Need a tutor Pty Ltd

Children from remote and very remote areas do not meet minimum education levels as compared with students from metropolitan areas anywhere around the world. Inequity in resourcing, qualified support and sheer isolation means this cohort remain below national standards in literacy and numeracy levels at virtually all year levels. I want to addresses these key areas through our individualised interventional tutoring support. My son, who experienced learning difficulties throughout school benefitted greatly from individual tutoring. Tutoring has been a particularly successful way to help students 'catch-up' and by the integration of technology we can now reach more children than ever before. COVID has seen a huge rise in the need to provide supported services in education due to enforced school closures around the world effectively rendering remote children unable to learn unless they had access to digital capabilities. Many children simply did not have this access and fell behind significantly. I feel that through Need a Tutor, our exclusive attention on remote and rural children means we can address this inequity through the use of our proprietary and innovative technology.

I started Need a Tutor in 2015 as a way for disadvantaged children to access quality education support. My son had benefitted from in-person tutoring whilst attending school due to his learning difficulties. I wanted to share his experience with the world, so I set about developing a platform to find, match and connect qualified teachers and tutors with disadvantaged students. Online individual, live tutoring delivered through our own safe, secure and reliable platform. Need a Tutor was born. Once launched in 2018 after extensive beta testing, we went on to develop partnerships with NGO's, communities, corporates and major organisations to help us fund interventional tutoring programs. COVID saw a huge spike in demand for our services due to enforced school closures. Many of our students could not remote learn due to the unavailability and expense of owning a digital device. We set about adding a device donation service whereby pre loved devices were repaired and shipped to our students. To date we have provisioned over 250 students in remote Australia  and Cambodia with ongoing tutoring and device donations. We want to extend our global reach through the Elavate prize.  

As previously mentioned children from remote and very remote areas do not meet minimum education levels as compared with students from metropolitan areas. Inequity in resourcing, qualified support and sheer isolation means this cohort remain below national standards in literacy and numeracy levels. School attendance (in Australia) sits at approximately 70-75% in country areas and the completion of year 12 sits at about half the normal rate than the city. The "Closing the Gap" report specifically details Indigenous children from remote locations that suffer the most, the further away from the city the less support and resourcing is available. Tutoring has been a particularly successful way to help students 'catch-up' and by integrating technology we can now reach more children than ever. Our ongoing online tutoring has been proven to improve student capabilities (by 1-2 years), attend school more often and improve graduation of year 12 students. COVID has seen a huge rise in the need to provide supported services in education due to enforced school closures around the country effectively rendering remote children unable to learn unless they had access to digital capabilities. Many children simply did not have this access and fell behind significantly. 

Home digital capabilities are lower in rural communities due to patchy internet connectivity, the inability to afford data and/or the unavailability of devices to learn with. COVID simply exacerbated this problem around the globe. Our program leverages the internet to conduct live 1:1 tutoring sessions. In addition, our digital donations program ensure that a learning device is gifted to students who have no way of tutoring or remote learning. We also combine this with data donation when needed through corporate telecommunications giant Optus. We set about combining our device donations + data + tutoring services to engage remote children and fully support their education online. Often difficult, due to infrastructure and internet coverage constraints, Need a Tutor offers delivery of programs which have not been available in most communities up to now.The adoption of our technology-based program is disrupting traditional learning support in rural areas and helping those most in need. In 2019 we expanded into Prey Veng, Cambodia. Considered one of the poorest provinces we focused on tutoring at risk-girls through our online platform and matched them with bi-lingual Australian teachers and tutors. We simply want to expand to wherever educational support is needed.

Currently, we provide programs predominately in the K-12 market, with a larger focus on secondary schooling and completion. This represents some 1.2 million children and youth within Australia and billions around the world. Our impact is being felt through data indicating our students have; higher academic levels and confidence, increased school attendance and greater numbers of our students completing Year 12 (or equivalent). We want to further penetrate the market by offering our online tutoring + device program to more children with the vision of providing a personal tutor to every child that needs one. Online, live and individual. Many countries around the world including the UK, USA and Australia have commenced tutoring-in-schools programs throughout 2021 as they acknowledge this is one of the most effective ways to help students catch-up from the COVID school closures and interrupted learning in 2020. We acknowledge the impact tutoring has and through our delivery we can access children that would normally not receive quality educational support.