# StudyPro: full text StudyPro turns the teaching material your tutoring centre has already built into your own branded learning platform. Students practise your worksheets at home, everything is marked instantly, and every parent gets a fortnightly report with your logo on it. ## Frequently asked questions ### What it is **What does the platform actually do?** You upload the teaching material your centre already uses. We convert it into practice sets, marked questions, worked solutions and explanations, structured the way you teach it. Your students work through it at home on their phones, it marks itself, and every parent gets a fortnightly report with your logo on it. It runs on your own web address under your own brand. **Where does the content come from?** There isn't any. It's yours. Upload your Year 6 folder and that's what's in there. Nothing appears in your platform that didn't come from a page you uploaded, and you approve everything before a student sees it. **Does this replace my tutors?** No. It doesn't touch your sessions. It covers the other six days: the homework you already set, marked automatically instead of by you at 10pm, and a report to the parent that has your tutor's name on it, not ours. **Won't they just use the platform and stop coming in?** No, and it is built so they can't. Nothing leaves the platform: no downloads, no printing, no screenshots, for anyone, and access ends the day a student leaves your class. What they get at home is your homework, marked, with help when they are stuck. What they get on Tuesday is you. One is the reason the other works. **Is it AI?** Part of it is, and it works under one rule: it only ever works from your material. It can't invent a question, can't answer from anywhere but your pages, and can't publish anything without your approval. When a student is stuck at 9pm, the explanation they get cites the worksheet it came from. **Who is it for?** Owner-operators of tutoring centres and coaching colleges in Australia and New Zealand with somewhere between 40 and a few hundred enrolled students, who have built their own material over the years. If your material lives in a shared drive or a filing cabinet with a scanner next to it, you're who we built this for. **Who is it not for?** Centres where each tutor makes their own material from scratch every week, because there's nothing central to convert yet. Franchisees who can only teach franchisor-supplied material, unless head office is at the table. And online tutoring marketplaces, who compete with our customers. ### Your material **What formats can I upload?** PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint, spreadsheets of questions, and scans of paper worksheets. Typed documents and clean scans convert best. Phone photos taken at an angle and handwriting usually don't, and we tell you that up front rather than converting badly. **My material is all on paper. Is that a problem?** Not if there's a scanner nearby. Most centres start with one subject or one year level, scan their best material, and go from there. If you'd rather post us the folder, there's a prep service where we scan, sort and curate it for you. **How long does conversion take?** One class's material takes about five business days. A whole centre's takes ten to fifteen. Poor scans add time, and we'll ask for re-scans early rather than late. **What if a converted question is wrong?** First, it can't reach a student until you've approved it. Second, every item shows the page it came from, so you can see in one click whether the error is in the conversion or in the original worksheet. Nine times in ten it's the worksheet, and finding it is a gift. If it's ours, we fix it that day. **Do you check my pedagogy or my answers?** No. It's your material, and that's the point. Where your worksheet gives an answer, we check that ours matches it and flag any mismatch for you. We don't second-guess your difficulty level or your sequence. **Does it work for English, essays and written answers, or just maths?** Both. Multiple choice, short answer and numeric questions are marked instantly against your key. Extended responses are marked against the criteria in your material, with the student's work shown to the tutor for a final call. Comprehension passages, grammar and vocabulary convert well. ### Ownership and privacy **Who owns what I upload?** You do. We claim no rights to your material or anything derived from it. We never reuse it, never redistribute it, and never use it to train any model. That's in the agreement, not just the sales pitch. **Could another centre ever see my material?** No. Your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's. Your content, your students and your reports are never shared with, visible to, or reused for another centre. Your material is your business. **Do you train AI on my content?** No. Not on your material, not on your students' answers, not in anonymised form. We make the same commitment in our own contracts with the providers we use. **Will you contact my parents?** Never. We don't hold their details for any purpose other than sending the reports you approve, from your address, with your name on them. Your parents never see our name. **What happens if I leave?** Your own originals never left your drive. You uploaded copies of them, and what we built from those copies lives on the platform. When you stop, access ends at the end of the term you have paid for, and we delete our copies within 30 days and confirm it in writing. **What student information do you hold?** As little as possible. A centre can run on first name, initial and a class. We don't need dates of birth or student email addresses. Less data held means less risk for you and shorter answers to every privacy question. ### Pricing **Do you charge per student?** No. We price on the size of your centre, in three bands, so you can put every student on it without thinking about the bill. Charging you per student to use your own material would be a strange thing to do, and it would make you ration the one thing that makes this work. **What's included in the price?** Everything. Unlimited uploads, conversion, instant marking with worked solutions, the explanation when a student is stuck, audio narration of your notes, classes and assignments, the tutor dashboard, unlimited tutor logins, the fortnightly branded parent report, your branding on your own web address, isolation from other centres, and approve-before-publish. If it's in the walkthrough, it's in every plan. **Why is there a setup fee?** Because converting your material is real work that happens once, and because a centre that has paid to have its material converted rosters it into Term 1. The pilot fee comes off it in full. **Is there a discount?** Pay annually and get two months free. We don't discount the setup fee and we don't run sales. **Is there a free tier or a free trial?** No. There's a paid pilot: one class, one term, your material, your branding, credited in full against setup if you continue. A pilot nobody has paid for is a pilot nobody runs, and you'd learn nothing from it. **How is New Zealand priced?** In New Zealand dollars, at a published rate reviewed quarterly, with GST at 15% added at invoice. You should never have to convert a price in your head. ### The pilot **How does the pilot work?** You pick one class of 15 to 40 students and send us that class's material: one subject at one year level, a term's worth. We convert it, brand the platform to you, and run it for ten weeks aligned to a school term. Parent reports go out from week two. At week ten you get a written read-out of who used it, what moved, and what the parents opened. **What does the pilot cost?** $1,500 plus GST, paid at the start. It's credited in full against your setup fee if you continue. If you don't, you keep the read-out and you keep your material. **What do I need to do during the pilot?** Send the material within a week of signing, tell the parents it's happening, and have one tutor own it and set work every week. Thirty minutes of onboarding with whoever teaches that class. If a pilot isn't run, it produces a no that teaches nobody anything. **Does the pilot roll into a contract automatically?** No. At week ten you decide, in a meeting, with the numbers in front of you. Nothing renews silently. ### Parents and students **What does a parent receive?** Every fortnight, a report with your logo, from your address: what their child worked on, how much, what improved in plain words, and what's next. You can edit it before it sends or let it go automatically. **Do students need an app?** No. It works in the browser on any phone, tablet or laptop, at your web address. Nothing to install, nothing for a parent to approve in an app store. **Can students message each other or a tutor through it?** Students can't message each other, and there are no public profiles. A centre can switch on tutor-to-student messages for its own tutors; it's off by default and the centre controls it. Your child-safety answer stays simple. **I'm a parent. My centre doesn't offer this. What do I do?** Ask them. Most centres have years of excellent material and have never had a way to put it to work between lessons. There's a page on this site written for exactly that conversation, with a message you can copy. ### Technical and compliance **Where is the data hosted?** In Australia, in an isolated space for your centre. New Zealand centres are hosted in Australia too, which keeps the platform within the Australian privacy regime and inside a working-day timezone. **Do I need a Statutory Education Licence?** If you copy from published textbooks, you should hold one regardless of us. The licence covers tutoring organisations, not just schools. We ask about it at upload, and each document records its rights basis. In New Zealand the licence regime is different and a for-profit centre generally needs a CLNZ business licence. Confirm your position with your own adviser. **Does it work with my scheduling or billing software?** It doesn't overlap with it. Keep TutorCruncher, Teachworks or whatever you use for rosters and invoices. We're the part with your teaching material in it. Student lists can be imported from a spreadsheet. **Can I use it across two campuses?** Yes. Same material, separate classes and reporting per site, and an owner view across both. Additional campuses are priced per site. **Is there an export?** No. It is a hosted service and nothing downloads from it, for a student or for you. That is the same rule that stops a student walking off with your worksheets. What protects you is that you never gave up your originals: you uploaded copies and kept the folder. If you leave, access ends and we delete our copies within 30 days, confirmed in writing. ## Platform features ### Upload and convert https://studypro.com.au/platform/upload-and-convert/ Your filing cabinet, uploaded. Your practice sets, out the other side. Drop in the PDFs, Word files and scans you already teach from. They come back as practice sets, marked questions, worked solutions and explanations, structured in your folder names, not ours. #### What goes in A folder is enough. Most centres start with one subject or one year level: their best material, not their biggest drawer. Typed documents, clean PDFs, decent scans and spreadsheets of questions all convert well. Phone photos taken at an angle and handwriting usually don't, and we say so at upload rather than after. Each document gets a fidelity score before anything else happens. A clean worksheet scores in the high nineties. A tired scan scores lower and gets flagged for a re-scan of the pages that need it. Nothing below the line is silently accepted. #### What comes out Practice questions in the same order as your worksheet, marked against your answer key. A worked solution for every question. Short explanations of the method, drawn from your notes. Flashcards from your rule boxes. Timed sets from your practice papers. All of it tagged to the topic and the page it came from. The structure is yours. If your drive says Year 6 Selective, Week 3, Ratios, that's what your tutors and students see. We don't force your material into someone else's syllabus. #### The rule we don't break Nothing appears in your platform that didn't come from your material. Every generated item cites its source document and page. An item that can't be traced to a page is rejected before you ever see it. When a question looks wrong, you click through to the worksheet and see where it came from, which is a stronger position than any content library can offer. **Is there a limit on how much material I can convert?