MyTutor raises £5 million to transform the UK’s private tutoring sector

EdTech (education technology) start-up MyTutor has raised another £5 million to expand its 1:1 tutoring offering across the UK and beyond.

This brings the total raised by the London-based company to £10 million.

Founded by Bertie Hubbard, Robert Grabiner and James Grant in 2013, MyTutor is now the UK’s leading platform for online tuition. The platform connects pupils and university students from some of the top universities and sees tutoring sessions delivered using live streaming.

And, while the average starting price for tutoring can hit £50 an hour in London, MyTutor’s prices start from a much more affordable £18 an hour.

“Parents tell us all the time that their child has become disengaged, they’ve lost confidence or they’re not challenged. There is a huge diversity of needs in children’s learning that can be met with 1:1 support,” Hubbard tells the Standard.

Here’s how MyTutor works: Parents can book a free session with a tutor to check compatibility with their child. Then all the sessions are carried out online, facilitated by a live stream between the pupil and the tutor on MyTutor’s platform. There’s also an online whiteboard so you can share documents and upload past papers. All sessions are recorded, so you can play them back when they have finished.

The platform’s tutors come from top-tier universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Durham. Hubbard says that only one in seven applicants are successful, and now there are 7,000 tutors on the platform.

All potential tutors are vetted through an interview stage and safety is paramount at MyTutor. “You can just have this world entirely for learning,” says Hubbard. “You don’t need to physically meet anyone [to use MyTutor] or share contact details and everything is recorded. It makes the online world safer.”

As well as working directly with parents, MyTutor also collaborates with 240 schools and universities in the UK to reach children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Birmingham University is one such example. It is part of the National Collaborative Outreach Programme, a £60 million governmental budget that funds outreach educational programmes.

Under this programme, Birmingham collaborates with schools in its catchment area and funds 1:1 tuition programmes with MyTutor for local pupils to get their grades up for university.

The scale of MyTutor’s prospects has impressed investors such as Stephen Welton, the CEO of Business Growth Fund and Mobeus Equity Partners. As MyTutor takes place entirely online, it’s easy for the platform to expand its offering, whether that’s the number of tutors on board or the number of countries it can reach.

In addition, the edtech sector is one of the fastest growing in the UK, according to EdTech, a new strategic partnership with government support. The country’s education exports industry is worth £17.5 billion a year, and the government hopes to increase this to £30 billion by 2020. Start-ups like MyTutor are one way to achieve that.

No matter how big MyTutor grows, Hubbard insists that computers won’t overtake the human element of tutoring.

“MyTutor is very much about somebody learning from a human. We’re always going to be a community, have 1:1 support, but be tech-enabled,” he says. “As this evolves, we can offer a richer learning experience, but our expertise will be in finding the right place to learn.”

It helps that the platform delivers results too. When testing a control group of pupils, Hubbard says that the pupils made 1.7 grades progress in the subjects they’d received tutoring for, compared to 0.5 grades progress in the non-tutored subjects.

“We’re seeing the impact of MyTutor work,” he adds.