Year in Review: Minerva’s 2017

2017 has been an amazing year for Minerva – but what exactly have we been doing to improve, grow and provide the best service possible?

Pro Tutors

In 2017, the Pro Tutor program grew from two to FIVE tutors, as we welcomed Siobhan, Alice and Jack, all of whom are now tutoring full-time Minerva Pros. All our pro tutors are trained, dedicated, on a salary, a part of the company rather than freelance, and tutoring at least 12 hours a week. This was one of director Hugh Viney’s big ideas when starting Minerva three and a half years ago, and this has been vindicated by the success of the pro tutor program.

And we’re looking to hire more in 2018!

 

Minerva Trust

This year, we finished our work with the Baytree Centre, the local Brixton charity helping refugee girls find school places, and are now working more closely with Pop Brixton, where our office is based. We’ve started The Treehouse, our weekly after-school reading and homework club for kids in the local area, as part of Pop’s wider after-school club initiative to reach out to the local community.

 

 

Me Club

Me Club got even bigger and even better this year. We ran it for over Easter and Summer for longer than ever before, and expanded our range of trips and workshops. As well as London’s tops museums (Science, British, Natural History) and our favourite Shakespeare workshop at the Globe, in 2017 we also incorporated Kidzania and the London Bridge Experience. AND, to top it all off, we even offered coding lessons instead of our usual 7+/11+ classes, which went down a storm with the kids!

 

International Tutoring

In 2017, our tutors have been all over the world inspiring young minds. We’ve sent tutors as far afield as India, Singapore and Botswana, not to mention Italy, Spain and Switzerland. We have even more exciting international work heading into 2018, and a group of well-traveled tutors who are keen to work abroad!

 

Homeschooling

We’ve had great feedback from families about how much our tutors and bespoke homeschooling packages have helped struggling students, to the point that Minerva has become the one of UK’s top destinations for homeschooling.

We’ve been taking on more students for whom school hasn’t been the ideal way to learn. Whether students have had terrible teachers, difficult classroom environments or behavioural problems, we have had amazing success with homeschooling this year, helping students tackle troubling grades, worrying behaviour and even mental health difficulties along the way.

 

Training

This year, we’ve run training sessions for our tutors, covering everything from the 7+ and 11+ to online tutoring and resources training. As well as getting experts in their fields to train our tutors, many have also been taken by Emily, our head tutor.

 

Good Schools Guide

Minerva was reviewed by the Good Schools Guide in 2016, and included as of January 2017. We received a glowing report, highlighting our energy, drive, dynamism, attention to detail and client care. ‘The Innocent Drinks (as in smoothies) of the tutoring world,’ apparently. You can read the full report here.

 

Thanks for supporting us in the last 12 months – we’ve had a great year, and are looking forward to an even better 2018!

 

 

By David Bard

David is a Minerva Pro Tutor who specialises in humanities subjects at A Level and is a trained expert in the 7 + and 11 + exams. Outside of tutoring, David writes blogs about everything that’s trending in education.