Helping to close the attainment gap

Making one to one support more accessible for schools

Traditionally, tuition has been the preserve of a fortunate minority, not necessarily those children who needed it the most, be that academically or socially.

We wanted to help address this imbalance.

Since 2013, we have made great progress towards our goal. We have worked with tens of thousands of teachers in over 2,700 English state primary schools, delivering online one to one maths tuition to over 80,000 pupils, the majority of whom are eligible for free school meals.

Designing tuition for the reality of school life

We knew we had to start by making tuition affordable within the reality of limited school budgets. We also knew we needed to be able to deliver tuition at a scale that could reach the hundreds of thousands of children who have the greatest need of one to one support.

Cultivating a global community of tutors

A central part of our solution is to recruit high-quality maths tutors from across emerging markets – notably India and Sri Lanka – where there is a huge population of passionate, well-educated English-speaking graduates and undergraduates who love maths.

All our tutors go through an extensive training programme before they begin, and receive regular and ongoing training and CPD.

We are really proud of our tutors and the work they do to support our schools, and are committed to providing them with a great place to work and competitive pay. In fact, our tutor centre in Sri Lanka, Third Space Global, is certified as a Great Place to Work.

Our commitment to our tutors:

• Competitive pay: average tutor pay is well above the local graduate average salary
• Guaranteed income: we guarantee payment per session even if the session doesn’t go-ahead
• Extensive initial training: our UK team have designed a full-time, 3-week training programme
• Ongoing development: all tutors receive ongoing CPD, frequent lesson evaluations and personalised feedback
• An environment to thrive: our tutor training and development team support tutors to pursue their goals and enhance their skills

Building a programme that makes a difference

We know that high-quality tuition doesn’t end with simply recruiting high-quality tutors. That’s why our UK team works to ensure we’re developing an effective and comprehensive tuition programme that is as supportive as possible for the schools and pupils that use it.

We’re constantly monitoring and improving our programme to ensure it follows best practice, fits with the school environment, allows teachers to easily reinforce their class teaching strategies and makes a positive impact on our pupils.

We’ve worked with UCL to develop a framework for the ideal one to one lesson and continue to develop an easy-to-use platform that helps schools raise maths attainment by:

• Diagnosing individual learning gaps through intelligent assessment
• Identifying the best sequence of lessons for each pupil
• Enabling tutors to adapt each lesson to suit each pupil
• Keeping teachers in control to support in-class teaching
• Generating and sharing comprehensive reports to help teachers see progress

Providing the best support possible for our tutors and schools

We believe in investing in our tutors and all the work that goes on behind the scenes to make a great tuition programme.

For every session purchased by schools, about half of the cost goes to recruiting high quality tutors, developing and delivering the best possible training to ensure they’re able to support our schools, and providing them with the daily academic and operational support that they need to succeed and thrive throughout their career.

The rest is invested in curriculum development, technology, customer support, safeguarding and operations; all the things that help to ensure our UK team can make the programme as helpful and effective as possible for the pupils and schools who use it.

Working as a team towards our shared goal

Ultimately, all of us at Third Space Learning, irrespective of our role or location, are working towards a common goal: closing the maths attainment gap by helping those children in English classrooms with the greatest need.

While we have a long way to go, the evidence from the 2,500 schools we have worked with, and our role in the National Tutoring Programme, suggests that the work we are doing is welcomed by teachers and schools and is making a real difference to the children we support.