Online Tutoring and Beyond: A Conversation with MyTutor's Co-founder, James Grant

tutored subjects. James is recognized in Forbes 30 under 30 is 2018 list for my tutors social impact. James Grant, Welcome to EdTech insiders. Thanks for having me on. I'm really excited to hear this story of my tutor you've been working on it, for years have enormous impact. But I'm not sure people in the states have as much familiarity as they have

with some other companies. So share the story behind the inception of my tutor, and how your vision of making tutoring accessible to all students really came to light.

benefited from growing up. But the more I dug into it, the more I realized it was this unfair advantage for students who are families who could afford it. And so those two problems seem to go very well together. Because I thought if I spin up an online platform, could I match these university students with high school middle and high school kids who really need the extra support but can't necessarily afford it. In the UK, like the US we had these amazing government funding pots.

And so the first thing I did was I sent out this email to a bunch of secondary school high school principals. And I was blown away because 20% of the entire school market responded to this email asking for a meeting. And I knew nothing about tutoring at the time, really. But it was an amazing opportunity to get on the road and travel around speak to principals learn about their challenges. And we got our first batch of contracts built an online platform. That was the beginnings of my tutor.

They basically on boarded onto our platform, we have two commercial models, we have a b2b platform where we partner directly with schools and districts, we help them operationally scale up these programs for not just providing the learning itself, but also the infrastructure to manage, monitor, and make the program successful. And then we also have a consumer marketplace where parents who can't afford tutoring for their kids go on and they can kind of self serve, they manage the whole process

themselves. So that's the essence of our platform.

together. And with this model, my tutor has demonstrated remarkable results delivering two and a half times progress for students in the subjects they're tutored in, which is really amazing. So you'd mentioned the training, what pedagogical approaches do you attribute to my tutors effectiveness? What does is the platform due that drives that level of student success.

gaps. It's totally unreasonable in today's world to expect schools to be able to bridge all of the gaps when you've got growing class sizes, teacher shortages, it's really tough, and there's limited time. But every student needs some form of personalized learning. So just having that different type of relationship that a student can rely on every week, same person in the room, that's one core

principle. Another thing is the infrastructure that makes sure that what our tutors are teaching is really aligned to the classwork. So we take lots of data points to understand the kind of picture of the student what where their learning gaps are, what type of learner they are, how they've been contributing in class, and some of the areas that we should really hone in on, the last two things are around kind of the

stakeholder buy in. So one part of that is making sure that parents or guardians really know what's going on, they have the context behind the program, they're able to really support and advocate for it. We also like to keep our programs delivered within the school day. So it's really valuable with a student sees it as part of the regular timetable, but also for students making sure it's seen as a reward, not a punishment, because the second the student

believes I'm failing. So I've been given this thing I have to do, because I'm bad, that framing just sets you up for failure, because the student won't be in the frame of mind where they see it as kind of a blessing that they're given access to this thing. And the tutors are there to really support them build trust, and grow their confidence, that sort of framing is quite core to our approach.

And it's very interesting, I really admire the way you're looking at the psychology of it and saying, you know, tutoring should feel like a reward, you're getting access to these university tutors, rather than this is your safety net, this is your last chance you're making mistakes. And I can imagine that makes an enormous difference. Can you speak a little bit more about how you do that, like, how is the tutoring framed in the schools or you know, a home so that it feels like a reward?

end. And they said, the student has never met an adult, outside of the school or outside of their family unit. This is so intimidating for them. And it made me realize that when training our tutors, it's not just about training them to deliver the subject really effectively. It's about how to build trust, how to understand the types of students that they may encounter in school, what their backgrounds are, and be really careful in the matching

slide as well. So being able to match people to similar interests, maybe passion for the same subject, or maybe just someone who's able to break down problems in a really simple way, show a lot of empathy. Listen, well, I think there's a couple

of pieces there. The other thing is really buying in parents and the teachers to know what the program is about how it's all going to run and turn them into advocates so that every time the students hearing about it, it's from someone who thinks positively of us.

