My senses tell me I’m in Sizewell nuclear power station, jumping into a reactor and splitting atoms with my fingertips.
But I’m actually standing in a dark, windowless lecture theatre, lit up by four giant screens at Eastern Education Group’s extended reality lab in Suffolk, wearing a headset to discover how nuclear energy ends up in our homes.
The group’s suave chief executive, Nikos Savvas, is deploying the latest tech wizardry across his group to create virtual replicas of working environments, to give learners hands-on workplace experiences without having to leave their campuses.
Savvas bought the former camera factory that houses the lab for £2 million with Local Enterprise Partnership funding in 2015, two years after becoming principal of West Suffolk College.
It is part of an all-age education group that includes two other sixth form colleges, a new construction technical excellence college, a network of adult learning centres, and primary and SEND schools across Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire.
A Teslasuit at Eastern Education Group’s Extended Reality (XR) Lab
Savvas proudly shows me a black, superhero-like Teslasuit that enables wearers to feel hot, cold, wet or even pain sensations through electrical stimulations, to train them for working in high-risk sectors. There are also gloves with finger tracking to simulate touch, for mastering tactile procedures.
Savvas is accompanied throughout my visit by his communications manager and two external PR advisers, and I wonder at first whether I am being swept along by a carefully choreographed publicity exercise.
“No one trusts me alone with any journalist. Clearly, I need to be chaperoned!” he jokes.
But it is clear that Savvas’s mandate to embrace technological innovation is motivated by a genuine belief that our current assessment-driven system is broken, and the latest tech tools can help to fix it.
Savvas passionately believes that by creating virtual worlds, his educators can inspire young people by bringing learning to life, and that using AI marking tools can free his teachers up to get to know their learners better.
“We’re living in a world that’s changing so quickly that the focus of education needs to be ‘how do you create a better society’, not ‘how do you pass exams better’,” he says.
He is working with his teachers to figure out what is “the very essence of teaching that we need to keep”, and what can be outsourced to AI.
Savvas does not mince his words.
“If I can get kids to be nurtured for the rest of the time with their teachers, I don’t have to have them captured in a prison in the classroom – I can get them to exercise and eat healthily too. This is education at its best.”
Journalist Jessica Hill with Dr Nikos Savvas in the XR Lab
Silicon dreams
Savvas started his own career journey splitting atoms in a very real sense, conducting experiments in particle physics at Stanford Linear Accelerator in California as part of his PhD programme through the University of Manchester.
He initially left his native city of Athens to study physics in Manchester, before moving to San Francisco at the dawn of the “Silicon Valley explosion”.
While friends back in the UK were struggling to connect to the internet via a cable, he could sit in a café on his laptop, enjoying the world’s first wireless connections.
“I could glimpse the future; it was mind-blowing,” he says.
After finishing his research, he could not persuade his wife (a British GP) to move Stateside, so he put his dreams of becoming a Silicon Valley tech programmer to one side.
He initially rejected the idea of teaching as a career because, having come from a “long line of teachers”, he was jaded by constant kitchen table discussions about education while growing up.
But he realised his vocation lay in FE when attending a talk delivered by a single mum, who spoke about how adult education had not only transformed her life but also that of her “off the rails” daughter, who became inspired to study by watching her mum thrive through learning.
“I realised that’s how you break the cycle. To get to the child, you need to get to the parent, and that’s why FE and adult education, more than anything else, changes lives.”
He started teaching at Pendleton College (now part of Salford City College Group) with a physics class of seven students, six of whom had just failed their exams.
Savvas gave them an irresistible incentive; if they passed their next attempt, he would take them Greek island hopping.
He stuck to his word and relished seeing them tick off new experiences during their two-week adventure. For some, it was their first time on a train, plane or ferry. For others, it was their first experience camping and seeing the sea. The trip became an annual tradition for Savvas and his learners.
Gloves with finger tracking to simulate touch
Vocational over A Levels
After moving up the ranks to principal, Savvas left to lead West Suffolk College in 2013.
Two years later, he formed Suffolk Academies Trust to sponsor the largest sixth form in Ipswich, Suffolk One, after it went “bankrupt” with a £9 million debt on a £10 million turnover.
One, as it is known, had opened five years previously at a cost of £70 million (back “when money was no object”) but had struggled financially due to low recruitment.
Savvas continued to expand the group’s sixth form provision, building the £35 million Abbeygate sixth form college in Bury St Edmunds, designed for 2,000 A Level students. It has continued to grow quickly and currently has 1150 students on roll.
Savvas believes young people’s concerns about student debt and AI replacing traditional graduate entry-level roles are now influencing their year 11 progression choices, with more opting for courses with clear routes into employment.
Whereas a few years ago applications to One were spread evenly between vocational and A Level courses, now they are 2:1 in favour of vocational.
