GoStudent - from an ex-tutor

[TommyAbroad]

Dear All,

Following another post I placed in a Mumsnet thread which mentioned GoStudent, I thought that some of you might be interested in having more information before you make any choices about tutoring for your child.

I have been a tutor on GoStudent for just over a year. This company is manned almost entirely a bunch of salesmen and entrepreneurs (not educational experts.) To be clear, the tutors are NOT employed by GoStudent. We are regarded as "freelancers" or something woolly, to allow GS to avoid paying a fair wage, or providing any benefits whatsoever.

I could type a whole essay here, but in short:

Fees you pay, and what the tutor gets
Your 30 quid for just 50 minutes? As low as just 12 of this goes to your tutor. GoStudent take around 60% of the fee. Given that these rates paid to tutors have just gone down even further, along with the abolition of basically all achievable bonuses in the last six months, means that you have a wide choice of underpaid, undervalued and VERY unhappy tutors on board. The tutors have requested meetings with management about pay, and this has been rejected out of hand by the company. The pay has not gone up (even for inflation) for over two years.

Matching your child to a tutor
They claim to do this, but do not. Requests from parents for a tutor are simply passed around WhatsApp boards for the most part, with the "Programme Managers" hoping to find anyone at all to accept the student. Anyone, it seems, will do. The "Programme Managers" are all on commission, and don't seem to care a jot (with certain exceptions.) There seem to be no educational experts left within the company, many of the PMs don't even know the names of the teaching qualifications in the UK.

Sales and parents' contracts
GS will attempt to pressure you into a contract for a minimum of six months. What they will press for the hardest is a three-YEAR one. This cannot be cancelled, and even when it expires, it turns into a three-month rolling contract from there on. This means that you'll still need to give three months' notice, even after your child has left school and no longer needs it. On the very few grounds that they allow you to cancel a contract early, they will demand personal information such as your payslips, proof of unemployment and the like.

Trial lessons, and the tutor you get
You may well get a brilliant tutor for your trial lesson, and you are convinced to join the company as a result. But they very often then deliberately allocate you to a different tutor (this never used to happen) who is on a cheaper pay-scale, despite your first tutor being still available. You won't get a choice over this.

Pausing a contract
Yes you can... but it simply adds those months onto the end of your contract.

Your lesson credits
These have to have been booked by the next month's renewal date, or you will lose them. No rolling over credits at GoStudent.

Customer Service
Appalling. There's nothing more to be said. Once they have your money, you better expect no calls back if you have a problem.

The Platform
For the most part, doesn't work. They have their own classroom called "GoClass" (that replaced Zoom) which constantly has bugs. Video not working, audio not working, interactive digital whiteboards not working, and they are completely incompatible with Apple devices.

The Communications, Tutor and Student
They have, once again, their own software (that replaced WhatsApp) for this called GoChat. Or "NoChat" as the tutors have dubbed it, because messages often never get through. As a result, lessons get missed, and communications are lost.

Safeguarding
The less said about this the better, or I may get into hot water. Ask them if they check the tutors' DBS certificates annually, for example.

Finally, sackings.
This company is as vindictive as hell towards anyone speaking out publicly, or "rocking the boat" over issues such as pay from within. I have been summarily sacked this week (along with five others) for joining the protest against the company changing the rules over trial sessions and pay at just six days' notice for the tutors (they now get nothing for these, and are expected to act as "Salesmen" to get the student to take out a contract.) I had the temerity to send "poo emojis" on the internal message boards at such announcements, and was sacked with immediate effect by phone. Not only that, it was demanded that I do not speak to any students, parents or fellow tutors following my dismissal. They must be joking.

Please everybody, there are many platforms. Better platforms. More reliable platforms. Cheaper platforms. Go elsewhere.

Best Wishes, and thank you for reading,

An ex-GS tutor, who is now VERY happy indeed to do my tuition privately, not through this bunch of sharks.

