With up to 200,000 A level students unlikely to find a place in a UK university, I was interested to read that Dutch universities are attempting to tempt away British students, with the lure of tuition in English combined with lower fees and cost of living.
The new Home Secretary Theresa May announced yesterday that the Government are to review the new vetting & barring and criminal records regulations to ensure that ‘they are scaled back to sensible levels’. Under the existing proposals privately organised tutoring between parents and tutors was outside of the scope of the new regulations, although arrangements made through tutoring agencies would be covered. So to this extent, there was some inconsistency in the way that tutoring was treated by the ISA.
As parents we continue to be very much in favour of the new ISA regulations. Nothing brings the need for tutor checking home more than the recently reported case of the private tutor Ugochukwu Okorie who went on to abuse two young sisters. Would the new regulations have stopped this happening you may ask, well only if the tutor was already known to the authorities and the parents had conducted an ISA check.
Our advice to parents continues to be to make their own tutor checks and follow up references every time they use a new tutor. The ISA would have made the process a whole lot easier – the combination of wider safety checks and ability to look someone up quickly on the database would give parents a much greater sense of security.
So where does this review leave parents? Well, no better off, lets hope that the Government conclude the review quickly so that we can give families that extra piece of information they need to keep their children safe.
I have been asked to speak at an event called ‘pitching for management, not money’ in London on 22nd June.
The event has been organised by Angel News with the aim of putting experienced professionals directly in touch with exciting growing businesses. I suppose that in many ways I am well qualified to tell people about the transition from the corporate world to that of a new business start-up. What it’s like and how it’s different.
Preparing for the event has set me thinking about the major differences. Here is how I see it:
1. Culture. Status and career development are important at a large corporate, in a relatively low risk environment. This counts for nothing at a start-up, and why should it. An effective culture at a start-up is critical, and it’s not about introducing processes like performance management as teams are small, it’s about getting clarity of purpose and energy.
2. Focus. The biggest difference, I think. Corporates are about executing the business model, engineering effective processes, management and administration. The focus is very different at a start-up, it’s about identifying unfulfilled market and customer needs, creative / innovative solutions, hypotheses testing, business model testing, customer development and agile development. Instead of traditional accounting, it’s business metrics and instead of a regular paycheck it’s about effective cashflow management and fund raising. Once you have nailed the business idea you can scale the business, it’s then that you move toward the effective management of processes that large corporates focus on.
The positives of life in a start-up include:
- You get to create something new and different
- Every day is different – a totally different lifestyle
- Learn new skills and meet new people
- Opportunity to realise a capital gain
- Develop a new outlook on life
But it’s not for everyone, and life is very different for me these days. Probably the biggest factors are uncertainty / ambiguity and your attitude to risk. If this appeals, why not come along?
There was a really interesting article in this weeks Economist, entitled ‘Satchel, Uniform, Bonus’ which has set me thinking.
As a father of teenage children I know how motivating the prospect of cash can be. I recall a school friend being incentivised to pass their GCSE’s by their parent paying them £10 per pass. Quite some carrot for a cash strapped 16 year old, I can tell you.
Anyway, this leads me onto the article which considered what might happen if we started paying students directly for performance. Cash payments reward good exam results immediately, whereas the prospect of a better job in say five years time has little meaning for the student.
Some interesting research has been conducted in Israel which shows that financial incentives increased the number of students completing their school leaving certificate by one third, but only for girls who needed to do only a little more to graduate. Research in the USA highlighted that students read more if they are paid $2 per book (subject to passing a comprehension test).
Research seems to indicate that it is least effective in the target groups that probably need it most, e.g. poor and disadvantaged students. It does seem like a good idea however, and rather than ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ it strikes me that in essence this is a good idea, and something we should investigate further in the UK.
I took a sharp intake of breath last night, when my youngest son asked for help with his maths homework. There was a tap on my shoulder and the question that so many of us dread ”Dad, can you help me with my homework?”
Schools rightly say that children need to be able to work independently, but there are times when they just need some help – and like any caring parent, you feel that you should be able to provide this support. I found myself saying ”it’s not like it was in my day” – hold on a minute, isn’t that what my father said too?
Even when you can provide help, it somehow ends up as an argument – hold on, maybe that’s just our family. I can quite understand how any parent trying to teach their offspring to drive is also doomed to failure.
All of this isn’t surprising really, when you consider the time expired since we left full time education, let alone changes to the Curriculum in the meantime. Those of you who can recognise my conundrum, will be unsurprised to hear that in a recent survey of 2,000 parents, five out of six parents were embarrassed to say that they struggle to help their children with homework.
