School may be out for summer, but it’s busier than ever here at MyTutor HQ, with lots of exciting things going on. In this bumper update, we’re giving you a sneak peek of our plans for the next few months and what we hope to achieve.
Graduation & hiring
First of all, a massive congratulations to the 1,500 of you graduating this year! We know it’s a real shame not to be celebrating in style with a cap and gown, but we’ve heard loads of happy news from tutors on your stellar exam results.
If you want to keep tutoring with us after uni, that’s great. You might want to update your profile to shout about your degree – send us an email with confirmation of your qualification and we’ll be happy to add that for you.
In other exciting news, we’re also hiring at the moment, and have a number of open roles across the business at entry-level and 1-3 years experience. We’ve got several former tutors in our team and we love the perspective they bring. So, if you or a friend are looking for work in a fast-paced edtech environment, check out our vacancies here.
School students
Summer programmes
With concerns over lost learning in lockdown, lots of our schools are extending their programmes over the summer holidays, to help students catch up before the next academic year. This includes our biggest multi-academy trust partner, who are running a summer programme throughout August for 1,100 pupils.
We’re also running a landmark online tuition pilot with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), and have delivered a whopping 5,000 lessons so far – with great feedback from the pilot evaluators, NatCen. A special thank you to the 8 tutors who joined us recently with NatCen for some pilot roundtable sessions.
As part of this pilot, we’ve rolled out a new quality monitoring process where we randomly review a selection of lessons each week and provide feedback on any ways that the lesson could be improved – we hope this will be a useful way of helping you fine-tune your tutoring skills.
We’re also trying to support you with more lesson content. We recently trialled a bank of resources and got some great constructive feedback. Off the back of that, we’ll be focusing on providing content that you can’t find for free on Google.
Lastly, if you’re looking to start working with school pupils and haven’t yet been approved, thanks for your patience. We’re still keeping a close eye on demand, and expect to onboard more of you in September – starting with those who have been waiting the longest.
National Tutoring Programme
You’ve probably heard about the government’s plans to provide a £1bn catch-up education fund for schools, which includes a £350m pot allocated to the newly established National Tutoring Programme (NTP).
The purpose of the NTP, which will be rolled out in the 2020/2021 academic year, is to help schools provide vital tuition for students who missed out on learning during school closures and lockdown – in particular, students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Starting in September, tutoring organisations will be able to apply to be part of the programme.
We’ve been talking closely with the EEF, Sutton Trust, and other key organisations responsible for the initiative, and, given our extensive experience over the past seven years supporting 550+ schools with online one-to-one tuition, we’ll be putting ourselves forward for selection as an NTP partner. We’ll keep you posted on our progress and how you can get involved.
With the NTP in mind, we’re thinking about ways that we can reach as many pupils as possible, so we’re developing our platform to enable us to deliver small group (think 2-3 pupils) tuition for schools. This is a big project, so it won’t happen overnight – but we’re hoping to run a very small pilot (1 school) in the Autumn term, and then to start to scale up group tuition once we’re happy with how it works.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us on support@mytutor.co.uk or 0203 773 6024. In the meantime, have a fantastic summer break!