I blogged eight months ago, back in December about UK based online tutoring websites and the embryonic nature of the online tutoring marketplace. Since then we have seen three new businesses enter the market:

1. MyTutor, which is interesting as it is owned by AQA exam board
2. Itutormaths, owned by the educational publisher Nelson Thornes
3. Tutorme, of which I must admit to knowing very little

Students from high attaining comprehensive schools are far less likely to attend top universities than those from independent schools. So say the Sutton Trust in their report ‘Degree of Success’.

Just focusing on Oxbridge entrants, they found that:

“2,000 schools and colleges had two or fewer Oxbridge entrants over the three years… just under two thirds of all schools and colleges, and accounted for 5.6% of Oxbridge admissions over the three years. The total number of Oxbridge entrants from these 2,000 schools and colleges over the three years is less than the number from 4 schools and one college who produced 946 Oxbridge entrants over the period.”

What proportion of these applications are accepted?

“5.2% of independent school pupils were accepted by Oxford and Cambridge, compared with 0.8% of pupils in non selective state schools, and 4.2% in selective state schools.”

Sutton Trust conclude that “independent school pupils are nearly seven times as likely as pupils in comprehensive schools to be accepted into Oxbridge.”

The Times Educational Supplement commenting on wider university acceptance rates included in the report say “there is something terribly wrong when a comprehensive school with the same scores as a local independent sends 17% of it’s pupils to top universities compared to 66% sent by its neighbour.”

But what do we as a nation do to correct this? Surely bright children from poor backgrounds should be given the same chance as kids from more affluent backgrounds? Can we expect much to change anytime soon? My belief is that increasing tuition fees will only serve to reduce state school applications still further, and that without proactive selection procedures at Oxbridge, nothing is likely to change.

Apart from an hour out of the school day, what did his visit bring to the kids at Globe Academy? As a kid from, shall we say, a ‘more challenging’ inner-city comprehensive school, I believe that meeting people that have done something and achieved in their lives is really important. Getting a new perspective, seeing that they are really no different from you, helps raise aspirations and set a new outlook on life.

Did it really have that big an impact on these kids, well it’s over to Tanvir Khan who said “It was the highlight of my life”. Those wanting Barak to visit their school, should form an orderly queue.

Wonder what the kids would have said about their views on the visit of David Cameron – maybe these weren’t printable

I am pleased with the article. If you would like to read it, just click on this link.

So you’ve done as much revision as you meaningfully can. What tips can an examiner give you? Well, these are from George Turnbull, the Exam Doctor.

Before the exam:

• Know when and where your exams are being held.
• Check your equipment, make sure that it is in good working order, and know what is to be provided by your school.
• Check you don’t have two exams at the same time. Special arrangements need to be made.
• Don’t cheat or break any rules. You could be disqualified or even arrested. Mobile phones are a menace and barred from the exam hall. Don’t take one in.
• Have a leisurely breakfast or lunch and walk to school, if possible. Be there in good time.
• Avoid friends outside the exam hall. They could confuse you. Keep your thoughts to yourself and concentrate on the exam. That’s why you are there.

In the exam room:

• Take six deep breaths, ignore everyone else and concentrate solely on what you have to do.
• Have a glucose sweet, to boost energy to your brain – but don’t crunch.
• Read the instructions on the exam papers carefully – do the appropriate number of questions from the right sections, and answer compulsory questions.
• Know how many marks each question carries – don’t spend too long on any one. Use the number of marks on the paper as a guide.
• Read questions carefully before you write anything. Time is allowed for this. Use that time to choose your questions, and write notes on the question paper to help you remember later.
• Make sure you answer the question asked.  No marks if you don’t.
• If you run out of time, more marks can be gained by completing your remaining answers in outline only.  State what you would do and how to do it, by outlining your main arguments in an essay – without writing the essay – and by jotting down formulae in science – stating how you would complete the question – without doing the calculations.

Good advice, I am sure you will agree. After the exam – no post-mortems. Don’t worry about the exam you have just taken – you can’t do anything about it now.  Put the papers in a drawer and look at them again only when your own grandchildren ask to see them. Concentrate instead on the next exam, where you can influence the result.”

Finally, all that is left is to wish you all good luck in your exams.

There is a great debate about nature versus nurture. Is academic success due to some special chromosome or is to just down to the way you are taught to learn, and the effort you put in.

An article from Matthew Syed has shed some light on the conundrum. He has found that many studies have found that top performers learn no faster than those who reach lower levels of attainment – hour after hour, they improve at almost identical rates. The difference is simply that high achievers practise for more hours. This was a Eureka moment for me, so it’s about the hard yards – structured and regular studying is the secret.

Syed has found further research which has shown that when students seem to possess a particular gift, it is often because they have been given extra tuition at home, by tutors or parents.

This is not to deny that some kids start out better than others – it is merely to suggest that the starting point we have in life is not particularly relevant.

So many kids, develop a mindset that rationalise poor exam results with a feeling that they are somehow not bright enough. This mindset has a way of becoming self-fulfilling, as it leads to a lowering of expectations.

So with so many kids revising for their summer exams, what words of wisdom can we impart? Well, it is as simple as giving plenty of time for revision, covering the subjects as many times as you feel necessary until you feel that you know the answer. If you don’t understand something, then you can visit Tutorhub for some one to one help online, of course.

Good words of advice, I think. Best of luck kids.

Formal confirmation is due in the Freedom Bill, but it seems probable that the ISA is to be merged with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). So where does this leave parents, as consumers and tutors?