** No. Setup converts everything you currently teach, on every plan. Adding a course later is $500 and a subject $150, one-off. Unusually large archives are quoted. **Can I upload textbook pages?** Yes, if you hold the rights to copy them. Each document records its rights basis at upload: your own, licensed, or covered by a Statutory Education Licence. In New Zealand the licence regime is different, and self-authored material is the safer bet. **What about diagrams and images?** Diagrams, graphs and images are captured with the question they belong to. Maths-heavy material goes through a specialist step so formulae come out as formulae, not as garbled text. ### Approve before publish https://studypro.com.au/platform/approve-before-publish/ Nothing reaches a student until you've said yes. Everything made from your material lands in an approval queue with the page it came from. You approve it, edit it, or throw it out. Then it publishes. Not before. #### Why this exists The moment something goes to a student with your logo on it, it's yours. So you should see it first. That isn't a courtesy, it's how authorship stays where it belongs. When a parent asks why a question was worded a certain way, the answer is on your screen, with the worksheet it came from beside it. Owners visibly relax at this step in a walkthrough. It's the point where the platform stops being an AI tool and becomes their material, organised. #### How it works Each converted document produces a batch: questions, solutions, explanations, flashcards. Every item shows its source page and, where your worksheet had an answer key, whether our answer matches it. Mismatches are flagged in red for you to resolve. Usually the worksheet is the one that's wrong, and now you know. Approve in bulk when a batch is clean. Edit the wording of anything you'd phrase differently. Bin what you don't want. Publish when you're ready. A tutor with approval rights can do this for their own classes if you'd rather delegate. **Do I have to approve every single item?** No. Clean batches can be approved in one click. Most owners spot-check the first few documents closely, then approve in bulk once they trust the conversion of their own material. **What if I want to change a question?** Edit it in the queue. Your edit is what publishes, and the item keeps its link to the original page for reference. **Can a student ever see something I haven't approved?** No. Unpublished items are invisible to students by design, not by setting. ### Classes and assignments https://studypro.com.au/platform/classes-and-assignments/ Class just finished. Set the week's work before you've packed up. Pick the class, pick the topic or the timed set, pick the due date. That's the week's homework for the whole cohort, from your material, without a photocopier. #### Classes that match your roster Year 6 Selective, Tuesday 4pm. Year 9 Maths, Saturday 10am. Classes are named the way you say them, with the students who are actually in them. Import from a spreadsheet, or invite students with a class code so they land in the right place on their own. Tutors see only their classes. The owner sees everything. A student in two classes sees both. #### Assignments, timed sets and revision Assign a topic from your material with a due date, and every student in the class gets it on their phone. Assign a timed practice paper for exam season. Assign a revision set built from what the class got wrong last month. Repeat an assignment next term with one click. Students see what's due, what's late and what's done. You see the same thing across the class on Monday morning. **Can I assign different work to different students in the same class?** Yes. Assign to the class, then adjust for individuals, or assign to a small group within the class. Extension sets and catch-up sets are common. **Do students need to be enrolled one at a time?** No. Upload a spreadsheet or share a class code. A class of 30 takes a minute. ### Instant marking and worked solutions https://studypro.com.au/platform/instant-marking/ Marked the moment they finish. Your Sunday night comes back. Every question is marked against your answer key as soon as the student submits, with a worked solution drawn from your material. Nothing waits for you. #### What gets marked automatically Multiple choice, short answer, numeric and fill-in-the-gap questions are marked instantly against the answers in your material. Fractions, decimals and equivalent forms are recognised, so 1 3/20 and 23/20 both score. Units are checked where your key specifies them. Extended responses and essays are assessed against the criteria in your material and shown to the tutor with a suggested mark, so the final call stays with a person who knows the student. #### The worked solution A wrong answer gets a worked solution straight away, not a red cross and silence. The solution follows the method in your notes, in the order you teach it, so it reinforces what happened in the room rather than contradicting it. A right answer gets the solution too. Students who got it right by luck learn the method; students who got it right on purpose move on. **What if my worksheet doesn't have an answer key?** We generate solutions from the question and your notes, and flag them for your review before publishing. Where a key exists, ours must match it. **Can a tutor overrule a mark?** Yes, on any question, with a note the student can see. ### Help when they're stuck https://studypro.com.au/platform/stuck-at-9pm/ Stuck at 9pm. An explanation, instead of closing the book. Right now that student closes the book and turns up Tuesday not having done it. On the platform they tap once and get an explanation drawn from your worksheet, with the page it came from. #### How it stays honest The explanation is built from your material and nothing else. It can't answer from the open internet, can't invent a method you don't teach, and can't be talked into doing the homework for the student. If your material doesn't cover something, it says so and suggests asking the tutor on Tuesday. Every explanation cites the document and page it drew from. A student, a parent or a tutor can check it against the original in one tap. #### Guided, not given The first response is a hint about the method. The second is a worked example from your notes with different numbers. The third is the full solution. Most students never need the third, and the tutor can see how many hints each student used. It isn't a chatbot and it isn't a tutor. It's your worksheet, explained the way you'd explain it, available at 9pm. **Can a student just ask it for the answer?** They can ask. It gives a hint first, then a worked example, then the solution, and the tutor sees how many steps they used. It won't write an essay or do a whole set. **What if my material doesn't explain something?** It says so, and suggests bringing it to the next session. It never fills a gap from outside your material. ### Tutor dashboard https://studypro.com.au/platform/tutor-dashboard/ Before anyone walks in, you know what Tuesday's lesson is. Who did the work, who didn't, and which topic eight of twelve missed. The class heatmap tells you in ten seconds what used to take a Sunday of marking to find out. #### The class view A grid of students against topics, coloured by how they went. Strong, ok, weak, not attempted. One glance shows the topic the class struggled with and the two students who didn't open it. That's your Tuesday lesson and your two phone calls, and you knew on Monday. Click a cell to see the student's actual answers and how many hints they used. Click a topic to see the questions the class got wrong most, with your worksheet beside them. #### The owner view Across every class and every tutor: completion rates, topics under pressure, students who've gone quiet for two weeks, and the parent reports due this Friday. A second campus shows up as another column, not another login. Casual tutors come and go. The material, the results and the parent relationship stay with the centre, in one place, whoever is rostered. **How many tutor logins do I get?** Unlimited on every plan. Every tutor gets their own login, casuals included, and nobody shares a password. **Can tutors see other tutors' classes?** Only if you say so. By default a tutor sees their own classes and the owner sees everything. ### Parent reports https://studypro.com.au/platform/parent-reports/ A parent who can't see progress assumes there isn't any. Every fortnight, each parent gets a one-page report with your logo, from your address: what their child worked on, how much, what improved in plain words, and what's next. It's the reason they re-enrol in Term 4. #### What's in it Sets completed out of sets assigned. Questions attempted and time on task. Accuracy by topic, before and after, so improvement is visible rather than claimed. A two-sentence summary in plain English that names the skill and the class where it was taught. What's next. Signed by the tutor or the owner. No jargon, no dashboards, no login. A parent reads it on their phone in forty seconds and forwards it to the other parent. #### Your name on it, not ours The report carries your logo, your colours and your tutor's name, and it comes from your email address. Your parents never see our name and we never hold their details for any other purpose. It's your relationship. We just make the proof. Review each report before it sends, edit the summary in your own words, or let them go automatically. Most owners read the first fortnight's closely and then trust them. #### Why fortnightly Weekly is noise and monthly is forgotten. Every second Friday is often enough that a parent sees a pattern across a term, and rare enough that each one gets opened. By Term 4 a parent has seen roughly twenty of them. That is a very different re-enrolment conversation from the one where they've seen nothing. **Can parents reply?** Yes, to you. The report comes from your address, so replies land in your inbox, not ours. **What if a student did nothing that fortnight?** The report says so, gently, and names what's due. Owners tell us that report gets the fastest replies of all. **Do parents get a login?** No. There's nothing to log in to. The report is the product. ### Your brand, your domain https://studypro.com.au/platform/your-brand-your-domain/ Your logo, your colours, your web address. Nothing of ours anywhere. Students sign in at your address and see your name. Parents get reports from your email. Your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's. To everyone who matters, it's yours, because it is. #### What's branded The web address (learn.yourcentre.com.au or whatever you choose). The sign-in page. Every screen a student or tutor sees. The parent report, down to the signature. The email the reports come from. Your logo, your primary colour, your name. We're not on any of it. Ask us what your centre's colour is and we'll change it live in the walkthrough. Ten seconds, and it stops being a demo. #### Isolated from every other centre Your material, your students and your reports sit in a space that is separated from every other centre's. Nothing you upload is shown to, shared with, or reused for anyone else, and nothing is ever used to train a model. That is written into the agreement, not left to a setting. Everything is hosted in Australia. Nothing downloads from the platform, for a student or for you, and if you leave we delete our copies and confirm it in writing. **Do I need to own a domain?