I signed up for a trial for my DS and although the tutor was lovely, was really put off by the woman who called me afterwards.
Aggressive and just wanted me to sign, couldn't tell me anything about the contract or what would happen if the tutor I hired left the company.
Luckily I told her I needed a couple of days to think about it (18 months is longer than my phone contracts) and did some research.
Why were you fired TommyAbroad?
And what do you mean by the DBS? (Sorry, first time poster, long time lurker!)

Thank you so much for taking the time to read all that!

Reasons why I was fired are already detailed above ("unprofessional conduct" they called it, despite the Programme Managers having done much the same to us tutors, but they DIDN'T get the chop.)

As for the DBS - it is the "Disclosure and Barring Service" certificate as I remember, something that ALL teachers and peope working with children have to have in companies like these.

Can I ask another questions about the tutors? There is a lot of material about how qualified everyone is, however, if there are no Education Experts on the payroll is there any oversight of the classes?
How do the parents know if we are paying for a qualified teacher or student who has little to no experience? Is everyone paid the same fee regardless of experience? Is there after-sales support?
Are there any other parents on here who have used this company? As it has the MumsNet seal of approval, however this is concerning, trustpilot has a lot of bad reviews from staff too.

Gosh sounds awful 😔.

I won't be going to GoStudent because of their impolite customer service. Contract orientated yet unable to answer basic questions such as the termination notice or how a tutor is found to match my sons needs. She jjust kept saying it will be on the documents - I'm looking up the legal bits of that because everything else I buy insist on saying lots before I agree.

After this experience I have searched more - reading mums net comments with all the other usual review sites. I'm reading how poorly regulated tutors are and often not employees of companies that imply they are by "our tutors" etc. Like the Uber contract vs employee issues, it seems your contract isn't as legally protected as those doing poo emoji who are employee's.
(I don't view it as professional but do believe in equal standards and heard far worse to management when our work contracts changed)

But I found a news report from 2021 to how a convicted paedophile was given a tutor contract and identified by a parent simply searching the tutors name then confirming picture when on line. The tutor was banned from teaching after being caught sending pictures of "himself "to a student.

Just volunteering an hour once a week online with a kids group for the last 5 years means I have to do a DBS. I gather it's been routinely recommended for this sort of work for over 20 years and was known as a CRB at first. But in 2021 they didn't have this as standard???

I felt compelled to make a comment because I think good rating I am seeing on other sites are for individual tutors, not actually the company and its misleading.

At first I thought you were posting miffed about pay and contract end but throughout you have shown there are tutors who want the standards enforcing for safeguarding and us paying.

My experience matches what you say. My word of mouth cash in hand tutor for my son ends next month so I hope we are both happier by then.

Thank you for this. We've had lots of problems with them, not with the tutors I might add, they've been lovely, but the infrastructure is awful.

there are a lot of tutoring companies and platforms of varying quality out there. The vast majority employ on a self employed basis. Many allow anyone to sign up - no verification whatsoever of either qualifications or experience. I would urge anyone looking for a tutor to stick with personal recommendations (a local Facebook group will give you plenty to have a look at ) and to only work with qualified teachers with current or recent experience in schools if what you want is to boost exam results. If you are looking for more specialised help for, say, dyslexia then do your homework on the qualifications you want the tutor to have before trying to find one that is suitable.

It is very much a 'buyer beware' market that is growing exponentially what with the mass exodus out of the classroom and the churn of staff in many schools. I would expect to pay a minimum of £25 an hour, if not £30 (I wont' do exam work for less than £30) to the tutor - ask your tutor if you are unsure. Poor quality, inexperienced tutors with little or no experience of the exams cause more problems than they solve. You need someone who knows how to interpret an exam spec and mark scheme correctly - there's a knack to it.

Please be careful before throwing your money away and not getting much to show for it.

Are you cancelling your contract or did you get stuck in it? TrustPilot have loads of people saying they were hounded and had to cancel their bank cards!

Good bunch of questions, none of the answers to which reflect well on GoStudent.