Parents will be disappointed that there will not be a independent website where they can check tutors online, and that noone will be required to be forever vigilant, constantly updating people’s suitability to work with children, when circumstances change. As I see it the problem with CRB checks is that they only reflect the CRB’s information on an individual at a point in time, whereas an ISA check was a much better control as it was similar to a driving license.

As tutors, maybe you are not concerned either way, as the industry is unregulated and there is no requirement per se for private tutors to be CRB checked in any case. The cost of a CRB check is normally met by employers, and you would expect this not to change with the ISA.

What do I think? Well on one hand I was concerned about the whole subjective review process and power seemingly in the hands of a team of bureaucrats. On the other hand, I think that we may have ‘thrown the baby out with the bathwater’ – does child safety come with a price? Would the ISA have stopped Ian Huntley, if you think like me that it would, then surely we will have got the balance between personal freedom and child safety wrong.

Online tutoring as received a fair amount of funding in recent years. This is a relatively new market-space, with Tutorvista only 5 years old. Until recently there were six VC funded online tutoring businesses: Tutorvista (who raised $80.8m), Globalscholar ($42m), Grockit ($17.7m), Cramster ($9m), Tutor.com ($13.5m) and Edufire ($1.7m).

In the period Oct ‘10 to Jan ‘11 four of these businesses were subject to trade sales:

• Tutorvista was acquired by Pearson (business valuation $215m)
• Global Scholar by the Scantron Corporation ($140m)
• Cramster by Chegg (value undisclosed)
• Edufire was also sold to Camelback Education Group (price undisclosed)

Only Grockit and Tutor.com remains unsold.

Assuming that the acquiring businesses wish to grow these businesses, we should expansion particularly in the US. Interestingly, Pearson says that it is more interested in the growing markets. John Makinson, chairman of Pearson India said that the “acquisition underlines Pearson’s commitment to education and skills development in India. The investment in TutorVista gives us control of the world’s largest online tutoring business and, crucially, a solid platform on which to build a leading presence in the Indian private schools sector.”

Integrating small technology based businesses in large corporates puts stresses on the acquired companies. These businesses require further investment and they will be judged shoulder to shoulder with existing and known business units. So whilst there is great scope for expansion, we’ll have to wait and see what actually happens.

In the meantime, Venture Capitalists will be interested in this segment, particularly in traditional markets like the UK. Have I told you about Tutorhub?

This list has been produced after hours of internet research, and is produced for information on a best endeavours basis. I have included both online tutoring websites and online homework / assignment help websites.

In alphabetical order the list of 37 websites is as follows:

I think it likely that I may have missed off a few websites, if so apologies. Please feel free to add them via blog comments below. Inclusion on the list has been subjective, and dependent on Google rankings and how active the websites appear.

The most popular online tutoring websites are: Tutorvista, Tutor.com, Smarthinking, Growingstars and e-Tutor. It would be interesting to hear if there were any market statistics that backed this up though.

It’s interesting that these websites are based in India and the US. I should declare that I am a co-founder of Tutorhub.com (a UK based website) which is also included in the above list.

In what is a slightly different market we have homework help businesses. At one end of the market we see Cramster, based in the US, who address specific learning needs rather than long-term tutoring needs. This type of service addresses what I regard as micro-tutoring. At the other end of the homework help market, we see just about every educational publisher’s revision and study guides.

I have been looking at the world of online tutoring in the UK, and found surprisingly few businesses in this market.

A simple ‘UK online tutoring’ website search shows the top 3 as:

• Whizz.com (MathsWhizz) delivering animated lessons via an ‘intelligent tutoring system designed to simulate the behaviour of a human tutor’ for 5 to 13 year olds for £19.99 per month. So not person to person tutoring in the traditional sense.
• Hometutoringonline.co.uk which offers ‘world class 1-to-1 private online tutoring’ via a ‘virtual classroom consisting of an award winning interactive whiteboard, chat and VoIP’.
• Hometutors.org.uk which delivers pre-arranged online tutoring by an interactive whiteboard.

So what’s happening – are there any online tutoring start-ups worth looking at?

With a legal entity based in the UK, Brightsparkeducation.com has recently re-launched an offshored online tutoring model using tutors residing in India (a la Tutorvista) and seems to be making progress in selling services direct to Schools. The costs of selling anything into the public sector are significant and the effects of the UK budget cuts are yet to be understood, but there is a market there, I believe.

Whilst I am talking about new businesses Dizeo.com is worth a mention, as it offers unlimited online homework assistance as part of social networking for kids. It’s not free of course, although cheap enough with questions costing 50p each. I can only assume that the monthly subscriptions enable them to cover the tutor costs. The UK national minimum wage is £5.93 per hour, so a 50p credit is worth 5 minutes, not that long for hands-on help.

Other businesses offering online tutoring are: Examfox (which also provides a limited set of online resources and videos), Livetutor and Meteoronlinelearning.

There are a number of traditional tutoring businesses offering online tutoring as an add-on service. The Mathsdoctor has a formal technology platform, whereas many other agencies connect tutors to students, leaving them to make their own arrangements – most commonly via Skype.

Our Tutorhub.com is a different offering, we are focusing on the kid and parent mass market. Unlike these other websites, we are a homework help Q&A website, where kids can ask questions for free to other kids or pay from tuition from online tutors. Customers get to choose from tutors who offer to help with their question. The choice is theirs.

Tutorhub is using instant messaging technology , for one reason only – because kids told us that they preferred it to whiteboards and skype. Another key differentiator is that Tutorhub uses only UK based and CRB checked tutors – and its our experience that there is a large supply of teachers and under / post graduates willing to work from home and tutor kids.

I would love to hear from anyone who knows of other online tutoring start-ups. Feel free to comment here.