** Most centres already do. We set up a subdomain on it, like learn.yourcentre.com.au. If you don't have one we'll help you register one in your name. **Can a parent tell it's not built by us?** There is nothing to tell. No logo, no link, no footer, no email. The only name on it is yours. ## Solutions ### Tutoring centres https://studypro.com.au/for/tutoring-centres/ You've built fifteen years of material. It's doing nothing between Tuesdays. Your worksheets, notes and practice papers are the thing that makes you different from the centre down the road. They live in a drawer. We turn them into your own learning platform, with your name on it, and a report to every parent every fortnight. - Term 4 is the killer: Exams finish, the holidays hit, and a share of your students quietly don't come back. They didn't leave because your teaching was bad. Nothing happened between sessions and their parents couldn't see progress. - Nothing happens in the six days: Ninety minutes with you. Then six days of nothing, or a photocopied sheet that comes back half done and unmarked. - The parent can't see the work: They pay every term. They judge you on a school report you didn't write. A parent who can't see progress assumes there isn't any. - Sunday night is marking: You're the owner, the principal, and the person marking last week's worksheets at 10pm. A good fit when: - You have material worth converting: A shared drive, or a filing cabinet with a scanner nearby. Three years or more of it. - You teach and you decide: Owner-operators who are in the room and can say yes without a committee. - Forty to a few hundred students: Small enough that every parent matters, big enough that Sunday marking hurts. **We use a scheduling tool already. Does this replace it?** No. Keep it. Rosters, invoices and bookings stay where they are. We're the part with your teaching material in it. The two don't overlap. **My tutors are mostly university students. Will they use it?** They set work in three clicks and read a heatmap. In our experience the tutor's favourite moment is Monday morning, when they know what the class got wrong before anyone walks in. ### Coaching colleges https://studypro.com.au/for/coaching-colleges/ One program. Twenty classes. Every tutor teaching it the same way. A coaching college lives or dies on consistency. Your program is the asset; the roster changes every term. Put the program on a platform and every class runs from the same material, marked the same way, reported to every parent the same fortnight. - Quality varies by who's rostered: A great Saturday tutor and an average Thursday one teach the same year level from the same folder and get different results, and the parents notice. - Term tests are a production: Printing, invigilating, marking, collating, sending. A fortnight of admin for one data point. - Parents compare you to the college across the road: And the college across the road sends nothing either, so it comes down to word of mouth and price. - Growth means more photocopying: A second site doubles the paper and halves the consistency. A good fit when: - A written program: Year-level sequences, weekly sets, term tests, answer keys. The more structured, the faster it converts. - Several tutors, several classes: The dashboard earns its keep from about five classes up. - A principal who owns the program: Someone to approve the conversion and set the standard once. **Can different tutors approve their own classes' material?** Yes, if you give them approval rights. Most colleges keep approval with the principal for the program and delegate day-to-day assignment to tutors. **We run timed term tests. Can those go on it?** Yes. A timed paper from your material, on the clock, marked instantly, with results by topic and a parent report that shows the term test alongside the fortnightly work. ### Selective and scholarship prep https://studypro.com.au/for/selective-and-scholarship-prep/ Your selective program is your reputation. Put it on a platform, not a photocopier. Selective and scholarship families pay for one thing: a result on one day. Your practice papers, your timed sets and your reading and reasoning material are what they're buying. Give them the six days between sessions too, and give the parent proof every fortnight in the run-up. - The season is short and intense: Families enrol in the months before the test and want to see movement every week. Paper can't show it. - Timed practice is the whole game: But timing, marking and collating paper tests eats the tutor's week. - Parents are anxious and comparing: They're on the forums. They want numbers. Silence reads as nothing happening. - Your papers are your edge: Years of practice sets tuned to the test. They must not leak, and they must not sit in a drawer either. A good fit when: - Practice papers with keys: Reading, mathematical reasoning, thinking skills, writing. Your own sets, in your own sequence. - Cohorts on a timeline: Year 4 for OC, Year 6 for Selective, Year 8 for select-entry, scholarship rounds. Classes are named by test and date. - Owners who protect their material: Isolation per centre means your papers are never shared with another centre. **Can it time a paper the way the real test does?** Yes. Set the duration per component, lock the order if you want, and the platform runs it on the clock with the results by question type afterwards. **Writing tasks can't be marked automatically. What happens?** The student writes on the platform, the tutor marks against your criteria with a suggested band to speed it up, and the mark flows into the parent report like everything else. ### NAPLAN prep https://studypro.com.au/for/naplan-prep/ NAPLAN season on your terms, from your material. Every March, parents of Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students arrive wanting practice. You already have the sets. Put them on a platform so students practise between sessions, you see the weak strands, and parents get a fortnightly picture before the test. - A short seasonal spike: A rush of enrolments in Term 1 and a drift in Term 2 once the test has passed. - Four year levels, four programs: Reading, writing, conventions of language, numeracy. Across four year levels, that's a lot of paper. - Parents want a number: They've seen last year's report and they want to know what's changed. A good fit when: - Practice sets by strand: Numeracy, reading, language conventions, writing, organised by year level. - A retention plan for Term 2: The fortnightly report is what turns a NAPLAN family into a year-round family. - Centres who've been doing this for years: The material already exists. It just isn't working between sessions. **Do you supply NAPLAN practice material?** No. We don't supply any material. You upload yours and it becomes your program. If you're using licensed material, the platform records that at upload. **How do we keep NAPLAN families after the test?** The fortnightly report keeps going. A parent who has seen six reports of improvement by Term 2 has a reason to stay that they didn't have on paper. ### Senior secondary https://studypro.com.au/for/senior-secondary/ Senior students study alone at midnight. Give them your notes, not the internet. Year 11 and 12 students already work between sessions. The question is what they work from. Put your topic notes, your past-paper sets and your worked solutions on a platform so the hours they spend alone are spent on your material, with your method. - They're already on their phones at midnight: Studying from whatever comes up first. Usually not you. - Past papers are the product: But marking a stack of extended responses across three subjects is a week's work for a tutor. - Parents are paying and blind: A Year 12 parent gets nothing between the school report and the exam. They fund the tutoring on faith. - Every curriculum is different: HSC, VCE, QCE, WACE, SACE, NCEA. And NCEA is mid-reform. A good fit when: - Your notes and your past-paper sets: Whichever state or country's curriculum. The material is yours, so there's nothing to localise. - Extended-response marking: Assessed against your criteria with a suggested mark, finalised by the tutor. - Term-by-term families: Senior families enrol for a subject and a year. The fortnightly report is what keeps them through it. **Does it work for NCEA?** Yes, because the material is yours. Upload your standards-aligned notes and sets and that's the program. Centres revising material for the new standards find the conversion a useful forcing function. **Is video part of it?** No, deliberately. Your tutors are the video. That's what parents pay for. We cover the days when the tutor isn't there. ### Maths centres https://studypro.com.au/for/maths-centres/ Maths converts best. Your sets, marked instantly, with your method. Numeric answers, equivalent forms, worked steps. Maths material converts cleanly and marks itself completely, and the worked solution follows the method in your notes, not a method from the internet. - Marking is mechanical and endless: Forty students, twenty questions each, every week. The owner does it at 10pm. - The wrong method spreads: A student learns a shortcut from a video and it takes a term to unlearn. - Formulae get mangled by generic tools: Anything that turns a fraction into a string of characters is worse than paper. A good fit when: - Worksheets with answer keys: The cleanest possible conversion. Equivalent forms recognised. - Notes with a method: Worked solutions follow your steps, in your order. - Formula-heavy material: A specialist step keeps formulae as formulae, including handwritten-looking print. **Does it recognise 0.5, 1/2 and 50% as the same answer?** Where your key allows it, yes. You can also require a specific form, such as simplest fraction, and it marks to that. **What about diagrams and graphs?** Captured with the question they belong to. Students see the diagram exactly as it is on your worksheet. ### English centres https://studypro.com.au/for/english-centres/ Comprehension marks itself. Writing goes to the tutor with a head start. Reading passages, comprehension questions, grammar and vocabulary convert and mark cleanly. Writing tasks are assessed against your criteria with a suggested band, so the tutor's time goes on feedback rather than first reads. - Writing takes a tutor's whole evening: Thirty essays, each read twice. The feedback is what parents pay for and it's the thing there's never time for. - Comprehension marking is repetitive: Same passage, same questions, forty times. - Progress in English is hard to show: A maths parent sees a percentage. An English parent sees a mood. A good fit when: - Passages with question sets: Reading and comprehension convert and mark instantly. - Writing criteria and exemplars: Your rubric becomes the suggested mark. The tutor decides. - Grammar and vocabulary drills: Short, frequent, marked instantly, the ideal between-session work. **Does it mark essays?** It assesses them against your criteria and suggests a band, with the reasons. The tutor reads, adjusts and adds feedback. It halves the time and keeps the judgement with a person. **How does progress show for a parent?** Comprehension accuracy by skill, writing band by criterion over time, and a plain-English summary. English parents finally get a trend. ### Multi-site groups https://studypro.com.au/for/multi-site-groups/ The second campus is where consistency breaks. Fix it at the material. When you open a second site the program stops being what you teach and becomes what each site remembers. Put the program on one platform and every campus runs from the same material, with per-site classes, per-site reporting and one owner view. - Two sites, two versions of the program: Different photocopies, different pacing, different results, and parents who talk to each other. - The owner can't be at both: So the second site runs on trust and a monthly visit. - Reporting is manual per site: Or it doesn't happen at the site the owner isn't at. A good fit when: - A central program: Converted once, published to every campus. Updated once, updated everywhere. - Per-campus classes and tutors: Each site sees its own classes. The owner sees across all of them. - An ops lead: Someone who owns the rollout and the approval standard. **How is a second campus priced?