David Cameron is a New Zealander entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of LearnCoach, an education platform for secondary and tertiary students.
David Cameron grew up in Waikanae, on the Kapiti Coast. He wasn’t a model student. In his first two years of college, he had 141 detentions. David liked school, and he enjoyed class talking with friends. However, he didn’t engage in the classwork or homework, as he found them boring. That frustrated his teachers and parents.
For avoiding exam failure, he developed his own study techniques for getting back into mainstream classes. He also was interested in helping other struggling students.
He went to University and he pursued a career as a secondary school teacher and professional tutor. When he was 25 years old, he got an idea that gave him access to a much larger classroom.
David Cameron saw a lot of students that were disengaged as him in the college. He thought if he could show them how to thrive in their exams, they might be motivated to do well in school as well. He did a video for two math classes. Six weeks out from exams, about 70 students were using it. Over the next four weeks, another 4000 students around the country signed up. It was exciting for Cameron to see how the internet could break those space-time boundaries.
He founded LearnCoach in 2012 with his wife Deborah Lambie, wanting to take the benefits of one-on-one classroom teaching to a wider audience. Since then, David has helped to create an empire of learning in new New Zealand, reaching thousands of teenagers and empowering dozens of disadvantaged communities.
LearnCOACH aims to give every student education when and where they need it. LearnCoach supports over 100,000 NZ students annually, delivering over 1 million tutorials to students. LearnCoach is New Zealand’s most used tutorial platform for secondary students. It is the first online provider to be government-approved for online delivery of the New Zealand curriculum. LearnCoach aims to provide as much low-cost, fast, and easy-to-use education as possible.
David has mobilized volunteers and driven an expanding, self-sustaining organization to impact the lives of young people around the country.
As well as developing LearnKo – which matches English teachers with Chinese students online – David’s future goals include turning LearnCoach from a teaching support system into a fully online school, enabling education in hard-to-reach places at a fraction of the cost.
Interested in how technology is improving education. The 2018 Young New Zealander of the Year, a Peter Blake Leadership recipient, and an Edmund Hillary Fellow. Chosen as a Future Maker by TeachNZ in 2016 for his ability to engage students in science and maths study.
Cameron has also recently launched New Zealand’s first-ever Second-Chance-School, where any room can become an NZQA-qualified classroom. Refugee centers, prison cells, or hospital wards can instantly become ‘pop-up’ schools through
