UK government heads into Fortnite to recruit the next generation of teachers

23 Apr

Department for Education partners with Sawhorse Productions and Moonrock on a custom Fortnite map designed to surface the creativity and problem-solving skills at the heart of teaching.

Screenshot from the Get Into Teaching Fortnite campaign showing the Mr Pickle 2 Student Run map with the text Help students find the path — ***A still from the UK Department for Education's Get Into Teaching campaign video, showcasing the Mr Pickle 2: Student Run Fortnite map built by Sawhorse Productions and Moonrock.***

The UK Department for Education has launched a teacher recruitment campaign inside Fortnite, the Epic Games title with more than 350 million accounts worldwide, as part of its Get Into Teaching drive.

The custom map, Mr Pickle 2: Student Run, was built by Sawhorse Productions in partnership with experiential agency Moonrock, and drops players into a fantasy forest to complete challenges that mirror the creativity and problem-solving skills the DfE says teachers rely on every day.

The campaign takes teacher recruitment off traditional job boards and into one of the most-played games in the world, as the UK continues to face pressure on teacher retention and missed recruitment targets.

Players can access the experience using map code 1683-6205-8518.

Inside Mr Pickle 2: Student Run

The map sits within Fortnite's user-generated content ecosystem, which lets creators and brands build standalone experiences that players can load directly inside the game using a code. It runs alongside Fortnite's main battle royale mode and has become a route for brands, artists and now governments to reach the game's audience through interactive content rather than ads.

Fortnite's owner Epic Games, founded in 1991 and headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, operates the game alongside Unreal Engine, the 3D engine used across gaming, film, television, architecture and automotive. Epic reports 2.5 billion friend connections across its player base.

The agencies behind the campaign

Sawhorse Productions is a Los Angeles creative agency with work spanning Fortnite and Roblox experiences, generative AI and web3 commerce. Moonrock is an experiential and content marketing agency focused on gaming and entertainment.

Nic Hill, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Sawhorse Productions, announced the launch on LinkedIn. "Where will the UK find its next generation of teachers? Probably not on a job board," he posted. "More likely, in the places young people already spend their time, inside games like Epic Games Fortnite and Roblox, where hundreds of millions of players every month are already building, exploring, and problem-solving."

Hill said the map "pulls players out of the classroom and into a fantasy forest, challenging them with the exact kinds of creativity and problem-solving that define great educators." He thanked Moonrock for bringing Sawhorse in, and credited the team with "pushing what's possible inside Fortnite's custom map space."

A new pipeline for teacher recruitment

Hill set out the campaign's logic: "Unexpected placement earns attention. Interactive experience earns engagement. Authentic creative earns conversion." He added: "When a brand (or a government) shows up in a space the audience already loves, in a format they actually want to play, you stop fighting for impressions and start earning something far rarer: time, attention, and imagination."

The DfE now needs to show conversion from map play to actual Get Into Teaching applications, the metric that will decide whether gaming-led recruitment becomes a repeat fixture in UK teacher pipeline strategy.