** A setup fee per campus and a monthly fee per campus on top of your base plan, with the third campus onward at a lower rate. All campuses share the central program. **Can a campus have its own material as well?** Yes. The central program is shared and each campus can add its own sets, visible only to that campus. ### Franchise networks https://studypro.com.au/for/franchise-networks/ Convert your program once. Every franchisee delivers it as a platform. You keep the IP. A franchisee can't upload the franchisor's material, and shouldn't. But head office can. Convert the proprietary program once, roll it out as a branded platform to every site, see what's happening in every centre, and keep every right to it. - The program is the franchise: And it's delivered from paper, differently at every site, with no view from head office of how. - Franchisees want a platform: They ask for one every year. Building it in-house is a multi-year project you don't want. - The IP has to stay put: Any platform that touches the program has to keep it inside the network, contractually and technically. A good fit when: - A written proprietary program: Levels, sets, tests, keys. The more codified, the faster the conversion. - A network of 10 to 100 sites: Priced per site, branded to the network, with head-office reporting. - A head office that owns the rights: You approve the conversion once. Franchisees deliver. **Can franchisees add their own material?** Only if head office allows it, and only visible to their own site. The core program is locked. **Who owns the converted program?** The franchisor. We claim no rights, never reuse it, never train on it, and the network's material is isolated from every other customer's. ## Places ### New South Wales https://studypro.com.au/au/nsw/ Sydney's centres run on Selective, OC and HSC material. Put yours on a platform. From Parramatta to Hurstville to Castle Hill, NSW centres have built years of practice papers for the Selective High School Placement Test, the Opportunity Class test and the HSC. That material is the business. It should be working between sessions and it should be visible to parents. - Selective and OC set the calendar: Year 4 families prepare for the Opportunity Class placement test and Year 6 families for the Selective High School Placement Test. Enrolments build in the months before each test and centres are judged on placement results. - HSC is the senior market: Years 11 and 12 across dozens of subjects, with past-paper practice at the centre of every program and extended responses to mark every week. - NAPLAN in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9: A Term 1 spike for many centres, and a retention problem in Term 2 once it has passed. - Diaspora-run centres refer each other: Western and north-western Sydney in particular. A centre that sends a fortnightly report becomes the one the WhatsApp group talks about. Programs: Opportunity Class placement test (Year 4, for Year 5 entry); Selective High School Placement Test (Year 6, for Year 7 entry); NAPLAN (Years 3, 5, 7, 9); HSC (Years 11 and 12); Independent school scholarships (Years 5 to 8 typically) Rights: The Statutory Education Licence under the Copyright Act 1968 covers tutoring organisations as well as schools, which is what makes copying from published texts legitimate for a licensed centre. Ask whether your centre holds one. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence at all. Confirm your position with your own adviser. ### Victoria https://studypro.com.au/au/vic/ Melbourne's centres are in the growth corridors. Their material deserves better than a drawer. Point Cook, Tarneit, Glen Waverley, Craigieburn. Victoria's tutoring centres run select-entry, SEAL, scholarship and VCE programs from material the owner built over years. We turn it into the centre's own platform, and send every parent proof every fortnight. - Select-entry is a Year 8 event: Entry to Melbourne High School, Mac.Robertson Girls' High School, Nossal High School and Suzanne Cory High School is decided by a test sat in Year 8 for Year 9 entry. Preparation programs run through Year 7 and 8. - SEAL and scholarships come earlier: Select Entry Accelerated Learning programs at government schools and scholarship tests at independent schools bring Year 5 and 6 families into centres. - VCE is the senior market: With Units 3 and 4 the focus, past-paper practice at the centre and a study score on the line. - The west and the south-east grow fastest: New suburbs, new families, new centres opening a second site within a few years. Consistency across sites becomes the pain. Programs: Select-entry high school exam (Year 8, for Year 9 entry); SEAL programs (Year 6, for Year 7 entry); Independent school scholarships (Years 5 to 8 typically); NAPLAN (Years 3, 5, 7, 9); VCE (Years 11 and 12) Rights: The Statutory Education Licence under the Copyright Act 1968 covers tutoring organisations, which is what makes copying from published texts legitimate for a licensed centre. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence. Confirm your position with your own adviser. ### Queensland https://studypro.com.au/au/qld/ Brisbane's centres run Academies prep and QCE from their own sets. Put them on a platform. Since the QCE moved to external assessment and ATAR, senior tutoring in Queensland has become past-paper driven. Add the Queensland Academies and independent school scholarships and Brisbane centres have years of material that should be working between sessions. - QCE and ATAR changed the senior market: External assessment in Units 3 and 4 means past-paper practice and marking against criteria are now central to every senior program. - Queensland Academies are selective: Entry to the Queensland Academies for Science, Mathematics and Technology, Health Sciences, and Creative Industries is by application and testing, and preparation programs exist for it. - Scholarship tests at independent schools: Brisbane's independent schools run scholarship rounds that bring Year 5 to 8 families into centres. - Sunnybank and the southside: A dense corridor of diaspora-run centres where word of mouth decides enrolment. Programs: Queensland Academies entry (Year 6, for Year 7 entry); Independent school scholarships (Years 5 to 8); NAPLAN (Years 3, 5, 7, 9); QCE (Years 11 and 12) Rights: The Statutory Education Licence covers tutoring organisations. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence. Confirm your position with your own adviser. ### Western Australia https://studypro.com.au/au/wa/ Perth's centres run GATE and WACE programs. Two hours behind, and usually overlooked. Perth is rarely first on any education company's list. It should be. GATE selective entry, independent school scholarships and WACE make for a serious tutoring market with material built over years. We run in a working-day overlap with the west and we come to Perth. - GATE decides selective entry: The Gifted and Talented Secondary Selective Entrance Programs test is sat in Year 6 for Year 7 entry to schools like Perth Modern and to selective programs across the state. - WACE is the senior market: ATAR courses in Years 11 and 12, with past papers and marking keys driving preparation. - Canning Vale and the southern corridor: Where a growing number of centres serve growing suburbs. Programs: GATE selective entrance (Year 6, for Year 7 entry); Independent school scholarships (Years 5 to 8); NAPLAN (Years 3, 5, 7, 9); WACE (Years 11 and 12) Rights: The Statutory Education Licence covers tutoring organisations. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence. Confirm your position with your own adviser. ### South Australia https://studypro.com.au/au/sa/ Adelaide is a word-of-mouth market. A fortnightly report is what gets talked about. Adelaide's tutoring centres run Ignite selective programs, independent school scholarships and SACE from material built over years. In a compact market where parents know each other, the centre that sends proof every fortnight is the one that gets recommended. - Ignite is the selective program: Entry to Ignite programs at schools such as Glenunga International, Aberfoyle Park and The Heights is by testing in Year 6 for Year 7 entry. - SACE is the senior market: Stage 1 and Stage 2 subjects with external assessment components and past-paper practice. - A compact, referral-driven city: Mawson Lakes, the eastern suburbs, the south. Parents compare notes and centres grow on reputation. Programs: Ignite program entry (Year 6, for Year 7 entry); Independent school scholarships (Years 5 to 8); NAPLAN (Years 3, 5, 7, 9); SACE (Years 11 and 12) Rights: The Statutory Education Licence covers tutoring organisations. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence. Confirm your position with your own adviser. ### New Zealand https://studypro.com.au/nz/ NCEA is changing again. Your material shouldn't have to start from scratch. New standards, new co-requisites, a restructured credit framework. Every New Zealand centre is revising material built around the old standards. A platform that takes what you have, restructures it and makes it reusable arrives at exactly the right moment. Priced in New Zealand dollars, hosted in Australia, two hours apart. - NCEA reform is a forcing function: Centres in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch are re-sequencing years of notes and practice sets to the updated standards. Converting while you revise means the revised version is the one that goes on the platform. - Auckland's centres cluster: Botany, Howick, Pakuranga, Epsom, Mt Eden, Albany, Flat Bush. Diaspora-run centres serving diaspora families, referred inside the community. - Scholarship and entrance: NZ Scholarship for Year 13, and entrance testing at independent schools bring families in earlier. - The copyright position is different: A for-profit New Zealand centre is not an educational establishment under the Copyright Act 1994, so self-authored material is the safer base. Most good NZ centres wrote most of theirs. Programs: NCEA Levels 1, 2 and 3 (Years 11 to 13); NZ Scholarship (Year 13); Independent school entrance (Years 7 to 9 typically); Years 7 to 10 foundation (Years 7 to 10) Rights: Under the Copyright Act 1994 an educational establishment must be not conducted for profit, so a commercial tutoring centre cannot rely on the educational copying exceptions and generally needs a CLNZ business licence to copy published material. