Kip McGrath operations manager Ms Emma Dent explains how the tutoring franchise is reaching students in regional and isolated locations, including Karratha in WA and Coober Pedy in SA, with tutoring opportunities in locations where previously there was none.
Ms Emma Dent has been part of Kip McGrath for almost 15 years, previously working as a qualified tutor and franchisee and now overseeing operations for the organisation’s corporate division in Australia and New Zealand, including an online hub in Karratha in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
“Karratha is not somewhere where we could physically operate a tutoring centre – from an economic point of view, it wouldn’t be sustainable. However, an online service makes tutoring accessible, not only to people in that area, but also to people who are on cattle stations further north, who don’t necessarily go to school, but do School of the Air and travel into school once a month in the Karratha region,” Ms Dent says.
Kip McGrath Education Centres is a global franchise business that offers tutors the opportunity to own a tutoring centre. Founded in 1976 by two Australian school teachers, Kip and Dug McGrath, the network has grown to 500 centres worldwide. It has 150 centres across Australia and New Zealand, offering both online and in-person tuition in maths and English.
Kip McGrath’s online students are treated the same as in-centre; the organisation strives to make them as involved as possible and feel part of the centre. Ms Dent says it does this in several ways.
“One of the ways we do this is award them ‘student of the week’ on our social media platforms when appropriate. We also mail out info packs, send the ‘Kip mail’ that is handwritten, and send birthday and anniversary cards,” she says.
“Our online students have as much to do with the centre as the in-centre students, to make them feel part of the Kip community.”
In the same way the organisation operates if a student lives near an in-centre location, students in regional and isolated locations are offered a comprehensive free initial assessment online.
“We would rather do a free assessment and let a parent know that their child doesn’t require tuition than not offer a free assessment. We’re empowering parents, and that’s what the free assessment is about; it’s empowering parents to know where their child’s strengths and weaknesses are within the curriculum. We also need that information to design a program for them that’s completely personalised,” Ms Dent says.
“We use the same technology for a one-on-one online comprehensive assessment that a student would use during an in-centre assessment. This helps to ease them in so we are not only settling them into this idea of tuition, but we’re showing them our own fully designed platform where students are always live with a tutor via webcam and microphone, and our interactive technology, which includes chat functions and interactive whiteboards – all different ways tutors can communicate with online students.”
She says for students who don’t necessarily want the face-to-face camera aspect at certain times, or don’t always want to interact verbally, they can use the chat function to speak to their tutor. Some families can be worried about doing online learning, but it is often smooth sailing, with only the occasional disruption.
“Technology is always going to be one of those fickle things where you can be disrupted by an internet outage. Cyclone season in Karratha causes some issues when the NBN gets filled with water. But it is a stable platform and versatile because there’s so many different ways that we can do things, there’s so many different workarounds,” Ms Dent says.
“Kip McGrath also have a team of customer service agents who help us to talk parents through the basics of resetting the cache and those types of tech-related issues. We’re proactive in that aspect.”
Ms Dent is not daunted by the occasional technical disruption – she was working as a franchisee at the beginning of the COVID pandemic and was involved in pivoting the whole organisation and 500 students online, almost overnight.
She has also witnessed many triumphs in Kip McGrath’s online student community.
“We had a student living on a remote cattle station who had a lot of life experience. He could not read a word on the page, but he could fly a helicopter, no problem. He was doing School of the Air but his siblings were coping better with that than he was. He graduated from Kip McGrath being able to read. The one hour a week of face-to-face tutoring made an amazing difference for him,” Ms Dent says.
“We also have a kindergarten student who participates in online tutoring with the help of a parent, all the way up to a Year 12 student in Coober Pedy who has just graduated with us, who valued the last few lessons that she had with her tutor and wanted to do as much as she could because it was a safe space for her.”
The organisation has more than 350 remotely based students in New South Wales alone, and Ms Dent’s team conducts more than 150 online assessments a week across Australia and New Zealand. Franchisee hubs in a physical location are also supported by the organisation’s online service.
“Our online service is not only for people who are remote, but also for time-poor parents who might live near a Kip McGrath centre. Our online service can substantially reduce their travel time. A lot of our parents use our online portal for the convenience it offers,” Ms Dent says.
She says regionally-located parents are more accustomed to online schooling and accessing services remotely than metropolitan-based parents.
“Because of the remoteness of a lot of our students, they don’t necessarily go to school, or they don’t go to school every single day, and something like our online system is giving them the same tutor every week at the same time, and that consistency then builds a bond and relationship, and that’s a huge part of what we want to do at Kip McGrath.”
For more information, visit Kip McGrath’s website.
