How CENTURY supports personalised learning, informs planning and reduces tutor workload at McConnell’s Tuition

Seymour McConnell runs McConnell’s Tuition, an online tutoring company providing Maths, English and Science sessions for students from Year 1 to Year 11. Initially operating from a community centre, since the COVID-19 pandemic they have moved entirely online and now tutor pupils across the country. 

What initially prompted you to choose CENTURY for your company?

A friend who teaches personally recommended CENTURY, saying it would work really well with groups and in an online setting. We trialled it and it was incredibly successful, so we’ve been with CENTURY for about three years now.

How do you typically use the CENTURY platform?

Our CENTURY usage is in every single lesson. We use the diagnostics at the start when a student first joins, whether for group or one-to-one sessions. For both our group and 1-1 sessions, the very first session of the academic year is dedicated to diagnostics. Once these are completed, we view the results in the Teacher Dashboard. This allows us to see which pupils are confident with what particular areas of that topic and where learners are either skipping questions or getting them wrong. 

We can’t repeat the curriculum in such a short time, as each week is about one to three hours, so we use the diagnostic results to focus on those areas within class.  

How does CENTURY help with planning and reducing teacher workload?

Once things are completed, we can go on the dashboard and get the analysis question by question. We can then create our own question sets for certain things, or we use a whiteboard through Zoom to discuss a concept. 

With CENTURY, what’s really good as well is the fact that you can have videos. Sometimes, if we’re doing a new topic, we’ll use a video in class and we’ll just pause, rewind, stop and discuss it as we go. This is really important to us because the teachers that work with us work full-time or part-time in colleges and schools. In terms of workload and teaching load, we try to minimise that, because the work they do for us is usually on a weekend or an evening, so it’s additional work and shouldn’t be stressful. The planning is very much taken away and all you need to do is understand what topic you want to deliver, because the resources are already there.

How do you find the process of onboarding and managing student accounts?

At the start of the year I do a bulk upload of students to the platform using a spreadsheet. If there are any problems, CENTURY is always available to help me out. I can also add individual pupils directly, so if I get a new pupil on an evening or a weekend I have the ability to do that myself. Removing pupils is straightforward as well because they can be deactivated from the admin section in the platform.

Does the content library on CENTURY cover all your students’ requirements?

It covers all our needs from Year 2 to GCSEs, but what we really appreciate is the content to help students prepare for SATs. The 11 plus is also really interesting and the content is specifically tailored for those entrance exams. There’s even a new addition of a Financial Maths course. Financial literacy isn’t something that’s really taught in schools outside of a few examples on percentages in terms of interest calculations. It doesn’t cover scenarios like why you’d want a credit card, what’s the best type of card when talking about loans or mortgages, or real-life situations for when they get into the real world. I think the information within that course is going to be really helpful in the future.

What do you and your students like most about CENTURY?

Personally, I like the fact that the setting work is really easy, so you can allocate via the Planner or as an assignment. The new Assignments feature is really intuitive. The video function, as I’ve mentioned before, being able to view a video for absolutely every topic is really great. It reduces planning time significantly.

Students have commented that CENTURY’s interface is really easy to navigate and they like the fact that they can access a range of subjects. They just filter their pathway and their homework is all in one place. We really appreciate that as a company, because we used to use two separate online platforms before we came across CENTURY and this just ties it all up together nicely.

What are your plans for going forward with CENTURY?

We’re more than happy to continue with how things are going, because it makes our lives easier. The idea is about making your lives easier. CENTURY highly contributes to the way we deliver and assess teaching and learning. If the teachers are happy and the pupils are happy, then there are no complaints.

Are you looking to enhance your tuition company with personalised learning and streamlined operations? Book a demo to see how CENTURY can support your tutors and students.

Already a CENTURY customer? Speak to your Account Manager or email support@century.tech to discuss how you can further optimise your use of the platform.