In this impactful episode of Modern Mindset, guest host Daniel Klulow interviews Kevin Ramchurn, an experienced maths tutor and the Managing Director of Suited Tutor, to discuss the transformative power of online one-to-one tutoring in the modern education landscape.

As traditional education models continue to evolve, Kevin shares compelling insights into how personalised learning, virtual tutoring, and flexible online education platforms are bridging gaps for students who may otherwise fall behind. From the benefits of smaller class sizes to tailored instruction for students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) and ADHD, this episode reveals how education technology is reshaping the learning experience across the UK.

Kevin draws on real-world teaching experience and data from sources like the UK National Tutoring Programme to explain how digital tutoring helps boost academic performance, increase student confidence, and reduce educational inequality—particularly for those in rural locations or disadvantaged communities.

The conversation also explores how online tutoring reduces travel stress for parents, provides access to qualified tutors across the UK, and offers interactive, face-to-face style digital learning experiences through tools like visualisers, drawing tablets, and virtual whiteboards.

Whether you're a parent seeking academic support for your child, an educator looking to enhance your teaching strategies, or a student navigating learning challenges, this episode is packed with practical strategies and expert guidance to help every learner thrive in today’s digital age.

Host: This is Modern Mindset, the show that picks the brains of the world's leading minds to help you unlock yours. I'm your host, Daniel Klulow, sitting in for Adam Cox, and today I'm joined by Kevin Ramchurn, a maths tutor and managing director at Suited Tutor. Welcome to the show, Kevin. 

Kevin: I'm glad to be here, so it's going to be quite interesting to hear my opinions on this.

Host:Yeah, yeah, great. Well, I guess we're here to talk about education and in particular one-to-one tutoring. So I guess the first question to ask you really is how large size classrooms affect student learning and why one-to-one tutoring can help with that.

Kevin: So with the class sizes, there have been a survey that we did last year that it shows the effect of school size and class size on school preparedness. and they talked about how reducing from a class of 30 to just 26, it does improve the students' outcomes by just allowing the teachers to tailor the lessons and increase the engagement between the students and themselves. And it also helps them with better discipline the students into managing the position they are and making sure they can work with different groups within the class. And within my own experiences, I have noticed that effect as well, because this study has not been done in just one school. It's been done across 21,000 schools, and that's over 80 countries. And in my current school, when we implemented that idea, it has shown a significant, much better result within the students. When I was going from 30 to 26, I was able to give more feedback in terms of like getting more out of them because then I didn't have extra four students to focus or extra group to focus. Because when I create a group in a class, I tend to group them in fours. And then having one less group does make me easier to manage what I need to see between each table and see what other feedback I can give to these small groups. And then you talk about how a one-to-one tutoring has an impact the students' outcome as well. When we did a survey from the National Tutoring Programme, it did show that it has done a 67% improvement in attainment and the grade has gone about two and a half more than regularly compared to regular students that don't take tutoring outside. And using one-to-one, it has helped in making sure we identify what they need to work on. And then when we work with the students, we do ask them what they're currently learning in school, because every school has different type of curriculum. So knowing what the curriculum is for that particular school does help a lot in tutoring, because then you can plan ahead and try to make sure we can Have a good plan for them to reach the current goal. So, like, one of the students from. um she's in current year seven but she's already ahead with a lot of stuff that will be taught in year nine but her current goal is just to recap everything she learned and just focus on those questions because she knows she has a test in one month so we just focus on that but then after that test we're just going back onto looking at other questions that will be ready for her in year 11. So we're trying to see what we can do in terms of that.

Host Yeah, absolutely. And I guess recently we've been hearing quite a lot about online tutoring and online resource in particular, and that's what you guys specialize in at Suited Tutor. So can you tell me a little bit about why that can be an effective solution for people, particularly when it comes to flexibility and flexible learning?

Kevin:: No, in terms of flexible learning, it's very important for the parents because they find out it's much easier to do time management. So when I do tutoring after school, after I finish my main job, I do go after school just to teach different students. And because I'm not traveling constantly, it does make me to teach a bit more students than regularly I would, because then there is a time where I have an outdoor time where about 30 to 40 minutes to get to the next student. But when I don't have that problem, where I'm just the next two minutes, I can go to my next lesson. It does give me, it does help me deliver more lessons and better quality lessons for the students that need it, because there is a lot of students that do need tutoring. And I've been asked by a lot of parents, um okay can you teach my child but because i don't have that much time and to do to those lessons um it online tutoring has helped i have been taking more students and we also been able to hire more tutors across the uk so like for example we got some tutors from London, Leeds, Birmingham,  Manchester and some in Oxford and they're very good because they are experts in their field and we always check whether they can deliver the lesson and then we always get feedback from the parents just to double check whether we are doing the right thing in the online tutoring. And when we do online tutoring, it does really help on making sure you have the right tools. One of the examples would be having a really good software for communication. So, we integrated our own website to have Google Meet, and they can book an appointment, and then the Google Meet will just pop up based on our website itself. Or if you're not comfortable using our websites to book it, you can always use Zoom and have that conversation with your tutor. and we also use different tools to make sure it's the same thing as face-to-face, because what we want to make sure is for them to see what we're doing. So I normally get either a visualiser or a drawing tablet, and there's quite a few of them available, and it does help a lot when you deliver lessons. the students do get more visual feedback as well, because they can see what you're doing. And it does give them more a chance to reflect on their own learning as well. Because with online tutoring, I can actually break down the activities and then pose some certain aspect or shared certain aspect on my screen. And it's been really great in making sure the interaction between them is consistent. And we do have other websites that we can use, like we have a website called, I think it's Interactive Whiteboard, where we can, if we don't have access to a visual or drawing tablet, we can use that to show or demonstrate to the students. So, there is some disadvantage on online tutoring, but there's so much advantage to it that it does outweigh it, you know.

