A community space for tutors
Since launch, one of the most common requests in the inbox has been a version of "is there a way to talk to other tutors on the site?" The interest is in a place to compare notes on what is working in the trade, and to ask other tutors about anything from awkward parent situations to which qualifications turn out to be worth the time.
The forum is live at /forum. It has Q&A threads, polls, member profiles, full-text search, accepted answers for questions, and reactions for helpful contributions. It is moderated under the same Code of Conduct as the rest of the platform.
Come and say hello on the release-day thread.
The forum is new and there are likely some rough edges still. We wanted to get it into tutors' hands rather than polish it further in private. Any feedback or feature requests are welcome, either on the forum itself or via /contact.
For the moment the forum is closed to identity-verified, publishable tutors. Parents and members of the public cannot see it, and only a verified tutor can write a thread or a reply. This keeps it free of spam and nuisance advertising.
Whether that is the right long-term shape is an open question. One of the first threads up there is a poll on it.
Our instinct is to open the forum to public reading from a fairly early stage, for a reason connected to First Tutors. Part of what made the First Tutors closure painful for the wider tutoring community was the loss of well over a decade of accumulated knowledge that had lived on the platform. Once a platform shuts down, the discussions it hosted become inaccessible to members and vanish from the broader record.
A publicly-readable, search-indexed Tutorperch forum would mean every conversation on it becomes part of the open web, available long after the conversation itself took place. If Tutorperch were to disappear in 20 years, those discussions would still be on file for whoever came looking.
Some discussions are better held in private, though. The poll therefore has three options:
- keep the forum private as it stands;
- open it publicly in full;
- or split it into a public main section and a tutors-only private sub-forum.
The poll is in Announcements: A question on forum visibility.
In the three weeks since Tutorperch launched, more than 25 of the features that have shipped were direct requests from tutors, sent in by email or via the contact form. The forum gives that conversation a more visible home alongside those channels, and is where we will be paying closest attention to feature requests from this point on.
Profile insights, free for every published tutor
Tutoring platforms typically gate profile analytics behind a paid subscription. First Tutors had a premium subscription for this; several UK competitors still do. The equivalent dashboard has shipped on Tutorperch this week as a standard feature for every published tutor, at /me/insights.
The dashboard covers:
- A headline chart of profile views, conversations or unlocks over time, alongside KPI tiles for each. Clicking a tile switches the chart to that metric.
- The full funnel from search-result impression through to a paying parent, with the drop-off rate at each stage.
- Organic search performance: queries the profile is appearing on in Google and Bing, alongside position and click-through rate. The data is pulled directly from the search engines.
- A reviews split showing native Tutorperch reviews alongside imported First Tutors reviews, with an effective rating that accounts for the volume of evidence behind it.
- Messaging health: reply rate, median time to first reply on a new thread, and the count of threads currently awaiting a tutor response.
- Action callouts at the top of the page for items needing attention: a photo still in the review queue, a safeguarding check approaching expiry, that sort of thing.
A note on the organic search section. Tutorperch has only been live for a fortnight, and Google takes considerably longer than that to begin ranking pages from a new website in positions where parents will encounter them. For now this panel will look thin across the board. We can chip away at the lag from our side, but a chunk of it is simply Google taking time to learn the site exists.
A note on the messaging-health panel. The numbers are there so each tutor can think about responsiveness on their own terms. Response time has no effect on search ranking and Tutorperch is not grading anyone on it — the aim is a working environment that stays healthy for every professional using the site. The full list of ranking inputs remains at /how-we-rank.
Imported reviews showing in search results
Until this week, a tutor's imported First Tutors reviews only appeared on their profile page. A parent skimming a directory listing or a subject hub had no way to tell which tutors had a First Tutors review history without clicking through.
From this week, an "N from First Tutors" chip shows on every tutor card so parents can see at a glance which tutors have imported reviews. The chip does not feed into the search ranking algorithm.
Tutors who want to import or refresh their First Tutors review history can do so at /me/external-reviews/firsttutor/import.
A better parent experience
The previous development update concentrated on the tutor side of the platform: the profile editor, the offerings flow, the search ranking and so on. This batch has gone the other way. More than half of Tutorperch's visitors arrive on a phone, and those visitors include parents looking for a tutor. The parent-facing routes were due an equivalent overhaul.
The compose form no longer asks a parent to create an account before sending. The first message is now composed inline alongside the parent's name and email; a single verification click then drops them straight into the conversation thread. The previous flow asked for account creation before a single line of text could be sent, which was costing introductions that ought to have gone through.
The unlock fee can now also be paid before signing in. The Stripe checkout page collects and verifies the parent's email itself, and the Tutorperch account is established afterwards from the receipt by magic link.
Underneath all of this there has been a wider mobile rework. The profile page, the directory listing, the filter pickers and the unlock flow have all been restructured to work properly on a phone.
An installable app
Tutorperch can now be installed as an app on a phone or desktop browser. It shipped a few days ago and has come up in the inbox a handful of times since.
We built it for push notifications. Once those arrive, a tutor will get a buzz on their phone the moment a parent unlocks their contact details or replies in a thread, instead of waiting on email.
Push is not quite ready yet. We are still working out the default opt-ins so the first wave of notifications is useful rather than overwhelming. A separate post will follow when the feature is live.
Installing is optional. The site works as a website either way.
Keeping Tutorperch cheap to run
Tutorperch's revenue model is intentionally narrow. The parent pays a one-off finder's fee on each unlock, and a tutor pays a one-off verification fee at sign-up. Beyond that Tutorperch takes no commission on what a tutor earns after the introduction. Listing a profile and exchanging messages are free, as is the analytics dashboard described above.
That only works financially if the platform itself is cheap to run. A good chunk of the engineering hours in this batch went into making the site faster and cheaper to serve. Profile pages in particular load noticeably quicker as a result.
In other news
Alongside the platform work, Fiona has published the first piece of original research from Tutorperch: the UK Private Tutoring Rate Report 2026. It draws on an analysis of 24,183 UK tutor profiles preserved in the First Tutors archive, broken down by subject, level, region and reputation.
The headline finding was that the word "confidence" appears in parent reviews 27 times more often than the phrase "grade improvement".
The report also includes an interactive rate explorer, a borough-level choropleth of London, the rate time-series since 2018, and the open dataset behind the analysis.
If anything on the site is broken, or there is feedback worth our hearing, get in touch. We read every message.
— Robert & Fiona