Homework help

Date: 19 Dec 2011

Ever wondered what on earth number chunking is? Have you sweated over number bonds and connectives with your children as you attempt to cram homework help into your busy day?

A new website could help. Tute.com aims to educate parents about how their children are taught and help them to support their learning. Recent research suggests parental engagement is the best way of improving a child’s education.

While some schools now offer classes for parents to teach them the mysteries of number chunking and the like, many working parents simply don’t have the time to take endless hours off work to take the courses. Tute.com allows you to access help whenever you need it.

The site was set up by Sean Gardner and Geoffrey Wheating, former director of strategic development at Reuters UK. Sean, a former head of campaign planning and communications at Orange, is not new to the world of internet entrepreneurship, having founded moneyexpert.com and been chief executive of moneyextra.com. He sold the latter off earlier this year and wanted to set up another business so he looked at trends in the US.
“There was a lot going on around education,” he said. This coincided with his own domestic circumstances. He has two daughters, aged eight and 10. “They were doing things at school that I just didn’t understand,” he says. “The curriculum has changed radically since we were children and it is a lot better in many ways, but I would have to go on Google to understand when my daughter came home and said she was, for instance, doing homophones. I could get a definition, but I needed to understand how the subject was being taught at school to really help her.”

He has also noticed a lot of demand for tutors, but says what was offered was very localised. “No-one was offering anything on a national basis or building a large scale online platform despite the fact that whiteboard technology can now be delivered via a standard browser,” he says.

Experienced teachers
Tute.com has a range of simple videos and resources, prepared by teachers, which aim to help parents understand how different subjects are taught at school and how learning has been transformed so much by technological advances in the classroom.

Sean, who works flexibly around his children, says they have been his guinea pigs and he is delighted that they think the site is cool. “It is delivered through an interactive whiteboard on a pc which they love," he says.

Tute.com has a team of experienced teachers working with them. They include a woman who worked for a local education authority teaching parents how to teach their children in a non-standard environment. “She has 10 years or resources and expertise available to her,” says Sean.

Also working for Tute.com are a couple who have spent time working with parents to bridge the gap between parents and children.

The site produces new videos and resources every week, all of which have been tested face to face by these experienced teachers.

It works by charging £5 a month for access to its channel or £50 a year upfront. Sean says it aims to be very accessible. Parents who want to get one to one online help, for instance, around a specific maths problem, are charged £15 an hour.

It covers the curriculum for all the key stages, but focuses mainly on maths, English and science where there is most demand.

Sean says the site, which launched properly last week, will build on feedback and can turn around material very quickly on a next-day basis.

“School can be too rigid in the way it tries to engage parents. Many parents are now working very flexibly, maybe attending a children’s play and then logging on and still working at 10pm. Schools have not picked up on this more dynamic way of working,” he says. Tute.com believes it can provide the kind of flexible homework support that fits around parents’ lives better.

Related tags: Homework