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence. In New Zealand we ask one extra question at upload: how much of this did you write yourself? Confirm your position with your own adviser. ## Comparisons ### Versus ChatGPT and NotebookLM https://studypro.com.au/compare/chatgpt-and-notebooklm/ Can't I just put my worksheets into ChatGPT? Yes. For you, tonight, with one PDF, do it. You'll learn something. What you can't do with a chatbot is run 120 students on their own logins, assign work by class with due dates, mark and track every answer by topic, and send a report to each parent with your logo on it, on your own web address. - Where answers come from: them, The open internet and its training data; StudyPro, Your uploaded material only, citing the page - Can it make things up: them, Yes, fluently; StudyPro, Anything without a source page is rejected before you see it - Who approves what students see: them, Nobody; StudyPro, You, before publish - Students: them, One chat window per person, no accounts for your centre; StudyPro, Every student on their own login, in their class - Assignments and due dates: them, No; StudyPro, By class, in three clicks - Marking and tracking by topic: them, No; StudyPro, Every answer, every topic, every student - Parent report: them, No; StudyPro, Every fortnight, your logo, your address - Your material's privacy: them, Depends on the plan and the settings; StudyPro, Isolated per centre, no reuse, no training, contractually - Will do the homework for the student: them, Yes, if asked; StudyPro, Hints first, worked example second, and the tutor sees how many were used Verdict: A chatbot is a tool for the owner. A platform is a system for the centre. Some owners will try the chatbot first and lose a term finding out how to get the results back from 120 kids. The honest answer is that you can't, and that's the whole difference. ### Versus Content platforms https://studypro.com.au/compare/content-platforms/ Content platforms sell you their material. It makes you the same as every centre that buys it. Atomi, Edrolo and Education Perfect are good products. They sell their own content library, under their own brand, to schools and directly to parents. Every centre that buys the same library teaches the same thing. Your material is the reason a family chose you. We put that on a platform, and we never write a question of our own. - Whose content: them, Theirs, the same for everyone; StudyPro, Yours, unique to your centre - Whose brand: them, Theirs. The student and parent see the publisher; StudyPro, Yours. Nobody sees us - Who else can buy it: them, Any school, any parent, the centre down the road; StudyPro, Nobody. It is your material, in your own space - Fit to how you teach: them, Their sequence, their method; StudyPro, Your folders, your sequence, your method - Sold to your parents directly: them, Some are, at a retail price; StudyPro, Never. We don't contact your parents - Parent report from the centre: them, Not from you; StudyPro, Every fortnight, your logo, your address - Price basis: them, Per student or per school, quote-only for institutions; StudyPro, Published, banded by centre size, not per student Verdict: If you have no material, buy a library. If you have material, a library makes you generic and a platform built from your own work makes you distinctive. Most established centres are in the second group and have been sold the first product. ### Versus Admin software https://studypro.com.au/compare/admin-software/ Keep your scheduling software. There isn't a single question in it. TutorCruncher, Teachworks, TutorBird and their peers do rosters, bookings, invoices and payroll. They do it well, and they contain no teaching material and no student practice. We're the part with your worksheets in it. The two sit side by side and never overlap. - Rosters and bookings: them, Yes; StudyPro, No, and we don't want to - Invoices and payroll: them, Yes; StudyPro, No - Teaching material: them, None; StudyPro, All of yours, converted - Student practice between sessions: them, None; StudyPro, The whole point - Marking and results by topic: them, None; StudyPro, Every answer, every topic - Parent communication: them, Invoices, reminders, sometimes attendance; StudyPro, A fortnightly progress report with your logo - Overlap: them, Nothing to remove; StudyPro, Nothing to remove Verdict: This isn't a versus. Keep the admin tool. Add the platform. A centre running both has its back office and its teaching both handled, and the parent gets an invoice from one and proof from the other. ### Versus Google Classroom https://studypro.com.au/compare/google-classroom/ Google Classroom hands out your PDFs. It doesn't mark them, explain them or report on them. Plenty of centres use Google Classroom to distribute worksheets. It's free and students know it. But a PDF in Classroom is still a PDF: nothing marks it, nobody explains it at 9pm, no topic-level result appears, and no parent gets a report. It's a photocopier with a login. - Getting your worksheet on it: them, Upload the PDF; StudyPro, Upload the PDF, it becomes marked practice - Marking: them, By hand, or build a Google Form per worksheet; StudyPro, Instant, against your key, with a worked solution - Help when stuck: them, None; StudyPro, An explanation from your page, hints first - Results by topic: them, None; StudyPro, Class heatmap, student by topic - Parent report: them, Guardian email summaries of activity, from Google; StudyPro, Progress by topic, every fortnight, from you - Brand: them, Google's; StudyPro, Yours - Your material's privacy: them, Google's terms; StudyPro, Isolated per centre, no reuse, no training - Cost: them, Free; StudyPro, Published pricing by centre size Verdict: Classroom solves distribution. It doesn't solve the six days, the marking or the parent. If distribution was the problem, most centres would already be fine. ### Versus Building your own app https://studypro.com.au/compare/building-your-own-app/ Building your own app: the quote is the first surprise, year two is the second. Every established centre has thought about it. A developer, an app with the centre's name, the material loaded in. The build quote is one thing. The marking engine, the explanation that only uses your material, the parent report, the security, the hosting, and the second year of changes are the things that don't appear on the quote. - Time to first student: them, Months, often a year; StudyPro, About two weeks for a pilot class - Converting your material into questions: them, Someone types them in; StudyPro, Upload the PDF - Marking engine: them, Build it, including equivalent forms; StudyPro, Included - Explanation from your material only: them, Hard to build well, easy to build badly; StudyPro, Included, cited to the page - Parent report: them, Build it; StudyPro, Included - Hosting, security, backups: them, Yours to arrange and pay for; StudyPro, Included, isolated per centre, in Australia - Year two: them, Every change is a new invoice; StudyPro, Included in the monthly - Ownership of material and data: them, Yours; StudyPro, Yours. You keep your originals, we hold copies and delete them when you leave Verdict: A custom build makes sense for a network with a technical team and a multi-year budget. For an owner-operator, the platform gives most of the same ownership feeling, with the engine already built and someone else carrying the second year. ### Versus Printed worksheets https://studypro.com.au/compare/printed-worksheets/ What you have works. It costs you your Sunday, and it can't talk to a parent. The real competitor isn't software. It's the photocopier. Printed worksheets have run tutoring centres for decades and they still work. They also come back half done, get marked at 10pm, tell you nothing by topic, and leave the parent with no idea what happened. Same worksheets, different delivery. - Getting it to the student: them, Print and hand out on Tuesday; StudyPro, Assign on Tuesday, on their phone by Tuesday night - Getting it back: them, Some of it, on Tuesday, if they remember; StudyPro, Submitted when done, visible to you immediately - Marking: them, You, Sunday night; StudyPro, Instant, with a worked solution - Help when stuck: them, None until next week; StudyPro, An explanation from your page - What the class got wrong: them, You find out by marking all of it; StudyPro, Monday morning heatmap - What the parent sees: them, A sheet in a bag, maybe; StudyPro, A fortnightly report with your logo - Your material's safety: them, Photocopied by anyone, walks out the door; StudyPro, On the platform, watermarked to the student, and nothing downloads - Cost: them, Paper, toner, your Sunday; StudyPro, Published pricing by centre size Verdict: Paper isn't broken. It just does nothing between sessions and says nothing to the parent. The same worksheets on a platform fix both without changing a word of what you teach. ## Guides ### The Term 4 retention playbook for tutoring centres https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/term-4-retention-playbook/ Students don't leave in Term 4. They leave in Term 3, quietly, and you find out in Term 4 when the re-enrolment form doesn't come back. By then the decision was made weeks ago, at a kitchen table, by a parent who had nothing in front of them except an invoice. This is the plan for the other version of that conversation. It runs from week 6 of Term 3 to the first day of Term 1, and every step is something a centre can do by hand this year. Where the platform makes a step automatic, it says so, but nothing here depends on it. - Count last year's losses first. Most owners guess low. - Start in Term 3 week 6, not Term 4. By Term 4 the quiet ones are gone. - The lever is written proof of progress to the parent, regularly, from you. - The holiday gap is where a wobbling family becomes a lost one. Fill it with one small thing. - Track five numbers on a Friday. The gone-quiet list is the one that pays. ## First, count last year Before anything else, work out what happened last summer. Take the enrolment list from the end of Term 4 and the list from week 3 of Term 1. The difference is your number. Not the students who moved house or finished Year 12, the ones who could have stayed and didn't. Most owners who do this for the first time are surprised. Whatever the count is, multiply it by your own annual fee and that is what walked out, with most of Term 1 spent replacing them. Put your own figures into the [retention cost calculator](/resources/calculators/retention-cost/) and keep the number. It's the budget for everything below. ## Why they leave, in the parent's words Ask a parent who left and you'll hear one of three things. "We weren't sure it was making a difference." Nothing they could see, so nothing they could point to. "She was doing the work but we never heard anything." Work went into a bag and came back marked, sometimes, and nobody told the parent what it meant. "It just lapsed over the holidays." No contact from December to February, and by February the routine was gone. None of those is about the teaching. All three are about what the parent could see between sessions, which for most centres is nothing. A parent who can't see progress assumes there isn't any. That's the whole problem, and it's fixable. ## The timeline | When | Do this | Why it works | |---|---|---| | Term 3, week 6 | List every student with no completed work in the last fortnight. Call two parents. | The gone-quiet list. Five weeks' notice on who won't be back. | | Term 3, week 8 | Send every parent a written note on what improved this term. Not an invoice. | The first piece of proof most parents have ever had from you. | | Term 3, week 10 | Ask the three most engaged parents what they'd tell a friend. Write it down. | You'll use their words in Term 4. | | Term 4, week 1 | Put the re-enrolment form in every parent's hand with the term summary attached. | Proof first, ask second. | | Term 4, week 3 | Call every family that hasn't returned the form. Ask what would make it a yes. | Not a sales call. A question. | | Term 4, week 6 | One more written progress note, shorter. Name the skill for Term 1. | Gives the parent a reason the holiday matters. | | Term 4, last week | Confirm the Term 1 class, day and time for every returning student. | A booked slot is harder to drop than a vague intention. | | December | One message, one piece of holiday work, one date for Term 1. | Fills the gap. Keeps the routine alive. | | Mid-January | A short note: here's what we'll start with in week 1. | The family that's wobbling remembers why they enrolled. | | Term 1, week 1 | Welcome back, and the first fortnightly report goes out in week 2. | The cycle starts again, earlier this time. | The [Term 4 retention checklist](/resources/templates/term-4-retention-checklist/) has this as a printable page with a box beside each line. ## Term 3, week 6: the gone-quiet list This is the step that pays for the whole plan. Sit down with the homework record, or the pile of sheets, and list every student who hasn't handed anything back in two weeks. Then list every student whose parent hasn't replied to anything this term. Those two lists overlap, and the overlap is your Term 4 losses, five weeks early. Call two of those parents this week. Not to sell anything. To ask how things are going and whether the homework is landing. You'll hear about a busy sport season, a new sibling, a change of school. Sometimes you'll hear the real thing: "honestly, we're not sure it's working." That's the conversation you want in week 6, not the silence you'd get in Term 4. On the platform this list builds itself. The tutor dashboard shows students with no