Tutoring 2.0

In case you didn’t know, my company, m2r Education, has been synonymous with teacher recruitment for the past 15 years, winning many awards to boot.

It has given my team and I, immense satisfaction in helping teachers from around the world find new roles and also amazing international schools find new teachers. All of this has hopefully meant that international school children have been given best opportunities to learn and develop.

So in September 2020 I decided to take this up a notch and offer our same excellent service to school children, outside of the school environment. Hence, m2r Online Tutors.

Data from UNESCO stated that in April 2020, over 1.5bn children in over 186 countries had had to move to remote learning at some point in the past 18 months. This is still going on today. My own kids were doing this only last week due to local outbreaks.?

When I decided to launch our own tutoring business, the aim was always to keep this online. Technological advancements allow (the majority) of parents and children the ability to learn remotely and as most kids exist in an online world anyway, in my opinion this was not going to cause much consternation.

In all honesty, us as parents are probably more reticent about online learning than our offspring!

Having looked at the market I saw, much to my dismay, that the majority of tutoring companies did not use qualified teachers, something which I am still battling with today. Why? Was it down to a lack of interest from those with a QTS or that unqualified teachers (undergrads / postgrads etc) were asking for a lower hourly rate?

I made a decision that no matter what, we would only work with teachers who had a strong mainstream school background, had QTS, great references, a clear DBS and a passion for learning. I would not allow my 2 kids (15 and 11) to be taught by someone who wasn’t a qualified teacher so why should this deviate when working with our tutees?

I decided to keep the rate low and when I explained my vision to interested Teachers, those that had the same passion and long term outlook came on board. We now have tutors from KS1 to KS5, tutoring children in not only English, maths and science, but also MFL, humanities, business plus more.

We get applications every day from people who want to join us as a Tutor and 99% are turned down as I will simply not deviate from this policy. I continue to monitor this crowded marketplace and I am yet to come across a single tutoring organisation that has such a strict policy as this. I am sure (and hope) that I am proved wrong.

Fast forward 10 months and I believe my decision has been totally vindicated.

We have not lost a single student down to poor tutoring. All parents are happy with the quality of learning their children receive. They love the detail in the lesson planning and schemes of work, the fact that our Tutors understand classroom management and can offer detailed post lesson assessment and feedback. They have the confidence to know that our Tutors have worked across several exam boards, been GCSE and A Level markers and also, lived and worked internationally.

Since September my wonderful Tutors have delivered online lessons to children not only in the UK, but across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We have supported online learning across all subjects, not just the core English, maths and science. They have helped students from primary age all the way to A Level, helped with entrance exam preparation and most importantly, boosted the confidence in all those that they have worked with.

It is brilliant when a parent says thank you and also when our Tutors tell me that their student is progressing. Long may this continue.

We are now about to embark on our first summer school programme, 12 Tutors, small group classes across July and August. All lesson planned and prepped, content uploaded and ready to rock and roll. It is going to be amazing and something that I never, ever thought we would do.

In September I plan to launch a series of online, free to access, lessons. All created and delivered by our Tutors. I know that not every child has access to their own technology or a quiet space to learn. Hopefully these free lessons and workbooks will help in some way.

Online learning is here to stay. Whether it is through Minecraft or Roblox, planned online private or group lessons or summer / winter programmes, it will become embedded in our lives, if it is not already. I am just glad that we are part of this new learning journey for kids of all ages.