The Australian private tutoring industry has now been Ubered by a pair of software engineers operating out of Brisbane.
For co-chief executives and founders Sam Robertson and Cameron Schmidt, the story of Scooter Tutor began in 2007. Schmidt initially came up with the idea, and name, after travelling house to house on a 50cc scooter to tutor his students.
Schmidt then partnered with Robertson to develop Scooter Tutor. However, they realised that managing a private tutoring company with a large workforce of remote employees isn’t easy.
So they Ubered the process. They developed software and a website whereby prospective students – or often their parents – could search for tutors, book times and choose locations for tutoring. Robertson assures that their tutors are vetted and qualified.
“We go and background check all our tutors, we interview them, we make sure they’re obviously certified and qualified to work with children, perform reference checks, and then only once we do know that we’ve got the best tutor, do we actually employ them and put them on the system,” Robertson explains.
Scooter Tutor’s greatest similarity to Uber lies in its ratings system. After the lesson, clients are automatically prompted via email to rate their lesson out of five stars. Any lesson with a 4-star rating is followed up by Scooter Tutor with the student and tutor. Tutors who get three ratings below four stars are sacked. As with the ride-sharing app, drivers have to maintain a rating of at least 4.6 stars to keep their job, according to documents leaked in 2014.
But the on-demand nature of Scooter Tutor may raise the eyebrows of some educators. There are concerns that some parents overwork their children by sending them to private tutors, resulting in fatigue and possible mental illnesses. Certainly in South Korea, tutors are in such high demand that one, Kim Ki-hoon, earns $4 million a year just from tutoring. Seoul’s local government has had to ban tutoring organisations from operating past 10pm.
This situation doesn’t exist in Australia, yet. But Robertson says he understands the concerns raised by private tutoring’s critics.
“I think while overwork is definitely a risk, that is a responsibility of the parent to really understand where the limit is for their child,” Robertson says. “But I do think that it provides them [the kids] an opportunity to have that one-on-one learning outside of the classroom where there might be a whole heap of other pressures.
“They might not have the confidence to put their hand up and ask questions in class, there might be issues with bullying and I think that’s really where tutoring provides a valuable environment for these kids to be able to have a more private learning experience.”