looked at the core curriculum of the Early Years Foundation Stage, and started by assigning each core element to one of their characters in an original magazine called POPIN. Featuring Ozzy Owl who was a maths wizard, Kitty, a friend to learn spelling and writing with, and Gillie giving lessons on everything from sharing to unleashing your creativity, they were able to develop a full magazine that contains stories, puzzles, activities and games that were worthwhile learning at the same time.
Knowing they had something special on their hands, Justine and the team started looking for routes to market and ways to grow the POPIN and Kids Active Media brand into something bigger that could have an even larger impact, Justine began searching for available support – to identify ways to grow, find funding, and the big break for POPIN.
The Kids Active Media team proudly showing off their POPIN magazine pages
The turning page for Kids Active Media
In November 2022, Justine approached business support service Backing Essex Business to gain some guidance on finding outlets to sell books and merchandise from Kids Active Media, and to find out about any available grant funding that the business might have been able to apply for. Having put her personal savings into the business and working closely with Backing Essex Business Advisor Robert Laurie, Justine was introduced to a local accountancy firm to start the process of registering for the SEIS scheme and attract private investors and raise funding for the business.
“We’ve taken the risk, we’ve got the product and we’ve done all the research and development, so we just need the funding and support to move forward.”
As well receiving this support and advice from the Backing Essex Business programme, Justine joined the Create South East programme in early 2023 – receiving additional free support at an estimated value of £10,000. Part of a cohort of other business owners, Justine was able to gain new skills and knowledge about business management and making new connections to forge ahead for Kids Active Media. Helped by both Robert and the team at Create South East, and ideally looking for funding for Kids Active Media, they began to shape the business into an investment-ready venture – displaying the human value and impact of their work, and reaching out to organisations that might be interested in working with them.
Having been unable to secure funding for the business through the Create South East programme due to only a small amount of funding in the sector for a business like Kids Active Media, Justine and the team kept pushing – getting their message out there however they could, and attracting retail opportunities a long the way.
Fast forward to early 2024, Justine and the team behind Kids Active Media have now got their magazine for POPIN in several prominent UK retailers, including One Stop, Waitrose and Morrisons to name a few. Sticking to their guns and focused on maintaining the magazine as 100% sustainable, they have held back on including toys with their magazines to attract their customers and fanbase – with a view to offer toys and merchandise for the POPIN brand in a retail setting in the future!
“Eventually we’d like to do retail pop up shops, and apparently there might be funding for that, so we’ll see. We’ve taken the risk to get it to this stage. For us, it would be nice if we could get funding for that to take those live, as that would open us up to more engagement with kids and families and spread awareness of POPIN.”
— Justine Maynard, founder of Kids Active Media
With the POPIN magazine on shelves all over the UK and also plans to put on a production at the Thameside Theatre in the summer of 2024, this year could bring more positive growth for Kids Active Media and see it helping even more children nationwide – so watch this space!