Host: No, absolutely. The benefits are numerous for sure. You mentioned a little bit earlier as well about being able to kind of like tailor feedback and personalize teaching a little bit. And with a rise in sort of students with mental health challenges, and we've heard a lot about students with special educational needs struggling for placements and things like that and the support they need. Can you tell me a little bit about how personalised tutoring can help those students?

Kevin: No, no, you're right about having that mental health everything, because in the last tournament from the National Parents Survey, we find that more than half of those parents say that child has mental health, and due to that, a quarter of them are missing school. And it does affect in terms of It does affect them in the long run because they're not learning anything, they're not recapping anything, and they're not they're basically falling behind and having the online tutoring is another alternative to make sure we can support them because if they're refusing to go to school at least online tutoring is there to make sure they don't fall behind because we have in my current school we do have a lot of school refusers and we've been putting them on online tutoring and it does help them in making sure they are keeping up with our curriculum and we're making sure that by the end of year 11, they should, or year 13, they should be able to achieve the result that they want. And also, 80% of the parents prefer online tutoring just because of the reduced travel stress so they don't have to go rushing in the morning making sure their child is ready and there's a lot of things like because it's just one-to-one the students feel less pressured and the mental health does well not the mental health but like it does bring them their mental state a bit down so that way they can feel calmer they can actually ask more questions because I do have a lot of students within my classroom. who sometimes don't feel comfortable, even though as a teacher we do push them to be more comfortable in answering, but they're not too comfortable just because they're afraid their peers will make fun of them or they're not correct. But being one-to-one or tutoring, it does help build their confidence. You actually did see one of my students who done tutoring, but not with me, but with a different company. But when she came back, her result was like, it just changed. So like her confidence is so much better. Like she even says, I should be moving up set now. Like it does move, it does do a lot. And the other students are still catching up, but like she's just ahead and we don't have to worry anymore. And yeah, which is quite good.

Host:Yeah, absolutely. I bet it's fantastic to see when one of your students improves.

Kevin: Can I give you one more point as well? It's just because of the ADHD point, because we do provide a lot of training to our tutors already. but it's up to them to get more information as well. So, when we provide information about, let's say, ADHD, we do tell them to make sure they manage their time correctly and make sure they do short activities, because with an ADHD person, it's more about they can do an activity, but not for too long. So, we need to keep changing the activity, but still stay on the same topic. So, like, when I have ADHD students, I'll do one activity, then give them a five-minute reflecting time on what they have learned. So, instead of them being silent and doing the work, I just talk to them just to see what they can, what they understood from what they just did, and then going back to the work, and then just to break down the little activities to make sure they get most out of it.

Host: Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. I guess it comes back to that, that, that tailored feedback, that tailored approach that we've been talking about. I did just want to quickly touch on as well that kind of how beneficial can online tutoring be for those students who are maybe from disadvantaged areas where, you know, the school that they're in the catchment for isn't particularly great or, you know, maybe they live in a particularly rural area where there is only one school and so options are limited. Are they the kind of, you know, ideal candidate for doing extracurricular activities and extra work with someone like yourself?

Kevin: No, you're right about that and we do have a lot of students who are in disadvantaged areas so like one of them will be like Blackpool or Bradford. There's a lot of people, students from that those areas where they have the highest level of a certain absence in those schools. So when we have online tutoring it does help our tutors to deliver at any point of the country as long as they have access to internet. And just having access to internet, it does do a lot for the students because one, they don't really need to worry about being around other students. Two, they can get the best tutors from anywhere in the country because we know if you're stuck in certain areas we might not have a good tutor on that section so with our company we always make sure when we interview them we will always double check whether they're specialists in that subject and by looking at their degree and double checking whether they can deliver those lessons by doing little interviews with them. So for those students who are in the sanitised area to have access to those tutors is a very, very big thing for them to get a little bit push. And I do feel like a lot of factors. It does help with parents as well in terms of, what's it called? Sorry, in terms of, again, extra help. Because there was a survey form, I think it was the National Tutoring Programme, where they provided those areas with tutoring. and they did see a lot of improvement in terms of the result. But because of the funding they didn't have enough, they had to cancel it. And it's quite sad, because those students do need access to tutoring, because it will push their grades so much better.

Host: Yeah, absolutely. So if anyone's listening now and thinking, you know, a particular part has resonated with them, maybe they have a child with ADHD or they're from a disadvantaged area, whatever it might be, is there somewhere where you can direct them to find out a little bit about what you guys do and online tutoring?

Kevin: Yeah, sure. Our company name is called Suited Tutor because we're really suited to be your tutor. and if you go to our website we give a lot of information to the parents to the tutors and even to the students to know what they expect and it's very easy because if you're if you're not too sure about anything you can call us you can send a message you can email us like we have everything ready for you just to make sure you have a good experience with us and if you're not too sure about online study we do offer courses as well so that way you can have you can manage your time in just looking at certain topics instead of having online tutoring, if you want.

Host: Yeah, fantastic. Well, look, Kevin, thank you very much for joining me and chatting about this. That's Kevin Ramshawn, a maths tutor and managing director at Suited Tutor.

Kevin: Thank you, Dan.

Host: Have a nice day. Thank you for listening to Modern Mindset with Adam Cox. To automatically receive the latest episodes, please subscribe. If you'd like to support the show, please share this episode with just one friend you think it could help. And if this episode helped you, please leave us a five-star review for Suited Tutor and Modern Mindset. Picking the brains of the world's leading minds to help you unlock yours.