You choose who can unlock you
Tutors can now decide who is able to unlock their contact details.
It is off by default, so nothing changes unless you turn it on. When you do, a parent can no longer pay to unlock you out of the blue. They have to message you first, and the option to pay only opens once you have opened it for that conversation. You will see an "Allow unlocking" button in the thread once you have read what a parent is asking for and you are happy to take it further.
Messaging itself is unchanged. A parent can still write to you, and you can still reply, exactly as before. The setting governs only whether the option to pay the finder's fee is available yet.
You can turn it on under Approve unlocks on your dashboard.
Keeping scams and abuse out of your inbox
A directory is only as good as the trust people place in it. Over the past few weeks we have seen coordinated bursts of spam and phishing aimed at tutors, with new accounts sending near-identical pitches to dozens of tutors at once.
In response, we have added additional layers of security. New parent accounts now confirm a mobile number before they can send a first message, and incoming messages are checked automatically for the signs of a scam or an abusive message. Anything that looks wrong is held for our team to review before it reaches a tutor. Identity-verified tutors are exempt from the phone check, and a genuine parent will not notice any of this.
We have not set out what triggers a check, since the people we are guarding against would read it too. If a real message is ever held by mistake, it reaches a person quickly and we release it.
A faster, clearer profile editor
The profile editor is quicker and smoother to use. Subjects and rates update as soon as you change them, and the bio and qualifications boxes feel more responsive while you type. The level picker now shows the most common levels at the top, so you are not scrolling past a long list to find GCSE or A-level. Publishing is clearer too: if a required field is missing, the editor tells you up front rather than letting you publish and bounce back. And you can now choose to hide the year a qualification was awarded from your public profile, for anyone who would rather not show it.
Filter the directory by review history
The directory now has a "Minimum reviews" filter, so a parent who wants to see only well-established tutors can ask for those with at least ten, twenty or fifty reviews. It counts reviews left on Tutorperch alongside any imported reviews, matching the number shown on the card.
It is a filter, not a ranking change. It does not move anyone up or down the results, it only narrows them to the tutors a parent asked to see. The full list of ranking inputs remains at /how-we-rank.
A longer wait before a review
The wait between paying the finder's fee and being able to leave a review has moved from seven days to thirty. The short window had always been there to rule out a same-day review left before a parent had given the introduction a proper try. A month gives a tutoring arrangement a fairer chance to show what it is before it gets rated.
This is the first step in a larger piece of work on reviews. We think they can be made more useful, both for the parents reading them and for the tutors earning them, and we will have more to say before long.
Accessibility
We ran a full accessibility review of the site this fortnight, against the WCAG 2.2 AA standard, and made the discovery pages easier to use. Tap targets that were too small on a phone are now bigger, text that sat too light is now easier to read, and the whole of a tutor card is reliably tappable again. The homepage and the directory listing had their own pass alongside.
Small things
- Search aliases. Typing "FCE", "Farsi" or other common alternative names into a filter now finds the right subject or qualification instead of coming up empty.
- Improved location filtering. Tutors who teach online or have not set a postcode are no longer wrongly dropped from a location search, and distance now falls back to the centre of an area when an exact postcode area is missing.
- "Recently joined" means recently joined. The sort now orders by the date a tutor first joined, rather than the last time they re-published their profile.
If something is broken, missing or just awkward, let us know in the feedback section of the forum. We read every message.
Robert & Fiona