Our mission is to make life-changing tuition available to every child. Finding the right tutor has previously been stressful and limited only to those who lived near great tutors, but tuition is still a £2bn market in the UK. One-to-one tuition is one of the most effective and well-evidenced forms of learning, and by making it accessible wherever you live, affordable for those who can pay for it, and free for those who can’t, we’re helping kids from all backgrounds widen their life chances.
As well as helping over 20,000 families, we’ve partnered with over 550 schools. That number is growing fast, as we’ve been chosen as one of the providers for the government’s National Tutoring Programme, helping disadvantaged pupils catch up on lost learning. Our network of over 15,000 handpicked tutors are engaging, relatable role-models from top UK universities. We can prove it works too – students improve, on average, by a whole grade in 12 lessons, and 88% say their confidence improved too.
How did the company start?
Parents, teachers, and school pupils are increasingly overwhelmed by mounting expectations. This leads to stressed parents, anxious pupils, teacher-burnout and increased inequality.
Robert Grabiner experienced this frustration firsthand as a parent trying to find extra support for his teenage daughters. He co-founded MyTutor with James Grant, an entrepreneur who had worked closely with teachers to help disadvantaged children fulfil their potential at school. I saw how we could use technology to have a bigger impact on the sector. And so MyTutor was born, supporting kids from all backgrounds right from the beginning. MyTutor is now the UK’s leading platform for online tuition, with fast-growing markets internationally too.
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How has the need for MyTutor evolved during the pandemic?
Before March, our growth was partly held back by a lack of trust and awareness around online learning. Lockdown and school closures have fast-tracked the adoption of online learning as more parents and teachers have realised it’s effectiveness, convenience and affordability.
As forced home-schooling this year made parents take a bigger interest in their child’s education, online learning has rapidly gained market share. Parents have seen how the personalised nature of one-to-one tuition can help fill in learning gaps and keep their teens’ learning right on track, and we’ve seen a 280% increase in consumer demand in the past few months. On the government-funded side, they’re investing more in services like ours to help bridge the attainment gap that was widened during lockdown.
What can we hope to see from MyTutor in the future?
We want to help make sure that no child gets held back or left behind in their education. As pick-up of online learning speeds up, we’ll continue to scale our tutor base by finding work for talented uni students and grads – teens love learning from role models who recently sat the same exams as them.
Finding the perfect tutor will become even easier as we optimise the tutor matching process, and we’ll be offering more ways for parents to keep track of their child’s progress as they learn. We’ll also be expanding more into small group tuition, meaning we can help even more students boost their grades and confidence. The sector has never moved this fast before, and we’re excited by the impact we can have as we scale.