activity for two weeks, and the owner sees it across every class. By hand it takes an hour. Do it anyway. ## Term 3, week 8: the progress note Most parents have never received a written word from their child's tutoring centre that wasn't a bill. Change that in week 8. One page, or one email. What their child worked on this term. What got better, specifically. What's next. Two sentences from you, in your words, about this child. Sign it with your name. Specific is the whole point. "Priya is doing well" is nothing. "Priya's accuracy on adding fractions with unlike denominators went from about one in four to two in three, which is the skill we spent three Tuesdays on" is proof, and it's proof the parent can repeat to the other parent, to a grandparent, to a friend at the school gate. If you don't have the data to be specific, that's worth knowing too. It means work is going out and coming back without anyone recording what it showed. The [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/) is the one-page layout with a filled example. ## Term 4, week 1: proof first, ask second The standard re-enrolment email is an invoice with a deadline. Sent cold, it reads as a bill, and a bill is something you can decide not to pay. Send it differently. The term summary goes first, on top, with the specific improvement named. Then the form. Then the deadline, with a reason: "so I can hold her Tuesday spot." The order matters more than the wording. A parent who has just read that their child's accuracy doubled on a named skill is reading the form in a different mood from a parent who's opened a bill. The [re-enrolment email templates](/resources/templates/re-enrolment-email-templates/) have seven versions of this, including the one for the parent who has been quiet all term. ## Term 4, week 3: the call that isn't a sales call Every family that hasn't returned the form gets a call. Not a chase. A question: what would make it a yes? You'll get four answers. Money, which is real, and worth knowing. Timetable, which you can often fix. "We're not sure it's working," which the week 8 note should have addressed, and if it didn't, ask what they'd want to see. And silence, which is a no you should accept warmly and ask to come back to in Term 1. Log each answer in a sentence. After thirty of these, the pattern tells you what to change next year. ## December and January: the gap The family that's wobbling in November becomes a lost family in January for one reason: nothing happened for six weeks. The routine broke, the child stopped thinking about it, and the parent found a reason not to restart. Fill the gap with one small thing. One message in December with one piece of holiday work, ten minutes' worth, and the Term 1 start date. One short note in mid-January saying what week 1 will cover. That's it. Two touches. Enough to keep the thread, not enough to be a nuisance. On the platform, a holiday set from your own material is assigned in three clicks and marked when it's done, so the January note can say "thanks for the holiday work, here's where we'll pick up." By hand, a photocopied sheet in an envelope does the job. ## The five Friday numbers Retention is a habit, not a campaign. Five numbers, every Friday, on a whiteboard: | Number | What it tells you | |---|---| | Students with completed work this week | Whether the six days are being used | | Students gone quiet for two weeks | Next term's losses, early | | Parents contacted this fortnight, in writing | Whether proof is going out | | Re-enrolment forms returned (Term 4 only) | Where you stand | | Families with no next date | The ones drifting | The last one is the sharpest. A family with a booked Term 1 slot, a confirmed class and a known start date is enrolled. A family with none of those is a maybe, whatever they said. ## What this looks like with the platform Everything above can be done by hand, and this year it probably should be. But it's worth seeing what changes when the work students do lives on a system built from your own material. The gone-quiet list appears on the tutor dashboard every Monday without anyone compiling it. The progress note goes to every parent every second Friday, automatically, with your logo, from your address, with the specific improvement by topic pulled from the work the student actually did. The term summary at the end of Term 3 is a one-click version of the twenty fortnightly reports that came before it. The holiday work is assigned in three clicks and marked when it's done. The plan stays the same. The hours come out of it. ## This week Count last year's losses. Write the number down. Open the [checklist](/resources/templates/term-4-retention-checklist/), put it on the wall, and find week 6 of Term 3 on the calendar. If it's already passed, start at the next line. The plan works from wherever you pick it up. ### The Statutory Education Licence, explained for centre owners https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/statutory-education-licence-tutoring-centres/ You've been photocopying chapter 4 of the same textbook for your Year 9 comprehension class since 2015. One day a parent, a new tutor or a publisher asks whether you're allowed to. In Australia the answer is usually yes, if your centre holds a Statutory Education Licence and stays inside its limits. The rest of this guide is what that licence is, what it doesn't settle, and why the answer is different across the Tasman. We're a software company. This guide describes what exists and who to ask. Your position depends on your material and your licence, and the only people who can confirm it are the Copyright Agency, Copyright Licensing New Zealand, or your own adviser. - The Statutory Education Licence under the Copyright Act 1968 explicitly covers tutoring organisations, not just schools. - It permits copying up to 10% or one chapter of a published work for educational purposes, in return for a fee. - Material you wrote yourself needs no licence at all. That's most of what a good centre teaches from. - Record the rights basis per document: wrote it, licensed it, copied it under licence, not sure. - Whether the licence covers uploading third-party material to a platform is a question for the Copyright Agency or a lawyer. - New Zealand is different. A for-profit centre generally needs a CLNZ business licence, and self-authored material is the safer base. ## What the licence is Under the Copyright Act 1968, a statutory licence administered by the Copyright Agency allows educational institutions to copy limited portions of published works for educational purposes, in return for a fee. It covers schools and TAFEs, and it covers around a thousand private providers, explicitly including tutoring organisations. That last part is the one most owners don't know. The licence isn't a schools-only arrangement that a tutoring centre borrows by analogy. Tutoring organisations are named. If you copy from published textbooks, you should hold one regardless of whether you ever use a platform, because it's the thing that makes the photocopying you already do legitimate. The limit is up to 10% or one chapter of a published work. So chapter 4 of the comprehension book is inside the limit. Three chapters of the same book is a different conversation, and it's a conversation to have with the Copyright Agency, not with us. The fee and the terms are the Copyright Agency's to explain. We don't quote them here because they're not ours to quote, and because the number that matters is the one on your own agreement. The short [glossary entry](/resources/glossary/statutory-education-licence/) has the same description in three sentences, for a tutor who asks. ## What it covers, and what it leaves open It helps to separate the material a centre teaches from into categories, because the licence only speaks to one of them. | Material | Position in Australia | Who confirms it | |---|---|---| | Worksheets, notes and papers you wrote | Yours. No licence needed. | Nobody. You wrote it. | | Material you licensed from a publisher | Governed by that licence's terms | The publisher's agreement | | Pages copied from a published text, within 10% or one chapter | Statutory Education Licence, if your centre holds one | The Copyright Agency | | Pages copied beyond that limit | Outside the licence | The Copyright Agency or a lawyer | | Copied material uploaded to a platform for conversion | Not settled here | The Copyright Agency or a lawyer, not a software company | | Material of unknown origin | Unknown | Find out before use | The first row is the one to notice. A centre that has built fifteen years of its own material is, for most of its drawer, in the row where no licence is needed. The licence question only applies to the part of the drawer that came from a book. ## Material you wrote yourself needs no licence This is the sentence to hold onto. If you wrote the worksheet, the rule sheet, the practice paper, the answer key, you hold the copyright in it, and you can copy it, hand it out, put it on a platform and take it off again. There's no licence, no limit and nobody to ask. Most good centres wrote most of their material. The Year 6 fractions sheets, the timed reasoning sets tuned to the test, the rule boxes, the term tests. It's the reason a family chose you over the centre down the road, and it's also the part of your material with the simplest rights position. Which is why, in the [guide to digitising your material](/resources/guides/digitise-your-teaching-material/), the start-here rule is your best folder. Your best folder is nearly always one you wrote, and it goes onto a platform with no rights question attached. The complication is that fifteen years of a shared drive mixes the two. The sheet you wrote sits next to the chapter you scanned. A tutor's set from 2018 borrows a passage from a book and nobody remembers which. That's what the register is for. ## The four rights categories For every document a centre teaches from, there are four honest answers to "where did this come from?" | Category | What it means | What to record | |---|---|---| | Wrote it | Written by you or a tutor employed by you, from scratch | The year, and who. "Written by us, 2019." | | Licensed it | Bought or licensed from a publisher under written terms | The publisher, the terms, what the terms allow | | Copied it under licence | Copied from a published work under a Statutory Education Licence in Australia, or a CLNZ licence in New Zealand, within its limits | The source, the chapter or pages, the limit, the licence number | | Not sure | Origin unknown. A tutor's folder, an old drive, a sheet with no name on it | "Not sure. Find out before use." | The fourth category is not a failure. It's the honest state of a lot of material in a lot of centres, and writing it down is better than pretending it's the first category. A document in the fourth row stays out of use until it moves to one of the other three. The [material rights register](/resources/templates/material-rights-register/) is a printable grid and a spreadsheet layout with one row per document and these four categories explained in plain language. It also carries a short note on what to do if a publisher contacts you, which is a page you want to have read before the day you need it. ## Why a register per document matters The first time anyone asks where a worksheet came from, you want the answer already written down. Not reconstructed from memory, not guessed from the font. Three reasons it's per document rather than per folder. The rights position genuinely varies inside a folder. A Year 9 English folder has your comprehension questions, which you wrote, wrapped around a passage from a published book, which you didn't. One row for the folder can't capture that. Two rows can. It's the record a professional centre keeps. A publisher's query, a tutor's question, a parent's curiosity, a buyer doing due diligence on the centre in five years' time. All of them are answered by the same page. And it's the record that lets you move quickly. A centre with a register knows on the day which folders are in the first category and can act on those