So tell us a little bit about you know, how my tutor works with so many different public schools in such a, you know, broad systemic way to really support the entire education system, not just individual students.

on. And it went really well. And off the back of that there was this billion budget, which was the kind of world's first government funded direct tutoring budget. So that money that could only be spent on tutoring. With that, I guess there was this frenzy where we were trying to scale everything up, we knew a lot of come to mind would come in, it'd be an opportunity to grow. And our central team actually at that stage went from about about 40

people to 250 in 12 months. So it was really fast, fast growth, courts, the scalability of tutoring, people often a very quick to go to the quality of the tutor themselves, which is obviously like a non negotiable. But there's an underestimation of the operational complexity of running programs within schools, particularly if you imagine the large district sort of saying, we're going to do tutoring, this is the company we're going to

use. Let's roll that out. Now, actually, a lot of the schools in those cases aren't necessarily bought, and they don't even know necessarily what they're being signed up to. And so the first thing that we did was, we built a really dedicated relationship management team that had end to end ownership of the school experience, then we started scaling up our technology stack so that a lot of the tasks that teachers would have to do to run the program

became automated. One of the first features that we kind of we implemented was similar to the Uber model that if a driver catches on you, you quickly get matched with someone else, we had an automated rematching system where if a tutor for whatever reason, didn't show up, it sort of put the spot out to our base, educated them on what the student needs, and rolled out that tutor into the lesson

within a minute or two. So it was those sorts of tools that made the schools feel really supported by us that they didn't need to put in tons of extra effort. But also the quality was still really strong.

tutor and to T relationship. But it sounds like this relationship management team as a central operational organization was incredibly important in building relationships with each of these schools and districts so that it didn't feel like this tutoring program was just, as you mentioned, sort of like dropped on them from above and with no, you know, face to it and no training and it wasn't clear, you know, how it was supposed to be implemented. It sounds like that end to end relationship.

Sounds pivotal. And then, you know, this uber model is so interesting. And I think this is a great segue to the next question. One of the things that's so difficult about tutoring, we saw the field of online tutoring, explode. During the pandemic, you saw that from very close up. All sorts of tutoring companies all over the world. And in lots of different models saw enormous growth very quickly. You mentioned that my tutor has been online since the

beginning. So it didn't have to pivot to online in any way would have already built a lot of expertise there. But it sounds like you're also, you know, ready to go in a way that that didn't feel like it was purely product driven, like you did this sort of rematching style kind of thing with Uber and you're automating things making life easier for the teachers. But it just sounds like it didn't feel like this thing was sort of turnkey, just go it was actually building a relationship

with the schools. I imagine that has had enormous benefits as the pandemic slows down. And you know, just the way tutoring could be turnkey on it can also be turnkey off if it's just a sort of a faucet. But that's not really how my tutor works. So with all that in mind, how do you envision online tutoring evolving in this sort of post pandemic era? And complementing educational models going forward?

tutoring to be. But during COVID, I guess there was an enormous need to really show action. And so the alluring kind of models were ones that every student were really low cost, really simple to run, particularly as kind of going

home. Not being in school meant lots of operational challenges, just to keep any sorts of education going for those sorts of models have really good kind of marketing spins of why they're successful, but are a little bit more difficult when it comes to impact and engagement because essentially, the less human kind of experience with both the teachers and the students, the less engagement you have to be a really independent learner to be totally self guided really like

proactive and so without those deep relationships with all the stakeholders, even though you could argue it's slightly less scalable, a bit of extra work, it's just kind of the only option to get true engagement. And as COVID is kind of not in the midst of lockdowns anymore, and now schools are having to be much smarter with their spending was the ESA cliff, demonstrating the ROI of programs is critical.

