TC09497 - [2025] UKFTT 00460 (TC)

The supply by GM was a single supply, the predomination element of which is a supply of educational services;

the perception of a typical consumer would be that the supply was a form of teaching rather than a form of examination; and

accordingly, the supply was not an examination service within the meaning of Item 3.

A consumer of the ConquerMaths product would regard it as a teaching product primarily designed to improve the understanding of maths rather than something designed to assess maths skills as a self-standing end on its own. In our judgment, that would be the case regardless of whether the consumer is the pupil using the product (whose perception would be shaped by the landing page for pupils which clearly presents the products as a teaching product) or the parent buying the product (whose perception would be shaped by the landing page for parents, which again emphasises the product as involving teaching).

We were not presented with any satisfactory evidence of why a consumer would buy the product purely as a means of accessing assessments. It was argued that a parent would want to get access to the library of assessments so as to determine what standard their child had reached and seek appropriate remedial maths tutoring if necessary, because of the importance of pupils understanding maths and the way in which it is necessary to master topics cumulatively so as to be able to make progress. But we were presented with no evidence to support that assertion and it seemed to us much more likely that a parent reading the landing page would buy the product in expectation it was a teaching and/or revision resource that would improve their child's understanding of maths. In this context, we observe that we could have been given evidence that consumers were buying the product in order to get access to assessments to determine the level of the child's understanding in maths and what teaching was required. For example we could have been presented with evidence of advertising that that was the benefit of ConquerMaths, or a survey of consumers seeking to show why they had bought ConquerMaths. The only evidence we had of what benefits parents were expecting from ConquerMaths was what we could deduce from the landing page they saw; the benefits described on that landing page were predominantly teaching and learning rather than assessment.

The admission, albeit that he subsequently tried to retract it, by Mr Khokhar that one way of making progress in maths was to do the tests was telling in our view. In our judgment and based on our own experience, doing tests is itself a way of learning about a topic since, once an incorrect answer is identified, it is often possible to reverse engineer why the answer is incorrect so that the point can be understood and learned. This pointed to ConquerMaths being a learning/tutoring/revision product rather than an examination service.