without waiting for anyone. A centre without one has to audit before it can do anything. Fill it in during the material audit, when you're already looking at each folder and still remember which ones you wrote. Update it whenever a folder is added. ## The open question: uploading for conversion Here's the part we're careful about, and you should be too. The Statutory Education Licence makes copying from a published text legitimate for a licensed centre, within its limits. Whether that licence also covers uploading the copied pages to a third-party platform so they can be converted into practice sets is a separate question, and it isn't one we answer. It has to go to the Copyright Agency or a lawyer. We say that plainly for a reason. A software company telling you that your licence covers what the software does is a software company with an interest in the answer. The person who can tell you is the licensing body that issued it, or an adviser who acts for you. What that means in practice is simple. Convert what you wrote first. For material in the third category, record the licence and the limit in the register, then ask the Copyright Agency the specific question before uploading it: does my licence cover uploading these pages to a platform for conversion? Write down what they say. ## What we do at upload Every document uploaded to the platform records its rights basis: your own, licensed, or copied under a Statutory Education Licence. It isn't a checkbox to click past. It's the register, kept where the material lives. In New Zealand we ask one extra question at upload, for the reason in the next section: how much of this did you write yourself? Beyond that, the position on ownership is the one on the [security and ownership](/security/) page. You keep every right to your material and to anything derived from it. We claim none. We never reuse it, never redistribute it, and never use it to train any model. Your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, and your material is never shared with or reused for anyone else. Nothing downloads out of the platform, and if you leave we delete our copies within 30 days and confirm it in writing. That's the software side. It doesn't answer the licence question, and it isn't meant to. It means that whatever your rights position is, it's the same after upload as before. ## New Zealand is different The Australian licence has no counterpart that a commercial New Zealand centre can lean on in the same way. Under New Zealand's Copyright Act 1994, an educational establishment must be not conducted for profit. A commercial tutoring centre isn't one. So a centre run as a business cannot rely on the educational copying exceptions, and a centre that wants to copy published material generally needs a CLNZ business licence. CLNZ is Copyright Licensing New Zealand, which administers licences for copying published works. The [CLNZ licence glossary entry](/resources/glossary/clnz-licence/) is the short version. The [New Zealand page](/nz/) has the wider picture, including the current NCEA reform, which is sending every centre in the country back through its material anyway. The same caution applies as in Australia. This is a description of what exists. CLNZ or your own adviser confirms your position. ## The practical consequence for a New Zealand centre The consequence is that a New Zealand centre's self-authored material is on much firmer ground than its photocopied textbook pages. So the order of work is sharper. Audit by how much you wrote. A folder you wrote entirely goes first. A folder that's yours around a published passage gets split in the register: your questions in the first category, the passage in the third or fourth. A folder that's mostly copied waits until you hold the licence or have replaced the copied part with your own. Most good New Zealand centres wrote most of theirs, so this is less of a constraint than it sounds. And the NCEA revision that's already underway is a natural moment to do it: the notes and sets being rewritten for the updated standards are, by definition, yours. ## This week Open the [material rights register](/resources/templates/material-rights-register/). Take your three most-used folders and give each document a row and a category. Count how many are in the first row. That's the material you can convert this week with no rights question attached. For anything in the third row, find your centre's licence, note the number and the limit next to each document, and write down the one question to ask the Copyright Agency or CLNZ. For anything in the fourth row, don't use it until it moves. If you're in Australia and copy from textbooks but don't hold a Statutory Education Licence, that's the first phone call, and it has nothing to do with software. Everything above describes what exists and who to ask. It doesn't tell you what your licence covers or whether your centre is compliant. The Copyright Agency, Copyright Licensing New Zealand or your own adviser can. We can't, and we won't pretend to. ### Running selective and scholarship prep as a program, not a rush https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/running-a-selective-prep-program/ Selective and scholarship families arrive in the months before the test. They want to see movement every week, they're anxious, and they're comparing you with the centre their friend uses. For most centres that turns the season into a rush: a paper test on Saturday, a stack of marking on Sunday, a spreadsheet on Monday, and a parent on Tuesday asking how it's going with nothing specific to tell them. It doesn't have to be a rush. The practice papers you've tuned over years are already a program. What's missing is the rhythm that turns them into one: timed sets by component, accuracy tracked per component, a report to the parent every fortnight, and a plan for the family after the test. This guide is that rhythm. - The season is short, the parents are anxious, and silence reads as nothing happening. - Structure everything by component. Timed sets, accuracy, the report to the parent. - Your practice papers are the centre's edge. They must not sit in a drawer and they must not leak. - The fortnightly report to a selective parent is a number and a trend, not a reassurance. - The test is a date. The family is a year-round enrolment if you keep reporting after it. ## The shape of the season A selective season has a beginning that's sudden and an end that's fixed. Families enrol in a cluster once the test is close enough to feel real. They want to see movement every week, because the date is coming and nothing else in their week is as clear. They're on the forums, they've heard what the other centre does, and they want numbers. Paper can't give them that. A practice paper on Saturday, marked by Sunday night, produces one score. The parent hears the score, or doesn't, and has no way to see whether it's better than a fortnight ago or which component moved. So they fill the gap with worry. Timed practice is the whole game in this season, and timed practice is the part that eats the tutor's week. Setting the timer, invigilating the room, marking, collating the results by question type, working out who's slipping on timing. Every hour of that is an hour not spent teaching the component the cohort is weakest on. The [selective and scholarship prep](/for/selective-and-scholarship-prep/) page describes the week the platform runs. The rest of this guide is the program behind it, which you can run by hand this season and on the platform next. ## The tests, by state The names, years and components differ by state. This is the general shape, with the component names as centres describe them. Dates and formats change, and the relevant education department is the source for both. | State | Test | Sat in | Components as centres describe them | |---|---|---|---| | New South Wales | Opportunity Class placement test | Year 4, for Year 5 entry | Reading, mathematical reasoning, thinking skills | | New South Wales | Selective High School Placement Test | Year 6, for Year 7 entry | Reading, mathematical reasoning, thinking skills, writing | | Victoria | Select-entry high school exam | Year 8, for Year 9 entry | Reading, mathematics, verbal and numerical reasoning, writing | | Victoria | SEAL programs | Year 6, for Year 7 entry | School-run selection, often with a test | | Western Australia | GATE selective entrance | Year 6, for Year 7 entry | Reading comprehension, quantitative reasoning, abstract reasoning, writing | | South Australia | Ignite program entry | Year 6, for Year 7 entry | School-run selective testing | | Queensland | Queensland Academies entry | Year 6, for Year 7 entry | Testing and application | | All states | Independent school scholarships | Years 5 to 8 typically | ACER, Edutest style and school-run papers | Two things follow from the table. In New South Wales the OC test in Year 4 is often the first step toward Selective in Year 6, so a family can be with you for three years across two seasons. In Victoria the select-entry exam is a Year 8 event with preparation through Year 7 and 8, which is a longer runway than most states and a different kind of program. The [New South Wales](/au/nsw/) and [Victoria](/au/vic/) pages have the calendar shape for each. Whatever the state, the structure is the same: a small number of named components, each with its own practice material and its own accuracy. ## Build the program around timed sets by component The unit of a selective program is a timed set for one component. A reading set, on the clock. A mathematical reasoning set, on the clock. Not a whole paper every time, because a whole paper produces one number and hides which component moved. Here's the weekly rhythm that holds up. | When | What | Why | |---|---|---| | Saturday, after class | Assign a timed reasoning set and a reading set from your papers, due Wednesday | Two components, two numbers, mid-week deadline | | Sunday to Wednesday | Students sit both sets timed, at home | The six days between sessions become practice under conditions | | Thursday | Look at accuracy by component across the cohort, and at who's slipping on timing | This is next Saturday's lesson, decided before you walk in | | Saturday | Teach the weakest component. Assign the next two sets | The loop closes | | Every second Friday | Parent report: accuracy by component, trend since enrolment, what's next | The anxious parent gets a number instead of silence | By hand, the timing is a kitchen timer and an honest child, and the accuracy by component is a column in a spreadsheet per student. It's real work for a cohort of twenty. It's still the right structure. On the platform, a [timed set](/resources/glossary/timed-set/) from your material runs on the clock on the student's phone. You set the duration per component, lock the order if you want, and the results come back by question type as soon as they submit. Every question is marked against your key, with a worked solution drawn from your paper, and a student stuck on a question type gets a worked example from your material rather than closing the book. The [instant marking](/platform/instant-marking/) page has the detail. ## Accuracy by component is the number everyone wants The tutor wants it on Thursday to plan Saturday. The parent wants it on Friday to stop worrying. The student wants it to know what to practise. It's the same number, and a selective program that tracks it per component is a program. One that tracks whole-paper scores is a rush with a spreadsheet. The tutor view is a grid: students down the side, components across the top, each cell coloured by how they went. One glance shows the component most of the cohort missed and the two students whose timing is falling apart. Click a cell to see the student's actual answers and how many hints they used. Click a component to see the questions the cohort got wrong most, with your paper beside them. The owner sees every cohort and every tutor. Year 6 Selective on Tuesday and Year 6 Selective on Saturday, taught by different tutors from the same papers, side by side. If one cohort's reading