I think also we're seeing I know, I've mentioned this a couple of times, but we're seeing a much deeper appreciation for the operational complexity of running these programs. So it's no longer okay to just say, you know, a program is up and running, students are on boarded, let's go, you need that continuous support, advice of what to change understanding of the school setting by internal stakeholders, there's no shortcut for it fundamentally, you can use

technology to enhance it. But you can't remove humans from the experience, either at a service level or tutoring level.

way. And, you know, without naming any particular model or company, I think, you know, when you mentioned these marketing spins, there's this idea of, you know, when people are desperate for solutions, they need to, as you said, look like they're doing something really big to address a, you know, emergency, it doesn't always feel like the answer is going to be you know, something that is relationship driven, it feels like it's we just need to turn the faucet on, you know, the hose on full blast

and get this out there. But there were lots of these like expos a articles halfway through the pandemic, that said, some of these tutoring contracts are just not being used, the school districts are spending all this money, they have access for all the students, but because it's not been rolled out in a way that sort of makes it clear how to use it. And it ends up being on the students in many cases to choose to go to tutoring. And as you mentioned, that they don't have a relationship with a

tutor. So it's not like, they're like, Oh, it's my friend, I'm going to reach out to them. It's a tutoring system. It just created a real mismatch. And very many of these contracts went with very low usage. You're being you know, kind about it. But I think it's something that really exposed a big hole in edtech. And in online tutoring, because going all the way towards that productize delivery, just really clearly

didn't work. And when the evidence really came out, I'd love to hear you talk more about it. And we're obviously not trying to, you know, advocate for any one model over the others, at least I'm not. But I do think it's really interesting how you sort of found this balance of how do you scale really quickly, obviously, the company scaled enormously, but not lose that humanity and that relationship and that feedback loop. Tell us a little bit more about what that looked like sort

of in the trenches. How did you, you know, Were there moments when you could decide to just say, yes, just roll it out to those 10 districts, and we don't need a relationship manager? Or was it always going to be, you know, we need to be really systematic about this.

that you're using. Externally, you have to distinguish between the buyer who may be the district leader, and the user who is responsible for either the outcomes or the responsible of actually implementing the thing and running it. That's something that we thought about

very early on. And we have some advantages in the UK, which is a very school by school lead driven kind of purchasing model, but knowing exactly what the people on the ground running, if needed, and what they cared about going and visiting the schools, even in the midst of the pandemic to understand what's going on. That for us was like a real trust builder, that even in times where we weren't getting everything, right, they knew that humans were really

trying for them. And I think alongside that knowing when to use technology because I'm not sitting here saying that everything should be human led human relationship matters human to the you know, there's a role for AI there's a role for digital products, and it's knowing how to be smart with it so that it still feels like there's a trustworthy human at the center of the experience, but everything around it can be automated and efficiencies can be built on and lives can be

simpler, or even just outcomes can be enhanced. I think one of the analogies that I always used to kind of bring to life, the role of technology, I was a DJ, when I was younger, I started when I was a kid. And at the time, there was no real technology behind DJing. It was a couple of turntables, some records, and you have to do everything makes the music yourself. Now there's buttons that you could press that does it for you. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you lose

some of the human experience. It just means that the humans can do some of the kind of icing on the cake stuff, the stuff that's unique to humans at the moment that real soft skills that trust building the things where our tutors are able to say, actually I did these exams recently, they were really hard. I struggled to these were the methods that I use that made me feel better. Yes, I can tell you that. But do you feel it in the same way when you're with someone in the

trenches? Who's there to get you through a hard time? Yeah, that's some of the way we thought about that.

feeling of, I'm supported. This is somebody I know, this is something I'm actually, you know, feel committed to and like it was provided to me in a way that that's meaningful, all of those psychological pieces really do matter. And I think we're all wrestling as a field with you know, how to how to balance the human psychology, you know, high touch and the low touch the sort of, you know, tutor by chat model or tutor by chatbot model, it's really

tricky. One thing that strikes me when you talk about your model, you know, integrating it into the school day, having near peer university students teach high schoolers, knowing the student's strengths and weaknesses intimately having the school bot in being able to do this at home. I mean, this feels like a model that is obviously not pandemic specific at all. And it feels like something that should be part of our educational system sort of writ

large. And I'd love to hear, you know, what advice would you give to the educators listening to this, or institutions, whether they're higher ed or K 12, that are saying, Wow, this is a really cool model, it would free our teachers up to do more, it would provide personalized instruction, you know, what advice would you give for them to integrate online tutoring effectively into their day and into their strategies to make sure that students aren't falling through the cracks?

