To whom it may concern,
I hope all is well with you and your school.
I have been working as a tutor for the past three years whilst and university and I have recently started a tutoring company called Sutton Education Pty Ltd because I believe that I have found solutions to common problems in existing tutoring agencies. Which could be of benefit to your students.
I have worked for various agencies in Victoria, NSW and QLD and have been able to identify the following key issues:
- The general quality of tutors is very poor. This is because the selection process is very indiscriminatory. When a tutoring agency acquires a tutor, they pay the tutor as a contractor with their own ABN as to lower costs and not having to give them as many worker rights. This allows an agency to have many tutors on hand to allow the agency to be very flexible and offer a wide variety of services, with very little cost as they do not have to guarantee work for the tutors. This dilutes the quality of tutors because after all there are only so many good tutors. The agency then prioritises distributing the workload evenly among tutors, rather than prioritising giving students to the best tutors. Further, a good tutor can make more money working freelance. My proposed solution is to employ as casuals a small group of dedicated, experienced, and high achieving tutors. Then to pay them well and ensure continuing training.
- Most tutors have sufficient technical ability to teach a subject (but not necessarily to excel) but lack the verbal communication skills. This is because most tutors are like ordinary people and are not proficient in this area. This is the fault of the agencies; in that they rarely ever train new recruits.
- Often the interaction of the student and the agency is limited to a feedback survey, anything billing related and perhaps scheduling. The responsibility is then on the tutor to do all the customer service, liaising and providing help outside of lessons. But the tutor isn’t paid for any of this, so doesn’t have an incentive to do so properly. It is my belief that the agency should provide extra services to help the student outside of the lessons. For example: provide on call help, notes, worked solutions, customer support, and answer general questions.
This is the link to my Facebook page, where you can see some information about me and the positive reviews that I have had from my students in the past few months since I set all this up. My success rate of turning a trial student to a regular is approximately 90%. Partly this is because I am young enough to truly understand the students’ perspective.
I think the usefulness of in person private tutoring (or even online) is even more valuable as the result of COVID-19 and school shutdowns. I found that last year it was particularly valuable to my students to supplement their online schooling.
Now, I am looking to expand my personal network of students and look for other tutors to hire. I believe I can do this with using online and traditional marketing techniques. I hope to form some sort of partnership with your school as part of this campaign. I would be happy to further discuss this. My phone number is 0450850505.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Kind regards,
Stuart Sutton, Director
Sutton Education Pty Ltd
ABN: 58645244417