• To the best of my knowledge and my experiences there, there is NO oversight of classes. I was never monitored, recorded, inspected, evaluated, or anything else of that sort. Despite teaching over 600 lessons on the platform to children ranging from 11-18 years old. The only requirement of the tutor was an "up to 200 characters feedback" after each lesson.
• If the parents book a tutor themselves directly through the site (which they now can, though this is a new feature of the site which doesn't work at all well) then they can see the "Tutor Profile", which would outline the qualifications and experience of tutors before they book somebody. If a tutor is assigned by a Programme Manager, you probably won't know until you meet the tutor and ask them.
• I would add, though, that the tutors on the platform (whether qualified teachers or not) are passionate, dedicated, knowledgeable and good at what they do. You'd have to be passionate if you're doing it for 12 Pounds an hour. So rest assured about the quality of the tuition.
• All tutors are paid the same fee, regardless of the student's age, the subject, or the qualification they're aiming for. I gather that GS charge rates which vary according to these factors though, such as higher rates for A Level. But they don't pass those higher rates on to the tutors. Some subject tutors (such as for GCSE Maths) have even just had their standard rates reduced below those of other subjects.
• Finally, TrustPilot reviews are aggressively removed by GoStudent if they don't like them. GS flag the review almost immediately, the reviewer is demanded to provide evidence of who they are, and of course there are no tutors still on the platform who are prepared to do that. Have a look at the TrustPilot statistics on the GoStudent page - it shows how many reviews GS have flagged and removed. Incredible.

Hope some of that helps!

Isn’t that the site that Peter Andre’s Dd used but then failed her GCSE’s ?

I might be confused

We’ve just had a free trial with them and the tutor was absolutely amazing. But I’m so glad I read the reviews before handing them my bank details, they’re absolutely awful. The worst thing about it is the amount of fake reviews that they’re clearly leaving themselves to offset the bad ones so they don’t look anywhere near as dodgy as they actually are. I clicked on the profiles of the first two 5 star reviews, one had left 18 5 star reviews for the company, and the other had left 6. They shouldn’t be allowed to leave more than one per profile. Complete bunch of scam artists

I should add, when I mentioned the tutors leaving lesson feedback in my post above, that leaving feedback is entirely optional for the tutor, and they can leave "five stars" for every lesson if they wish. The tutors grade the lessons themselves. None of this seems to be monitored or checked.

hello,i am also a GoStudent tutor and i wanted to let you know that unless the tutor has it in their profile that they have QTS(qualified teacher status) then you won’t know if they are or not,i’m assuming the company check the QTS but with how much the company is slacking recently i wouldn’t be entirely sure they do check,i can assure you however that some of the tutors who are university students are great if not better tutors as they will have recently been in the same position as some of the children,i still wouldn’t recommend GoStudent tho as they’re just a company with corporate greed and they don’t care about their employees nor do they have people in places of power with experience within the education industry,i would suggest you take your tutoring needs elsewhere,hope this helps??

Very interesting... it's a shame because it's a great idea but very poorly executed.

The Mumsnet seal of approval is bad PR for them given the paedophile, quality and payment issues. I'm on the phone app but can't see a way to contact MumsNet to flag it up for review- any ideas?

There's another convicted paedophile on the site at the moment...

Please confirm you have reported that to the police. Putting it on here is no substitute to reporting properly to keep children safe.

How do you know that? I haven't seen anything...

Yes it's been reported

He was in local newspapers, looking for a tutor and he was listed. He as also barred from working with children.

Just so you know, Go Student contacted me on here and he has been removed from their site.

Total rip off! I paid for 6 sessions and only ever received 2. Tutors kept cancelling and changing the lessons. I contacted Go Student and asked for a refund and they promised to called back but never did. I have emailed countless times and no response.

@SarahMajid - you should write a negative review on trust pilot, I did and they called me immediately.

I am at my wits end, I signed up for 3 years and live in Austria. I thought initially it would be a great support for my bilingual daughter. Tutors are unavailable for long periods, as they tend to be students. I can’t keep swapping tutors as my daughter is only 7 and it takes a while to build up the relationship. I feel completely trapped with the monthly fee and we just want to sever the contract completely. It was a huge mistake not fully understanding the fine print in German. I am investigating whether I was give adequate notice of this type of provision of services contract. There also seems to be no recourse to Go Student when the provision of their services are inadequate.