Our latest press release.
What does a teenager in rural Canterbury have in common with a tutor based in Kerikeri, in the Far North? Online tutoring.
It's the thing that let one family find their son a tutor with the exact mix of subject knowledge and patience he needed, from almost the length of the country away.
He needed help with senior Physics and Maths. Living down a rural back road, with the nearest town some distance off, that kind of specialist help was never going to be sitting in the next street.
Instead, Impact Tutoring matched him with Anna Barry, who runs the network's Far North hub from Kerikeri. Anna has since gone on to tutor other members of the same family too, something Impact Tutoring sees often: once one child finds the right tutor, the rest of the household usually follows.
It's not an isolated story, and it's not only a rural one. In-person tutoring remains at the heart of what Impact Tutoring does, and that isn't changing. But online tutoring builds real relationships too: a live tutor working through the same digital whiteboard as your child in real time, seeing exactly where they get stuck. Sessions can be recorded, too, so a student can go back and replay a tricky explanation the night before an exam. For a lot of families, the right tutor for their child, the one whose subject knowledge and way of working actually fits, simply isn't the closest one. A family in Auckland or Wellington can hit that same wall a family in rural Canterbury does.
"It's not just about finding a tutor, it's about finding the best tutor," says Anna. "Rural families are part of that story, but we don't need to limit ourselves to that. Sometimes the best tutor is online, and that's true for a family in the middle of Auckland just as much as it is down a back road in Canterbury."
That's why the network is now bringing every Hub up to the same standard for online tutoring, rather than leaving it to whichever branch happens to offer the most of it. Every online tutor goes through structured training and onboarding before they work with a family, follows digital safeguarding and child-protection guidelines, and has regular check-ins to keep the standard high. New families get a practice session with the technology before their first real lesson, so nerves about the tech don't get in the way of the learning.
"During COVID we were scrambling to provide our tutoring services. I never want to be in that position again," says Jean McKenzie, founder of Impact Tutoring. "That's part of why we're building this properly now - the same training, the same safeguards, the same quality standard, for every online tutor across every Hub, not just some of them."
Jean credits Far North hub owner Anna Barry with shaping much of this work. "I want to acknowledge the skill Anna's brought to it," she says. "She's helped us build this so every branch can offer the same standard, not just the ones already doing a lot of online tutoring."