Online tutoring service aiming to help families who can't afford grinds to scale up operations

An online tutoring service, aiming to “level the playing field” for families who cannot afford grinds, is to put €40,000 in financial backing towards scaling up its operations.

An online tutoring service, aiming to “level the playing field” for families who cannot afford grinds, is to put €40,000 in financial backing towards scaling up its operations.

Among the winners of this year’s Social Entrepreneurs Ireland (SEI) Awards is 'jumpAgrade', an online platform offering weekly tutoring by registered teachers to secondary school students.

The platform puts an emphasis on making tutoring more equitable for all students, regardless of their family's circumstances, according to David Neville, who created the service with fellow University of Limerick (UL) graduate Pádraic Hogan.

"We are proud of what we have built and we think it will help level the playing field for those who may not be able to afford grinds,” he said.

We didn’t want to develop a grinds programme with all of the bells and whistles that was just accessible for one percent of families.

Mr Hogan said: "Being an SEI Awardee further validates jumpAgrade’s efforts and will help us to be able to scale our impact in order to help students, irrespective of their ability, location or family background, to progress on to third level education or skilled work.”

The two friends originally were interested in solving some of the common challenges associated with grinds, such as finding the right teacher, according to Mr Neville.

“But as we were working on it, we started to see how big a problem the grinds culture we have here is for people who can’t afford them.”

During their first year in operation, Mr Neville and Mr Hogan were approached by the Limerick Youth Service (LYS), an organisation in Limerick city working with a number of disadvantaged communities.

“They had a group of young people who needed extra support after school but their families couldn’t afford grinds and the LYS couldn’t find extra teachers to support them.”

The bulk of costs associated with jumpAgrade goes towards its teachers, he added.

“We knew that we couldn’t pass on those costs to those families the youth service had brought to us. However, we were able to get Northern Trust in Limerick to come onboard as a corporate sponsor and they agreed to cover their use of the service."

Through further corporate sponsorships, the service has been rolled out for free to more youth clubs as well as to access programmes in third level institutes. This includes University College Cork and Dublin City University.

According to Mr Neville, students at eight DEIS schools using jumpAgrade saw their grades improve on average by 11.5% after 12 weeks of using the service.

A further 85% of students also reported feeling more confident in the subject they received their online grind in.

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