is an investment. So you have to sort of go in, I don't want to point out, bring on a new customer, pull the wool over their eyes and say, this is going to be a piece of cake that you're going to turn this on and never think about it again. And we'll deliver results to the end of the year, that's just entering a relationship on under false pretenses. What you should think about is the return on

effort, really? So are you going to get the right outcomes, whether it's impact simplicity for for your staff, whatever your goals are, for the effort that you're going to put in? And let's be honest about that. Are you going to get the outcomes that you need for your money as well? I think there's the obvious stuff like you know, make sure you trust the quality of tutoring. What are the quality assurance processes? How are these tutors brought on? And

like, are they trained? Are they interviewed and filtered through very carefully? Do you have scalable models for that? Are you going to be able to deliver the scale that we need when thinking about partner, I also think tutoring can be done by

lots of different people. It can be done by qualified teachers, it can be done by university students, sometimes it can even be done by people within the school, all the students in the school, I think something that we thought carefully about is the complementary effect of different types of instructors at different points in the journey. So don't just be evangelical about it's only qualified teachers for all

parts. Think about the pros and cons of each supply pool and try and give students a range of support for there's something amazing about the foundations by qualified teachers, the end to end syllabus, the behavioral management, but then the tutors, filling the gaps, helping them understand how to raise their aspirations and what a future could look like for them. That collaboration is really really cool.

States. And I bet they're, you know, similar programs in the UK, where university students really do want to give back, they want to close the equity gap, they want to give back to

schools. And this strikes me as such an interesting and sort of exciting way for universities and university students to sort of create this really healthy loop, where this really turning point in US higher education where they are changing admission processes left and right and higher ed institutions are starting to think about how can we support more younger students in being prepared for

our university. And this, this connection that you've made at a national level between universities and high schools, is incredibly inspiring. In that way? Can you talk a little bit about you know, how the universities, you know, do you have relationships with specific universities? Or do you recruit individual students, one by one from any university? And how do you sort of see that evolving?

central relationship. There's a model in the UK where universities are actually given government funding to support disadvantaged students or students from low income households to get into the university, or to think about higher education. And one of the tactics they use for the other strategies they use for that is funding tutoring within the schools for those students. And so we'll provide a in that sense, but I think one just going back to some of your

original question. We actually interviewed we survey tutors each year. And we asked them, whether they thought about a career in teaching. And then also, if yes, have they done anything to act on it. And one year, I think it was a couple of years ago, we had 78% of tutors say they'd be very keen to explore career and tutor and further but only 9% had done

anything at all about it. And so there was this amazing gap between this amazing pool of potential teachers at the time and a great teacher shortage, but many of them just weren't doing anything about it. So we took it to the government, we said, look, there's got to be some sort of model to encourage more kids to go into teaching.

And we started working with them more formally, to put on webinars to get school work experience placements to just basically leverage that tutoring experience to learn more about teaching and push them towards that as a career.

that going forward. We have a big teacher shortage in the US as well, I'm sure that is, that would be a very, very interesting way to sort of digitize a little bit of the ethos of the Teach for America and other models. What is the name of that program, by the way, I'd love to look into it more that program that's specifically about universities getting, you know, encouraged to help disadvantaged students in high school.

growing? Are you looking to expand internationally more than you already have? How do you see it contributing to the future of education?