But he expresses frustration that the wider system still focuses on progressing students to universities, with plans for new V Levels driven by the perception that “to make them better we should make them look a bit more like A Levels, instead of asking how we can make our qualifications more practical and vocational”.
Since Savvas formed Eastern Education Group in 2023 it has continued to expand, with the DfE recently handing it another new SEND school and centre of excellence.
Adult education is still a key focus for Savvas, with his group soon opening a lifelong learning campus in Thetford and working with Cambridge and Peterborough Combined Authority to open three new centres in St Neots, Soham and Ely.
Nikos Savvas at Abbeygate Sixth Form College
Playing games
Savvas is a devotee of psychologist Carol Dweck’s growth mindset theory – the idea that people learn best when they are allowed to make mistakes and improve from them. He believes that schools do this well in the early years, but this changes as children move through the system.
“We go into an examination mode, where every mistake is punished by taking grades down, so they don’t take risks, and learn only the narrow knowledge that will get them through the exam.”
In Savvas’s view, primary schools have also been quicker to embrace new technologies than colleges (both his own children used VR headsets at primary school), while universities have been slower still.
“The vast majority of under-35s own some sort of VR headset for gaming,” he says. “Then in education, it’s still whiteboards, maybe a PowerPoint or a short video.”
Savvas believes that using AI marking tools means that instead of spending evenings assessing work that a student might “look at once and then put in their bag, never to be seen again”, teachers can focus on mentoring, coaching and building personal relationships, leaving AI to “help with all the mundane stuff”.
“Our favourite teachers are the ones who knew who you were,” he adds.
West Suffolk College is also working with its sister schools and colleges across the group to gamify GCSE maths using AI. One prototype involves escape room-style challenges where learners must collaborate and use maths to progress.
The project attracted international attention at a recent AI conference hosted by the group, which drew delegates from as far away as Canada.
Dr Nikos savvas speaking at the recent AI conference
Savvas is pragmatic about the prospect that these initiatives may not turn out to be the next big thing.
“If somebody else’s solution turns out to be better than ours, that’s brilliant,” he says. “I’ll go buy their product and use it.”
He warns that AI is already shaping young people’s education, as learners are using it at home and on their phones – so doing nothing is not an option.
“The real question is whether FE helps guide that use thoughtfully, or steps back and leaves it entirely unguided. Waiting is not a neutral position. It simply means someone else, with different priorities and no obligation to our learners, determines how this technology develops.”
Savvas acknowledges the fear that exists around AI’s threats to human capability, or what is being termed “metacognitive laziness” – students producing better outputs without doing the thinking that produces lasting learning. But he argues that AI used in the right ways can increase knowledge and deepen critical thinking.
“We have thought carefully about data, age-appropriate content, and how the model supports, rather than shortcuts, the learning process.”
Nikos Savvas at Abbeygate Sixth Form College
Fighting for what’s right
While Savvas considers himself a natural optimist, mental health concerns in young people and recent attempts to “sow fear and division” in communities are creating fresh challenges.
In December, a malicious communication prompted a mass evacuation at One and its surrounding streets.
A month before that, Savvas and Palvinder Singh, CEO of Kirklees College, had penned a letter expressing their indignation at the “growing threats to the fundamental British values that underpin our education system” after Union flags started becoming a common feature of some neighbourhoods.
“Once any symbol starts becoming a symbol of intimidation, it’s not acceptable,” he says. “The whole point of British values is about the rule of law, inclusivity, equity and equality. This is what makes Britain great.”
They had intended for the letter to include more names, but other college leaders backed away out of fear of publicising their views.
“If the chief executives and the principals are feeling intimidated, what about our kids and our staff?” he asks.
“Leaders in general need to be vocal in this climate. If this is what will intimidate us, imagine if something really serious happens. Behaviours that before were beyond the pale become normalised.”
Savvas says he has approached people putting up flags in his community to ask them why they are doing so. “It’s not about you,” they tell him. “It’s about them.”
“Who is them?” he asks them. “Is it your nurse in the NHS? It takes time and discussion. That’s why adult education is so important.”
Meanwhile, back at the lab, Savvas’s tech team show me how retail staff training to work at a branch of The Range can now use a VR headset and 360-degree treadmill to walk around a ‘store’ before setting foot in one.
The Pit Stop Challenge VR game
Then, technical developer Jake shows me a pit-stop challenge experience he has created so learners can compete to change a tyre in the quickest time possible on a virtual racing circuit. “You give students a leaderboard and they start getting really competitive,” he says.
While all this tech cannot fail to impress, Savvas is realistic about the risks. “Quite a lot of things we’ll do aren’t going to work,” he says.
But failure is not something he fears.
“We’ll dust ourselves off and go at it again. That’s the nature of the growth mindset.”