We didn’t know it at the start of 2011, but we were about to take the first steps in an amazing journey along our own personal yellow brick road. As you all know, back in January we were franchisees of a different company.
Twelve months on, our independent tuition centre is thriving with over 100 students. Our students and their parents love our new resources and we go home after lessons with praise ringing in our ears. How did it all happen? Here are the highlights of our amazing 2011.
1. The birth of Better Tuition
With a deep breath and crossed fingers, we took the decision to go independent. I won’t go into all the details, but I will say that we had a very clear vision of the future of our tuition centre and we didn’t want anything to hold us back. We wanted to create a modern tuition centre with resources entirely tailored to the UK National Curriculum and the current GCSE syllabus. We branched out on our own and Better Tuition was born.
We had taken our first steps on the yellow brick road.
Summer is normally a quiet time for us, but we found ourselves choosing logos, designing a website, leaflets, business cards and external signage. We also redecorated our centre in bright yellow – but all of this was the easy part!
We needed to fill our centre with an awesome range of resources, some designed by ourselves, some resulting from collaboration with APTC members (see below) and some bought in from top publishers such as Letts, Collins, Schofield and Sims, Bond and LDA. This was more fun than it sounds, as we love that sort of thing!
2. Becoming software developers
We were approached by a small software company who wanted to use our expertise to develop innovative software for use in tuition. Working within a team of other UK teachers, we were able to contribute to the inception of Outlearn, a brilliant learning resource for children aged 5 – 16 and which is one of the computer programs we now use at Better Tuition. The children love it because it focuses on the skills they need to develop. They can also choose and dress their own cute avatar and each activity earns them virtual coins which they can virtually spend when they have saved up. Most importantly, Outlearn is designed to support the UK National Curriculum and is a great asset to our centre.
3. Founding the Association of Professional Tuition Centres
Association of Professional Tuition Centres
We all know that anyone can be a tutor. Whilst we do know that there are good, effective tutors who are not qualified teachers, at Better Tuition we only ever use qualified teachers. It’s hard to choose a tutor – have a look at our advice here – so we wanted to create a new quality mark that would provide certain guarantees.
We founded the Association of Professional Tuition Centres along with some like minded professionals. The Association already has members all over the country, so if you are reading this and you don’t live in Urmston, Stretford, Lymm, Partington, Carrington or Irlam, visit the APTC website to find an excellent tuition centre.
The Association of Professional Tuition Centres collaborates to develop, design and research new resources to use in our tuition centres. We also hold mini-conferences in order to meet with other professional tutors and continually develop our skills.
4. Knowing we had done the right thing
Better Tuition is a big success. When we opened our doors on 24th August 2011, people popped in all day to congratulate us and tell us how much they liked our new look. In fact, people have continued to do this ever since!
Student numbers are up 33% compared to this time last year. The economic climate hasn’t improved so we can only assume that Better Tuition provides what people want.
We can’t thank our lovely customers enough. We are looking forward to serving our community for another year. We want to make 2012 the year we help more children learn and succeed. We also want this website to become a real community resource, somewhere free to learn about educational issues as they affect your child. We had well over 30,000 last month alone, so we are on our way to achieving this!
Happy New Year to all our customers past, present and future: we wish you happiness, health and prosperity in 2012.
We have lots of events and innovations in the pipeline and we will keep you up to speed on these. Why not join our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter?
Don’t forget to visit the Association of Professional Tuition Centres website.