tutors. But that's not necessarily the absolute best way to learn, the best way to learn is that consistent habit building, kind of human engagement, and then some digital follow up. And so we're trying to create this journey that's very personalized, and involves lots of different ways

to learn. So that's a bit of product expansion, part two, our journey from a kind of go to market perspective, we're very interested in aligning the learning that goes on in school and the learning that sometimes parents take away from school. It's been something globally, that's very disjointed. You have parents who often see some sort of failing in the school, they worry, they go and get extra support, could be tutoring could be something else. And there's no connection to what goes on in

class. And so we're very, very interested in bridging that gap. And if we exist to fix gaps in the school system, we need to bring stakeholders closer together and keep people informed whether it's funded by the school or parent. The third thing is geographical expansion, we're very interested in expanding our reach and applying our model to other countries that could benefit the US has helped with that list. It's got many of the same dynamics as the UK with some clear differences,

too. And we, over the last year have worked with our first few school districts, and the programs have been running really well. It's obviously a learning curve for us in the sense that there's lots of different curriculums. And state by state has different compliance rules and procurement rules. So there's some new stuff

to navigate. But the fundamental processes and building blocks of an effective tutoring program within schools are very, very consistent, so overlapping, we've invested far more heavily at the operational automation and infrastructure behind these programs than what we've observed with a lot of the other players in the market. So we feel we're really well positioned to scale up in the US market to

consistency? I am so curious about how you think about how these pieces might play together? I know we're very early in this world. But what kind of journey do you envision that could combine the humanity of a true tutor that you actually know and you know their name, and you have common interests with some of the incredibly sophisticated and fast growing technologies that allow constant access and getting, you know, automated tutoring, for lack of a better word in all sorts of ways that

are much less humane. And there's

products. And we're interested in all three, the first thing we did was we brought in a chief product officer from a company called Babel, which is Europe's largest language learning app. And we started building a roadmap around digital products that can complement the tutor journey. We do hackathons every quarter. So we did a recent one over two days, the theme was on AI. And we spun up some amazing

products really quickly. There were simple things like practice question tool for UK exams, we're thinking about ways in which we can leverage the recordings of our lessons to build really personalized notes for a particular student they can focus on, we use it internally for the way our customer service teams run, we're able to spot students that aren't really contributing to the lessons and feedback to the teachers so that they can have conversations with them and kind

of overcome pain points in the process. We also spun up a few innovation teams around digital learning and AI. And so we've got this constant process of testing and learning One of the things that was a real advantage for us is that we have so much data, we've delivered three and a half million lessons already. And we've just been storing a lot of this data, a lot of it hasn't been used. And now we've got a chance to be MLMs to create digital products that leverage the expertise that

specific to my tutor. So much harder to copy. The other thing is, we're very embedded in schools, we're trusted by schools. And so we're able to have that kind of confidence that whenever we release something new, they'll test it, even if it isn't perfect. A lot of adults parents are quite skeptical of AI still that they haven't yet seen some of the benefits, even though their kids

may be using it already. So having that trusted brand to say things may not be perfect, but you know, give it a try gives us quite a unique position,

what is possible. It's really interesting, and many of the examples you gave sounded quite powerful in all sorts of different ways. And of course, having this giant database that can be used to train a model or to fine tune a model could be incredibly, incredibly powerful. And you know, proprietary advantage, I have to ask this

very silly question. But I'm really curious about your answer to it, which is that, you know, there is a world in which a student has a relationship with a university tutor, let's call the tutor James just for the sake of expediency. And James can be with the student two or three hours a week. But James can also have a AI twin called James bought that, you know, nobody thinks that James Bond is actually James, but it is an online chatbot trained generative AI, you know,

empowered tutor. And the student, of course, can relish those two to three hours where they're talking to the real James, but they also have 24 hour access to James bot and can ask him questions anytime and can converse in any way and is never expecting that this is the real person. Is that idea totally moronic and would completely make no sense in terms of relationship building, or is that idea something that is could be really transformative in terms of access?

between. And so for us, the human interaction with on near peer tutors in our model, that's the kind of relationship owner or our relationship managers who are kind of managing the people actually running the programs. So they will always be core to us. But learning shouldn't just be one to three hours a week learning should be continuous, it should be accessible at all times. And they're, you know, the idea you just presented

makes total sense. The question I would have is, how can you use the data that stems from those sessions, the Chatbot sessions, the James got sessions? How can you use that to make the human engagement even more impressive, the next time I catch up?

