It’s been a head-spinning couple of months, and we’d firstly like to say a big thank you to all of you for keeping up your amazing work and helping to keep students learning throughout this difficult period.
At MyTutor HQ, we’ve been busy working on lots of new initiatives and changes to make the platform better for you. Here’s an update on what’s new.
Work with school pupils
Programme update
We know that many of you saw a slowdown in lessons when schools closed – and we understand the worry and financial uncertainty this caused. Since April, we’ve been working hard to get our schools programmes back on track, and have made some good headway: 71% of schools have now restarted their programmes, and the rest will be kicking off again in the Autumn term.
EEF tuition pilot
We’re excited to be working with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) on a landmark national tuition pilot to support 1,000 disadvantaged school pupils to catch up on lost learning over the summer. There’s more detail on that here – and keep an eye out for new tutor opportunities becoming available in the next few weeks.
DBS checks
Lastly, we know that some of you are keen to get background checked so that you can start supporting school pupils. Because we’re keen to make sure there’s enough work to go around, we’re not recruiting any more schools tutors at the moment, so we’ve put a hold on processing DBS checks for now. But we’ll be keeping a close eye on this – and if there’s more work available over summer, we’ll open this back up again if needed.
Work with private students
Demand on the rise
No-one’s really sure when exactly schools are going to re-open fully (not even the government… ahem), and this means that more and more parents are looking for ways to keep learning going at home.
Normally we’d expect to see bookings drop off after May (with exams out of the way), but this year, with no exams, we’re bucking this trend. We’ve had over 700 Free Meeting requests so far in June, and over 80% of pupils and parents are continuing to re-book each week.
It’s brilliant to see so many parents coming to us for support, but we’re mindful that it’s still a very uncertain time – so we’re keeping our freeze on new tutor recruitment in place until we’re confident that more tutors are needed.
In the news
Online learning has become the new normal in lockdown, and MyTutor has been hitting the headlines! Over the past few weeks, we’ve been featured in radio interviews, TV spots, national newspapers, and lots of parenting blogs. Check out some of the coverage below:
Online School
Reduced timetable
As schools start to reopen, we’ll now be winding down our free Online School group sessions to just one per day. We’re really proud to have helped over 8,000 students through the group tutorials, while also bringing new audiences to the site with some fantastic coverage.
The Online School made a huge difference to thousands of parents and students during lockdown – here’s just one little nugget of feedback to give you a sense of the impact: “Dear MyTutor team, Thank you for the extra tutorials. Absolutely priceless at this trying time. So grateful to the whole team and the tutors.”
Future of group tutorials
Off the back of the success of the Online School, we’re currently dipping our toe in with a very small trial of paid group sessions, to test out the format and gauge appetite from parents.
For this trial, we’ve approached tutors who filled in our ‘expression of interest’ form on the Tutor Forum – though unfortunately, because we’re only running 7 classes so far, and because over 300 tutors signed up, we haven’t been able to follow up with everyone who was interested.
Once we’ve run this trial and got an idea of whether it’s worth making group tutorials a bigger feature of our platform, we’ll let you know.
Improving the platform
In our Spring survey, you gave us lots of helpful feedback on where we need to improve the platform. Our Product team have digested all your suggestions and are now busy designing and developing improvements to two priority areas: our mobile app and the lesson space.
Over 100 of you have signed up to be ‘Alpha testers’ of our lesson space, and we’re excited to start working with you. You’ll be test-driving our newest designs and helping us decide what the new lesson space should look like. If you missed our call for product testers and are interested in getting involved, you can sign up here.
We’ll be trialling the updates with our Alpha testers over the next few weeks, but because it’s a complex process, it will take a bit longer to roll the improvements out to the platform. In the meantime, as always, we appreciate your patience and helpful feedback. We’ll keep you in the loop as new features are released, so keep an eye on your inbox.