Hello, I'm Tony, I'm the CEO of Tutocracy.

A lot of parents are dissatisfied with their children's schools. There's huge pressure on children these days, pressure to pass tests, pressure that comes from the school, from peers, from parents, and the government has placed a lot of emphasis on testing in schools, and there are ever larger class sizes.

The cost of living has gone up, and school fees in the independent sector have rocketed, and now we have to deal with closures of classes, bubbles, all that kind of thing, so there's a real need for an alternative provision.

I set up Tutocracy to improve educational outcomes for all our students. We aim to recruit and, importantly, retain the best available private tutors. In fact, we work proactively and collaboratively with our network of some 300-odd freelance tutors to ensure that we pay above the market rate for their tuition services.

The quality of tuition is important to us; our tutors aren't just experts in their fields, they also have knowledge of the education system, of school curriculums and, of course, testing requirements. And it goes without saying that we take safeguarding very seriously.

We know that testing is important, so we build and share expertise among our tutors to enhance our students' exam success. We obtain access to and distribute past examination papers and various teaching materials.

We have all kinds of learning resources that we provide our tutors; slides, cards, all kinds of stuff. It's our goal to enhance exam performance within six months of students signing up to our tuition services, and to ensure that, we have what we think is a rigorous approach towards continuous improvement.

Creating the right working environment is important, of course, and we aim to deliver tuition in modern, comfortable, and safe surroundings.

Although we've come in for a bit of criticism regarding those locations, which are often out of town, being concerned about how we might be encouraging people to use cars more is certainly something I acknowledge.

But I think people value centers in the right locations and it's definitely not cheap to run high quality venues, not once you've factored in staffing and maintaining them.

Aside from the tutors to keep us running, we've got 115 people working across our centres. Now, they're all part time, so that actually equates to 23 FTEs. But then you consider the management team, there are eight of us, and around 60 admin staff, it's not a cheap operation by any means.

Quality isn't cheap, but we had an operating profit of £1.8 million last year and we intend to increase that by 10% every year. I'm ambitious.

Loyalty really matters to us. Once we've attracted customers, we want to keep them. We've set up a recommend a friend scheme for parents, we give a 10% discount to any parent whose recommendation leads to someone else signing up and engaging one of our tutors.

And we also try to make our service offering as easy to use as possible for parents, for students, and for the tutors as well. We've set ourself a target for at least 50% of parents to recommend us to a friend within one year of engagement with the service.

We believe we have to succeed not only in the quality of the tuition but in the engagement of both students and parents, and we think we've built a recognizable and respected brand. We're certainly seen as a means of improving performance in SATs, the 11 Plus, and GCSEs, but the engagement with the children is key, more and more so in fact.

Kids influence their parents' decisions, they always have, 'Don't make me go, mum.'

These days, you also have to consider what they're saying about us through their social media accounts and how one child influences another, and how that then influences the parents. That can have a real impact on bookings.

For example, 'My tutor's a weirdo' appears on TikTok and suddenly no parent wants to book sessions with him. It's a constant battle.

We have to deal with competition naturally; we're not the only kid on the block, there are other tutoring services out there. Many of them online, which we are not; many of them cheap, which we are not. But, then, we represent quality. There are more and more self-study resources online and even video classes.

We also have to consider that many schools are now starting to offer out-of-hours top-up tuition in addition to the regular school curriculum and we're beginning to look at diversifying, maybe thinking about offering some new curriculum areas beyond English and Maths.

There are plenty of challenges and plenty of opportunities, but we believe Tutocracy can be the leading provider of private tutoring to school children in the UK.

Hearing from the CEO

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