Really, really fascinating. And it's great to hear that my tutor as a company that's been around for 10 years, has lots of data has built trust, which is key to anything related to new technology and new product is really thinking very expansively about what to do next. It's it's, it makes me feel excited about the future of of online tutoring and of edtech. So let me ask you one more question about this. Because I just think, you know, this is such an

interesting model. And I can imagine that the idea of connecting near peers and students in a very consistent way has such incredible research, supporting it, and students who have mentors who have near peer mentors who have somebody who cares about them, you know, throughout a school year or in multiple years have incredible results compared to students who don't have that kind of adult relationship. So The benefit is definitely there. And you're obviously seeing

impact. How do you measure the impact of the tutoring over time? What kind of data points do you tend to gather? And what kind of data points do you talk to the school about? To make sure that everybody feels very confident in the impact of the tutoring,

as actual results. And we can also benchmark them against predictions, teacher predictions, I think it's also important to understand how students confidence is building attendance over time, consistency of tutor feedback from tutor and admins of the teacher on how the students kind of contributing in class feedback on the operational running of a program. And so you take all these data points, and we tend to put them into some sort of a report at the end of

the year for our customers. In terms of getting much more specific about the impact data, the grade impact, we use a couple of models, one is looking at the students tutored subjects versus their non tutored subjects, which is quite an interesting angle. The other is benchmarking that students progress against other students who aren't on our programs for the same subject. Once you zoom out, you can also compare similar schools to understand what sort of processes within a

program are effective. It's quite interesting actually, for us, we can pretty much predict the overall success of a school program based on the first two weeks have they launched in the right way are students bought in are teachers aware of the program and contributing to the dataset? If some of those things are off, then you can have a great group of students who may have done really well, but it

doesn't always work out. So it's quite predictable, some of the things that we've observed over time, and we try to give that information back to schools, so they know how to run a program effectively.

answer. And I imagine that having that many data points also enables another kind of analysis, more and more sophisticated analysis with more and more sophisticated tools as well to identify all sorts of trends and clusters and things in there. So there's a lot there. Such an interesting conversation, I learned a huge amount, we always end the podcast with our two questions.

The first I'd like to ask you what is the most exciting trend you see from your particular vantage point as the head of my tutors, as co founder, my tutor in the EdTech landscape that our listeners should keep an eye on?

journey. And so we want to stay on top of that and position ourselves as almost unique and that humans still remain the center, but have all the support systems around it. So adding look, I really find it interesting where people say other trends stick out to them. Yeah, generative AI for us, this feels as though it's something that we have to embrace. And we have to figure out the right harmony between what we have historically done and what we will do.

that focus. It's AI, but it's aI with the human face, literally. And what is one resource that you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today?

progress. The other is a book called learning how to learn by Barbara Oakley, who we've been fortunate to have run a webinar with my tutor and some of our customers. She's really inspired firing. And I think that understanding the process of how to learn for a student is more important than any individual topic that they could ever

learn. So having those foundations so that they're expert learners will serve them so well in life, particularly in a world where knowledge is becoming so commoditized through the process of understanding the questions to ask how to absorb that information and turn it into something useful. That to me is worth investigating and understanding.

going to pick that up. And then learning how to learn by Barbara Oakley, old friend, I love Barb Oakley, you worked with her very closely in my Coursera days, I think one of the most sophisticated thinkers on learning in the world. Terrific, terrific suggestions. We'll put them in the show notes. James Grant, my tutor coming to the US as quickly as they can. I'm really excited to see what you do next. Thank you so much for being here with us on edtech insiders.