Online Study Groups is a project to help the tutoring market adapt to the changing needs of students in a world where most pupils are socially distanced at home and do not have public exams in the summer as a focus for their studies. The idea is to allow students to share online lessons with a Study Group. Research has shown that small group tuition is an effective way to learn. Working with friends and other students will also enable interaction and social engagement during the lockdown whilst being more affordable and accessible throughout the country than one-to-one tuition. Clients and tutors will access the latest technology in online learning as an alternative to face-to-face tuition on the Tutorfair website, and with every lesson including a donation to our charitable Foundation, give back to students who can't afford it. Students will be able to access expert tutors from across the UK in a budget-friendly and interactive way to replace the learning they have lost out on during the shutdown. Thanks to Innovate UK, we have been excited to launch Online Study Groups on the website this summer and give students the opportunity to study in groups and help them learn despite the disrupted school year. Our next step is to optimise the service for our clients and tutors, making it easier for them to arrange and organise their group lessons around school days, holidays and any other obstacles that might arise. With additional functionality for tutors, a smoother purchasing process for clients and further integration of Online Study Groups into our existing platform, we expect that even more students will be able to access the benefits of small group tutoring with Tutorfair. Make sure the syllabus has been covered, get ahead for next year or start a project with friends.

Growing reliance on standardised tests, and increased competition for top schools and highly qualified roles has driven demand for private tuition in the UK and globally (FT, 2013). However, tutoring remains unregulated and unreported, with no access to objective measurement of tutor performance (BBC Skillswise, 2014). TutorFair (TF) has proven the concept of a web based tutoring marketplace to find reliable, manually verified tutors and help address the lack of accreditation and benchmarking tools in the sector. To meet fast-growing demand, TF must solve 3 key issues common to tutoring: A) Manual verification (incl. ID, DBS and qualification checks), which prevents scalability and wide geographical reach (existing automated verification technologies have 77% failure rate). B) Disintermediation: Existing booking mechanisms do not accommodate flexibility, implicitly enabling disintermediation and underreporting of tutors’ work. C) Conversion: existing search tools cannot effectively match client needs with tutor profiles, forcing clients to filter results manually and generating poor conversion rates. This project will develop a prototype of 4 innovations with unique customisations for tutoring. These technologies will disrupt the tutoring market by reducing dependency on basic manual process and enabling a scalable data-driven, global marketplace for tutoring. With 35yrs of combined experience commercialising results of R&D for companies incl.LOVEFILM, Stockbury, PutITout, Xfactordates, the team is well placed to exploit the outcomes of this innovative project.