UK school closures prompt boom in private tuition

Surge in demand for online tuition, while rich families take tutors into isolation with them

The private tuition industry is booming amid the coronavirus pandemic, with school closures and fears of infection driving unprecedented demand for online teaching.

UK tutoring firms said there had been a surge in online tuition in the past three weeks as parents anticipated and then responded to the decision to close schools indefinitely.

Meanwhile, several agencies said some wealthy families had requested tutors go into isolation with them on remote country estates or super-yachts.

Leo Evans, a co-founder of The Profs, a tuition firm that works with around 2,000 schoolchildren and 3,000 university students internationally each year, said: “There has been a hike in online tutoring related to existential concerns around the coronavirus and schools being shut.”

Evans said the number of daily users of its online classroom platform BitPaper had risen more than sixfold in two weeks, from 5,000 to 32,000 . “There were 11,000 hours of online classes on Monday, almost a fifteenfold rise from 750 hours on 2 March,” he said. “It’s absolutely exploded since the coronavirus.”

Hannah Titley, the founder of the Golden Circle, which has about 80 homeschooled and several hundred after-school students, said all lessons were now being taught online, compared with 10% a few weeks ago.

“There’s been a huge shift,” she said. “Most homeschooled students in London have transitioned to online learning this week, and those families who can are staying in the countryside. This week 16 new homeschoolers have joined. We have another 11 starting after the Easter break.”

Titley said a drop-off in demand for GCSE revision as a result of the cancellation of exams had been more than offset by demand for other tutoring. For example, private schools were continuing to assess key-stage three pupils, aged 11-14, and after Easter some schools will start A-level courses for those pupils who were due to do GCSEs this summer.

One of the Golden Circle’s clients, Claudine Ries, who lives in central London, has switched to online tutoring for her 16-year-old son who is studying for US exams.

She said: “We are trying to socially isolate by seeing fewer friends and staying away from large crowds. We switched to online tutoring mainly because we felt it would unnecessarily expose the tutors who need to travel to our house while they could be isolating themselves at home.”

Will Chambers, the founder of Bramble, an online tutoring platform, said the number of daily users rose by 1,125% in two weeks, to 2,500 on Thursday. Many of the new users were elderly tutors concerned that homeschooling could put them at risk of infection, he said.

Adam Caller, the founder of Tutors International, which caters to rich families, said he had received several requests from clients in the past few weeks for tutors to go into isolation with them at short notice.

“We’ve seen a sudden rush, especially from Switzerland,” said Caller. “They’re looking for tutors who are willing to come and be locked in. One family has relocated from an area affected by the Covid-19 outbreak in northern Italy to St Moritz in the Swiss Alps.

“Another family, from Dubai, want to go and hide on their super-yacht in the Mediterranean. It’s paying £24,000 a month to the tutor.”

Mark MacLaine, the founder of Tutorfair, said one tutor had gone into isolation with a family in upstate New York, and another family who had flown to the Caribbean to escape the outbreak were now receiving online tuition.

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MacLaine said the additional demand was a boost to Britain’s private tuition sector, worth an estimated £2bn. He said this year could be his highest earning yet because so many families were looking for private tuition due to the uncertainty over the next academic year.

“A few of my A-level students have decided to resit their exams next year but most want to keep working,” he said. “A couple of parents said they’ll have their kids resit their GCSEs in their A-level year if they have to.”

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The National Education Association Endorses Joe Biden

Joe Biden earned a formidable labor endorsement on Saturday night: America’s largest union, the National Education Association, formally backed Biden as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and pledged to mobilize its 3 million members — most of whom are women — on his behalf.

In a statement calling Biden “a tireless advocate” for public education, NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia said the former vice-president “understands that as a nation we have a moral responsibility to provide a great neighborhood public school for every student in every Zip code.”

“As president, he is committed to attracting and retaining the best educators by paying them as the professionals that they are as well as increasing funding for support staff and paraprofessionals,” she continued. “And Biden will fire Betsy DeVos and replace her with an Education secretary who comes from a public-school classroom and believes that educators must have a seat at the table when crafting education policy.”

The NEA’s Saturday vote concludes a nearly yearlong endorsement process, and its decision to back Biden now, on the eve of his first one-on-one debate with Bernie Sanders, is significant. Union leadership has likely concluded that Biden’s front-runner status is about to become permanent.

The endorsement also comes relatively late in the cycle compared with the strategies of other unions. The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest educators’ union, jointly endorsed Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren in February. Its president, Randi Weingarten, later endorsed Warren in an individual capacity days later.

Both Biden and Sanders already enjoy substantial labor support. Earlier this March, Biden announced that he’d earned the endorsements of UNITE HERE and United Food and Commercial Workers locals in Michigan, Mississippi, Florida and Illinois. By that point, the former vice-president had also drawn the support of a number of Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union locals, and the formal endorsement of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union, among others. Sanders, meanwhile, has earned plenty of labor support too, including endorsements from the American Postal Workers Union and National Nurses United and a number of powerful locals belonging to the AFT, UNITE HERE and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

Endorsements are important, but they don’t always guarantee that a union’s rank-and-file members will vote the same way as their leaders. Sanders won the Nevada Democratic caucuses in no small part because members of the state’s powerful Culinary Union defied their leadership, who did not endorse a candidate but campaigned against Sanders and Elizabeth Warren over their support for Medicare for All. Teachers are also a consistent source of major donor support for Sanders. HuffPost reported in February that while Biden led an internal AFT poll in tandem with Warren, teachers are Sanders’s top donors by profession. At the time, Warren was the second most popular beneficiary of their financial support, and Biden was third.

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Australian schools: Digital equity needed for success

For millions of young Australians, it’s home schooling from now on. As well as getting their heads around months of staying inside – often in small apartments with no easy access to big, green spaces – families urgently need to work out how to carry on with learning.

The Prime Minister and other leaders rightly point to the risks facing the educational progress of young Australians as the nation locks down. Given the data showing that many students are already up to three years behind their international peers in reading, mathematics and science, they cannot afford to miss a beat as they watch a very strange school year unfold.

The first of Australia’s two national goals for schooling refers to ‘excellence and equity’.  Excellence in education is already the subject of much debate, but the Covid-19 emergency will exacerbate equity issues, with no guarantee that all young learners can simply switch to high-quality online learning.

And school closures are happening at the same time as most businesses and organisations ramp up their technological capability to keep things going. This is potentially the greatest test of the $50+ billion national broadband network. Our average speeds have improved, but other countries are doing better, and this was probably a major factor for Japan and Hong Kong in their early decision to close all schools.

Ideally, for at least some part of each day, Australian students should be able to see and hear their teachers as well as their classmates. Schools will want to keep students connected and maintain a sense of belonging, otherwise motivation and achievement will go out the window.

But some schools are advising parents that live streaming of lessons cannot occur because of the variation in household internet services and devices.

Every child will need the right device and the necessary software. As in some universities, this might mean offering financial support to students who would otherwise depend on school computers, who cannot afford internet connection or who have a disability.

Enabling equitable access to smart digital technology would be an encouraging sign of the effectiveness of state and territory policies and funding strategies

Australia’s education ministers own Education Services Australia, a national company that claims a “unique combination of education and technology expertise to create and deliver solutions that can be used to improve student outcomes and enhance performance across all education sectors.” ESA built the Australian Curriculum website, among many other projects.

Never has there been a better time for that organisation to show what it can do.

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