Pricing quandary: if one hour of individual at home tutoring costs parents €40 per week...

[Bobochic]

What should a school offering a once-weekly three-hour class with sixteen students charge per student per week?

• €10
• €20
• €40
• €60
• €80

Cost of teacher per hour 40 *3 =120 divided by the number of students 16 =€7.50

That doesn't take account of accommodation or the more significant workload of 16 students versus one. Nor of management costs.

But I'm still after a price rather than a cost.

Are you a parent or running the class? I'd expect to pay around £10-15 per hour so I'd vote for €40. It really depends what other competition there is locally and if the class is genuinely worth it.

I don't think the price for individual tuition is particularly relevant-it's a totally different situation. I pay my personal trainer completely different fees when I see her one on one compared with in her body pump class.

Depends if we'd need to provide lots of specialist equipment on top, or whether everything was included .
For example, music lessons are about £32 an hour (€35 now??) but I wouldn't pay for a lesson with 16 participants! Orchestra subs of about £4 a session, to cover room hire/conductor time would be fine.

Something classroom based, such as learning a foreign language, I would pay no more than £6ph, for a class of 16.

PurpleDaisies - how much more do you pay your personal trainer per hour for one-to-one versus a class?

For a price, I think you need to work out how much time it will take you and work backwards from that.

So 3hrs tutoring @ £40 pH is £120 . Calculate how much time prep/ differentiation/ marking will take and set yourself an hourly rate for that. Add in cost of to hire, travel, materials as appropriate. Divide by 16.

I'd agree that £30-40 would be a reasonable headline figure.

A three hour class sounds pretty intense though! What subject do you teach?

I'm neither a parent or a teacher here - it's a business proposal that I'm consulting on.

Six times more bobo.

Thank you

Aim for a third of the price being profit, so two thirds is the actual cost: room hire, delivery, prep and marking.

That's a costing, not a pricing, reasoning titchy.

And what the market will bear. So an established in demand course with a reputable tutor could charge a lot more. You could look at equivalents. For example Justin Craig have a well organised programme of GCSE and A level revision courses. They are really expensive but must be paying the schools quite a lot for use of facilities, and experienced teachers a lot to give up some of their Christmas and Easter holidays (or I hope they are!). But people will pay in the hope that that bit extra will get their child over a crucial grade boundary. Ditto, group coaching for things like Tiffin 11+.

Every so often there will be a newspaper article about tutors being paid huge amounts to spend the summer sitting on a yacht coaching a child for London entrance exams. However normally there is a going rate. People then expect to pay less if it is in a group, or unproven.

Thanks for the Justin Craig tip NeedMoreSleep - it's an appropriate benchmark in this case.

I think the fact there are 16 students make it less appealing for parents as the student won't be getting the individual attention. However, a local maths teacher coached a group of students privately. I think five of them, and they divided the cost of the tuition between them .

I agree that sixteen is too many.

I'm neither a parent or a teacher here - it's a business proposal that I'm consulting on.

What's our share of the consultancy fee?

In which case, worth looking at their delivery. We were happy customers, though presumably others will have different views. Things I liked were:

1. A sympathetic lady who did bookings and who was able to explain what a course might to do for my daughter. (It is expensive after all...) and who checked syllabus content.
2. Classes of eight max.
3. Questionnaire beforehand asking for objectives and the teacher coming back to clarify.
4. Experienced teachers. One was head of department at a large state sixth form college.
5. Use of feedback. I assume the aim is to have a core group of teachers, who are known to deliver.
6. Sitting the kids down at the start of the course and being quite direct about behaviour in class. They were all there for different reasons. Some would be trying to nail the A*, others hoping to get above the C barrier. No competitive behaviour. Speak up quickly if there was a problem.
7. Kindness and confidence building. Whatever a pupil knows or does not, they need to believe they can make the best of what they have.

DD is dyslexic and so bounced along the bottom of English classes, albeit at a selective school. GCSE was her last English exam ever, and she wanted to secure her predicted B, and ideally do better as medical schools can filter by GCSE results. JC helped her confidence, as it was clear she had been well taught, knew her stuff, and in a less selective environment was relatively able. The focus on the mark scheme and what was needed for each question was especially valuable, as her school normally had the luxury of educating beyond the exam rather than teaching to the test. She had not wanted to go as she "hated English" so three days of more English during her holidays sounded like hell, but went back happily after the first day, and happily agreed to repeat the course at Easter. She ended up with a very unlikely but valuable A*. One eye opener were the boys in her class who had all come from the same private school, and who clearly had disturbing gaps in their knowledge.

Its a case of knowing your market. We were willing to pay for English because we knew there was a problem, but not other subjects where time was better spent doing homework/revision set by school. Other families seemed happy to pay for tutoring support through the whole education process for no obvious reason, other than the kids start to rely on it. Whilst others look to plug gaps where state education, due to staff recruitment problems, may not be delivering as it might. The big advantage for us of courses, rather than finding an individual tutor, was accessibility and quality control.

And I want a share of that fee!

Thank you very much, NeedMoreSleep. Very interesting and useful. I think that eight pupils is probably the right number when they all hail from different schools/backgrounds. There are issues of heterogeneity of pupils in the organisation I am looking at, which is of course exacerbated by the larger class size. I suspect that a two-hour class of pupils with a more similar profile in a group of eight would be a lot more beneficial than the three-hour class of sixteen.

16 students
worthless to me.

I think it also depends on whether this is a "one off" type thing or a weekly event. Say for example you were talking about Maths. If you were running a one-off Saturday morning on exam technique and covering what you think may come up in the exam, giving tips on how to identify what Maths technique needs to be used etc then I'd happily pay about £45.

If this was a weekly thing and for example going over in more depth what should be being taught in school, I couldn't commit to £45 a week as valuable as the extra practice might be. The most I could afford for that would be £20. I'd instead try to get a share for an in home 1hr session, so getting a 1 to 2 lesson for an hour.