Mrs Wordsmith says that it’s on its way to becoming “every child’s favourite English teacher”. The education start-up has a new management team, including Nick Perrett, a former HarperCollins executive, it operates in a market that boomed during Covid-19 restrictions and its games and publications, which include characters created by the artist behind Dreamworks’ blockbuster movie Madagascar, have been praised for helping to improve childrens’ literacy. Promising stuff, then, for taxpayers who backed the company via the government’s Future Fund last September? Sadly, no.
The entity in which the public invested failed less than six months after receiving the money, with its key assets acquired out of insolvency on the same day by a business controlled by a Monaco-based hedge fund tycoon. The taxpayer
