R&D: Foothold
Dynamic Learning
Pathways Platform
A Social Challenge
The current education model caters to the 'average' student, neglecting those outside the norm. Resources are strained, leaving little support for children with special educational needs (SEN).
Existing provisions are scarce and expensive, often failing to engage or support these children adequately. Efforts focus on meeting minimum academic requirements, neglecting to identify individual skills and goals for lasting development and opportunities.
The Opportunity
Create a human-centric service emphasising early, sustained, and personalised learning for struggling learners.
This platform views learners holistically, addressing academic, professional, and personal aspects to discern strengths, weaknesses, aspirations, and goals. Utilise ML to augment this service, streamlining time-consuming tasks like identifying needed support and proposing optimised learning programs. This approach scales interventions efficiently, ensuring tailored guidance to maximise success.
In Spring Term 2022/23, there were 263,904 suspensions in UK state-funded primary and secondary education, with over 3,000 permanent exclusions.
Around 10% of young people have some form of learning difficulty (1.2 million in the UK) with many more dealing with emotional or behavioural challenges.
A Personal, 1-to-1 Service
Foothold sessions are primarily intended to be conducted in-person, as 1-to-1 sessions, but can be run as video classes when needed or when the learner benefits most.
The stable presence of the learner's 'Connector' and their tutoring and development team is an important aspect of serving the learner's unique needs.
Building the Right Team
Tutors, coaches, and counsellors from around the UK can register with Foothold as contractors, using it as a client-finder and booking platform.
The Foothold engine identifies matching contractors based on location, area(s) of expertise, experience, availability, reliability, and internal performance ratings.
Dynamically Reflowed Pathways
Session performance reviews are submitted by the contractors which feed into Foothold's tracking of a learner's progress. It uses this information to identify whether the learner requires a pathway extension or altering the number or duration of sessions.
The engine proposes a reflowed pathway to the Connector, who can then consult with the learner's team on whether to accept the reflowed pathway or to make additional adjustments.
UK Tutoring & Education Services Market
Global Market Size of Online & E-Learning
Homeschooling as an elective education framework is increasing throughout many countries
9,000,000
Children in the US being homeschooled at some point in their education, with 4,300,000 (5.4%) being homeschooled as their primary form of education.
116,000
As of Spring term 2023, the UK has over 86,000 children in elective home education, a 6.5% increase on Autumn term 2022. The UK has the second highest figures, with over 116,000 being homeschooled at some point in the 2021/22 academic year.
2–8% YoY
Homeschooling is experiencing steady yearly growth rates of 2–8% with significant uptake in Canada, France, Japan, Russia, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Hungary, Kenya, …
