Our latest press release.
New Zealand tutoring network responds to families who say every other option has left their child behind.
Some parents know the feeling well: sitting in another meeting, hearing another version of "we've tried everything," and still watching their child fall further behind. For a growing number of New Zealand families, finding support built around their child, not the other way round, has felt close to impossible.
Impact Tutoring, the nationwide network built on the philosophy "Because You Count," is developing a new one-on-one Intensive Support Pathway in direct response to what its franchise owners are hearing from these families at Hubs across the country: these families are not being heard. "We recognise that a small number of students face profound cognitive, neurological, or medical challenges that require an entirely different level of care."
This is not a small or occasional request. Hub owners across the network, from Te Awamutu to the Far North to Hawke's Bay, are fielding the same conversation on repeat: families whose child has a diagnosis, a developmental delay, or a set of needs complex enough that a shared classroom or small tutoring group was never going to be enough. Nationally, around 6% of New Zealand children aged 10 to 14 have a recorded neurodevelopmental condition, and roughly a quarter of them are managing more than one diagnosis at once, a figure that climbs to nearly half in some regions. These are not rare, isolated cases. They are a growing group of children whose needs a standard model was never built to meet.
Impact's Specialised Intensive Support Pathway is being built for children who need more than most: those with a formal to clinical diagnosis, those whose progress has stalled no matter how much mainstream support they've had, and those whose combination of needs means one-on-one, moment-by-moment attention is the only thing that actually works for them. These are families who have often been told, gently or otherwise, that mainstream options were not built with their child in mind.
Where Impact Tutoring's core model uses a 2:1 ratio, this new pathway offers dedicated one-on-one sessions. It is a deliberate departure from the core model, built specifically for children the core model was not designed to reach. It reflects a belief the network has held since it was founded in 2014: that education is about more than marks, and that every child, however they learn, deserves to feel like they belong.
The Impact Specialised Intensive Support Pathway is currently in development. Full details on eligibility, access and enrolment will follow before it rolls out across the network.
"We hear it from these parents," says Jean McKenzie, Founder of Impact Tutoring. "They've tried mainstream learning, additional learning support, behaviour therapy, homeschooling, online learning programmes - they've tried everything, and their child is still struggling and still feeling like they don't belong anywhere. We built this business on the idea that every person counts. This pathway is for the families who have been told, in one way or another, that their child doesn't fit. We think they do. They just need the right kind of support."
Every Hub is built around the whole child, wellbeing and belonging as much as academic results, under the philosophy "Because You Count." Each Hub focuses on a safe, nurturing space where students can be who they are.