Since launch the most common concern in our inbox has been a version of the same one: "I had years on First Tutors and dozens of reviews, and now they're gone. Is there anything I can do?"
A while ago we put up a template GDPR data-access request you can send to the First Tutors administrators, asking for your contact list and reviews back. That is still the cleanest legal path and we recommend everyone send one.
But weeks in, no response has come back yet to any tutor we've heard from, and the platform needs a way forward now. Tutorperch now holds its own archive of First Tutors profiles, and there is a way to claim yours.
What we built
Since launch we have been debating the best way to do this. The risks are real. Invented reviews would skew search results. Cherry-picked five-stars would destroy the meaning of an average. Copyright in the review text belongs to the reviewer, not the tutor. Shipping the wrong design would hurt every honest tutor on the platform. We have settled on what we believe is a fair system, both for the tutors recovering their history and for the parents reading the result.
The archive itself was built by crawling two of the largest public archives of the open web: the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and Common Crawl. Together they hold 19,631 First Tutors profiles with 37,724 reviews across them, captured between 2011 and 2026. A careful HTML parser handles the various layouts First Tutors used across that 15-year span.
It is the most exhaustive set of verifiable First Tutors reviews available anywhere on the open web today. Gaps remain, and the GDPR data-access channel below is how we'll fill them in over time.
How it works
The wizard is live at /me/external-reviews/firsttutor. To use it you need a Tutorperch account with identity verification complete (£3 one-off Stripe Identity check).
- Sign in, then open the First Tutors card in your dashboard.
- Search the archive by first name, by town, or by old First Tutors URL.
- If a profile matches you, you can see the full page we recovered: your photo, bio, subjects, qualifications, and every review.
- Confirm it's yours. Your First Tutors photo is shown next to your Tutorperch identity-verified photo so admin can see we have the right person.
- An admin reviews the claim, usually within a day.
- Your imported reviews appear on your profile under a "Reviews from First Tutors" block.
If you don't have your old First Tutors URL to hand, a Google search for "First Tutors profile" plus your name should surface your old profile in the results. Click through and copy the address from your browser bar. Searching by first name in the wizard is usually quicker, though.
How this stays fair
A few principles, all important:
- Imported reviews live in a separate block on your profile. They are not interleaved with reviews earned on Tutorperch, and the two have their own counts and averages. A parent reading your page sees both, clearly labelled.
- Imported reviews do not feed the search ranking. A tutor with five native Tutorperch reviews still outranks a tutor with thirty First Tutors imports. The on-platform review system is the credibility signal Tutorperch ranks on, and importing doesn't shortcut that.
- All-or-nothing per profile. You can't pick the five-star reviews and leave the two-star ones behind. Bringing your reviews across means bringing the whole picture across.
- Admin reviews every claim. Identity-verified profile in hand, photo match in front of them, admin signs off case by case.
What we won't do
We won't accept evidence a tutor could fabricate. Screenshots and downloadable PDFs are trivially fakeable, and asking admin to guess what's been edited and what hasn't would be unfair to every honest tutor on the platform.
Crawling the Internet Archive and Common Crawl works precisely because those archives are tamper-proof. The pages preserved there were captured live from First Tutors over many years, not submitted by tutors after the fact. We can be confident every review is real because every review was visible on First Tutors at the time it was archived. That is the line we're drawing.
If you can't find your profile
Some profiles will be missing. Common Crawl and Wayback don't hold every First Tutors page that ever existed; they hold the ones their crawlers visited. A profile with low traffic, or one created in the last year or two, is less likely to be in the archive than one with a longer history. There may also be a profile that's there but missing the newest reviews.
There is still hope, on two paths:
- The GDPR data-access request remains live. If you haven't sent one yet, the template on /first-tutors-closing still works. First Tutors administrators are legally obliged to return your data; the responses are slow but they do come.
- A second import path is coming for when your GDPR response arrives. Once a handful of tutors share what First Tutors actually sends back, in whatever shape it arrives, we'll design a way to import those reviews too as an additional step alongside the archive search.
What we're still figuring out
A few questions the community will help shape:
- Should imported reviews ever feed the search ranking? Today they don't, and that's the safe default. Whether they should, and on what terms, is the kind of decision we'd rather take openly than make quietly. Tell us what you think.
- Should imports be available from platforms other than First Tutors? Tutorful, Superprof, Tutor Hunt, MyTutor and The Tutor Pages are all still alive, which makes the verification problem a different one. We haven't decided whether to build for those cases and welcome arguments either way.
If you've got a view, get in touch. We're reading every message.
— Robert & Fiona