So, where next? Well private tutoring can provide that one to one support when it’s required. But it’s not always practical to find a tutor when you need one, let alone get support at 6pm when the homework is due in at 9am the next day. We have been thinking hard about this, and are working hard on a new online tutoring website which will connect families and CRB checked tutors.
Tutorhub is currently being piloted with a group of families and tutors. If you are interested to learn more about how you can become part of this pilot, please feel free to contact me.
Just a quick blog post to say that our new web offer TutorHub.com is being tested with parents and tutors, prior to be launched as a public beta.
This is a new and innovative offer to parents wanting to support their children’s learning out of school. We are testing the website with a group of Bristol-based parents and tutors. We are really pleased by the quality of feedback received and are adapting the offer around what our customers say they actually want.
I have been a close follower of Steve Blank’s work, and the whole lean start-up philosophy. What will result, is a customer offer that is much more customer focused and breaks the mould.
Exciting times.
Exciting news! We are three weeks away from launching Tutorhub, a new internet-based educational service, and we’re now looking for families with children in years 7-12 to take part in a trial of the service.
For the kids, Tutorhub combines the one-one attention of a home tutor with the speed and convenience of just looking it up on the internet. To start with, we’re focusing on maths tutoring, but we’ll be adding further subjects as we go.
What’s in it for you? Well, the bottom line is that for the pilot period of two months, your children will have immediate access to a whole bunch of maths tutors, for free. In a nutshell, they post their tricky question on Tutorhub, it’s picked up by one of our tutors who can best answer it and they can start a ‘chat’ session’ to get the problem solved. Once solved, the session ends and you can rate the tutor on how well they answered the question.
For your peace of mind, all of the tutors are CRB checked and all the sessions are recorded for review later. The kids will find the technology very familiar and it means you don’t have to answer those tricky questions they got for homework that night.
What do we want out of it? We want you to try it out and let us know what the kids think and hat you think. At the end, we’ll have three questions for you: what did you like about it, what did you dislike about it and what would you do differently.
If you feel that you would like to help, please email me on jon@jivatechnology.com or call me on 07917162584.
Beanbag was set-up back in 2007 to assist parents / guardians in finding face to face tutors for their children. Why – because as parents we struggled to find tutors for our children, and because we believe that this is an area where new technology solutions to old problems can make a real and lasting difference.
Our objective was always to increase the accessibility of tutoring, and as a technology business we have been thinking long and hard about other ways in which we could make this happen.
The problem as we see it, is that it’s not always possible to find a tutor when you need one, particularly if you live in geographically remote areas for example. It can also be a problem finding one to one support when your child needs help with an assignment or piece of homework. Formal tutoring arrangements whilst valuable are not always the answer. Online tutoring could provide a more cost effective way of tutoring, or provide that bit of supplementary support just when it’s required.
Yes there are alternatives. You can join a study programme online, e.g. themathsfactor.com, but this will not necessarily address the specific problems your children have when they need one to one support. Individual tutors sometimes offer skype (internet phone-call) based tutoring as well, but how do you know that they are who they say they are, and how does the tutor get paid?
Some of you may recall that Tutorvista.com entered the UK market in 2007, with a technology based offer providing unlimited online tutoring support by tutors based in India, but for a number of reasons this did not take off here. Why? Based on feedback from my children who used the service, there were dialect, and technology problems, this combined with low customer service levels made it unattractive to us. In spite of these issues, online tutoring is we believe a good idea, all you have to do is to see the number of online tutoring services in the USA, such as Tutor.com to understand the potential of online tutoring to address a wide variety of learning needs.
My belief is that online tutoring would be attractive to parents in the UK, if it were delivered properly, using technology that children prefer combined with professional customer service. What if we could provide online tutoring direct to parents, using the large number of CRB / ISA checked tutors that we already have listed on Beanbag? Would this be a winner – I think so.
Watch this space.
Some of you may have seen the thought provoking BBC Panorama programme last night entitled ‘are you a danger to kids’.
Evidence if any were needed on the effectiveness of one to one tuition was reported in the Times last week.
Research by the Institute of Education, London University has analysed the performance of children with the lowest level of achievement at the end of Year One (aged six) at ten schools. Children that received one to one reading recovery support under the £10m Every Child a Reader programme found that they are now on track to reach the expected level by the end of primary school.
Institute of Education
They found evidence that these children made momentous progress within a few months of intensive tuition, and were ahead of their peers by about half a level in reading and a third of a level in writing by the end of year four.
What was interesting about the IOE’s research was that it focused on economically disadvantaged children, with just over half taking free school meals, often with English as a second language.
We are pleased to see this initiative opening up the opportunity of private tutoring to all – and would love to see private tutoring make more of an impact in the public sector.