accuracy is moving and the other's isn't, that's a conversation about teaching, and you can have it in week three instead of after the test. The [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/) page shows both views. ## Your practice papers are the edge, and they must not leak Ask a selective centre what it sells and the honest answer is the papers. Years of practice sets tuned to the test, in a sequence that works, refined every season by what the last cohort got wrong. That's the reason a family chooses you over the centre their friend uses. Two things are true about those papers at once. They must not sit in a drawer, because a paper in a drawer isn't working between Saturdays. And they must not leak, because a paper that leaks is a paper the centre down the road is teaching from next season. Every platform will promise that other customers can't see your papers. For a selective centre the promise has to be specific and in writing. On this platform your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, and your papers are never shared with or reused for anyone else, not by permission, not by accident. We claim no rights to them, never reuse them, never redistribute them, and never train on them. Nothing downloads out of the platform, by anyone. The [security and ownership](/security/) page has it in full. The other side of leaking is the student. A timed set sat on a phone at home is a set a student could screenshot. That's true of a paper in a bag too, and the practical defence is the same: many sets, rotated, so that no single set is the program. A student who has seen one reading set has seen one reading set. The sequence is the edge, and the sequence stays with you. ## The fortnightly report to an anxious parent An anxious parent asks the same three questions every week. Is it working? Is she behind? What are you doing about it? The fortnightly report answers all three with numbers, and it's the thing that turns the forum comparison into a conversation about this child. | The parent asks | The report says | |---|---| | Is it working? | Accuracy by component this fortnight, against the last. Reading 6 in 10 to 7 in 10. Reasoning steady at 5 in 10. | | Is she behind? | The trend since enrolment, per component. Not a rank. Never a rank against other students. | | What are you doing about it? | What's next before test day. "Two reasoning sets this fortnight. Saturday's lesson is on the question type she's missing." | | Anything else? | Two sentences from the tutor about this child. Signed. | Never compare the child with the cohort in a report, even when it would flatter. A parent who's told their child is above the cohort tells the other parents, and now every parent wants a rank, and the report stops being about progress. Keep the report to what improved, in the language of the components. "Thinking skills went from 5 in 10 to 7 in 10, and the questions she's still missing are the ones we'll do on Saturday." That's a sentence a parent can repeat at the school gate, and it's the sentence that stops them ringing the other centre. By hand, this is the [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/) with the components as the topics. On the platform it's built from the sets the student actually sat: accuracy by component, trend since enrolment, what's next, with your logo, from your address, every second Friday. You can review each one before it sends or let a cohort go automatically. ## The writing component Reading and reasoning mark themselves, against your key, the moment a student submits. Writing doesn't, and it shouldn't. On paper, writing is the component that gets marked last, because it takes longest and the reasoning results are more urgent. So the parent hears about reasoning and nothing about writing until the week before the test. On the platform the student writes the piece on their phone or laptop, against your prompt, on the clock if you set one. The tutor marks it against your criteria with a suggested band to speed up the first read, and the tutor's mark is the one that counts. That mark flows into the parent report next to the other components, so writing gets reported every fortnight like everything else. The judgement stays with a person who knows the student. What changes is that it happens in the same week as the rest. ## After the test: from a selective family to a year-round family The test is a date. The family is an enrolment, and the question is what happens to it the week after. For most centres, the selective family leaves. The test is done, the reason for enrolling is gone, and nothing in the relationship suggests a next thing. Whatever the result. It doesn't have to go that way, and the fortnightly report is what changes it. A parent who has seen a term of reports showing accuracy by component moving has seen something that has nothing to do with the test: their child getting measurably better at reading, at reasoning, at writing under time. That's worth keeping whether the offer letter comes or not. So the report keeps going after the test, and the one after the test names what's next. For the family with an offer, it's the Year 7 program and the six days between sessions in a new school. For the family without one, it's the same skills, the same sets, and a Year 7 program that isn't about a test at all. In New South Wales, the OC family in Year 4 is a Selective family in Year 6 if you keep them for the two years in between, and the report is how you do that. The [Term 4 retention playbook](/resources/guides/term-4-retention-playbook/) has the timeline for the re-enrolment conversation. For a selective cohort, the same conversation happens in the fortnight after the test, and it starts with the report you were going to send anyway. ## The season by hand and on the platform Everything above can be run by hand this season, and if the test is close, it should be. The structure is what matters: sets by component, accuracy by component, a report every second Friday. Here's what the hours look like each way, for a cohort of twenty. | Task | By hand | On the platform | |---|---|---| | Timed sets, two per week | Print, time, collect. Depends on the child's honesty with a timer. | Assigned Saturday in three clicks. On the clock on their phones. | | Marking reading and reasoning | Sunday. Forty sets. | Marked the moment they submit, against your key. | | Accuracy by component | A spreadsheet, kept up by the tutor. | The heatmap, on Thursday, without anyone compiling it. | | Writing | Marked when there's time, often the following week. | Tutor marks against your criteria with a suggested band. Same week. | | Parent report | The template, five minutes per student, every second Friday. | Built from the sets sat. Review or auto-send. Your logo, your address. | | After the test | Whoever remembers to call. | The report keeps going. What's next is named. | The program is the same in both columns. The Sunday comes out of the second one. ## This week Pick one cohort. Write the components for their test across the top of a page and the students down the side. Fill in accuracy per component from the last set they sat, if you have it. If you don't, that's the first finding: the sets are going out and coming back and nobody is recording what they showed by component. Then assign two timed sets, one component each, due Wednesday. On Thursday fill in the grid. On Friday send each parent one page with the numbers by component and what Saturday's lesson will target. Sign it. Do that twice and you'll have a trend. Do it all season and you'll have a program, and a cohort of families with a reason to stay after the test. ### Parent reporting for tutoring centres: what to send, how often https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/parent-reporting-for-tutoring-centres/ A parent pays you every term and, most of the time, the only thing they receive from you is the invoice. They judge you on a school report you didn't write and on whether their child seems happier about maths. When the re-enrolment form arrives, that's what they've got to go on. Parent reporting fixes that, and it doesn't need a platform to start. It needs one page, five sections, every second Friday, from your email address. This guide is what goes on the page, what stays off it, and how to do it by hand this term. - A parent who can't see progress assumes there isn't any. The report is the proof. - Five sections: what they worked on, how much, what improved by topic, what's next, a line from you. - Every second Friday. Weekly is noise, monthly is forgotten. - Leave out attendance percentages, jargon, anything that reads like a school report, and anything a parent has to log in to see. - The student who did nothing still gets a report. It's the shortest one and the one that gets a reply. - Twenty fortnightly reports become one term summary, and that's the re-enrolment conversation. ## Why a parent who can't see progress assumes there isn't any Think about what a parent sees of your centre. A drop-off on Tuesday. A pick-up ninety minutes later. Maybe a worksheet in a bag that comes back marked, sometimes, with a tick and no explanation. An invoice at the start of term. None of that shows progress. It shows attendance and cost. So when the parent asks themselves in Term 3 whether it's working, they have nothing to answer with except the school report, which measures something different, and their child's mood, which measures nothing. Silence isn't neutral. A parent who hears nothing doesn't assume things are fine. They assume nothing much is happening, because that's what nothing looks like from the outside. That's the whole retention problem in one sentence, and the [Term 4 retention playbook](/resources/guides/term-4-retention-playbook/) is built around it. The report is the fix because it gives the parent something to point to. Something to repeat to the other parent, a grandparent, a friend at the school gate. Something to reread when the re-enrolment form arrives. ## The five sections, in order A parent reads a report on their phone in about forty seconds. Five sections, in this order, fit that. | Section | What goes in it | What it does for the parent | |---|---|---| | What they worked on | The topics, named the way you'd name them. "Fractions of a quantity, equivalent fractions, adding with unlike denominators." | Tells them the ninety minutes had a shape. | | How much | Sets completed out of sets assigned. Questions attempted. Roughly how long. | Tells them whether the six days between sessions are being used. | | What improved | Accuracy by topic, before and after, in plain words. "Adding unlike denominators went from 1 in 4 to 2 in 3." | This is the proof. The only section they'll quote. | | What's next | The next topic or set, and when. "Two word-problem sets. We'll do the first one together on Tuesday." | Gives the fortnight a reason. | | A line from you | Two sentences in your words about this child. Signed with your name. | Reminds them a person is paying attention. | The [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/) is this layout on one page, with a filled example for a Year 6 maths student and the wording for each section. Order matters. Progress in the middle, where the eye lands. Your line at the end, where it's remembered. ## What improved: the section that does the work The third section is the one most centres get wrong, because it's the one that needs a number. "Priya is doing well" is nothing. It's what every centre says and it can't be repeated to anyone. "Priya's accuracy on adding fractions with unlike denominators went from about one in four to two in three, which is the skill we spent three Tuesdays on" is proof. It names the topic, it has a before and an after, and it links the improvement to something that happened in your room. That last part is the bit owners miss. The parent isn't only learning that their child improved. They're learning that the improvement came from you, on a named day, on a named skill. That's what they re-enrol for. To write it you need three things: the topic, a before, an after. By hand, that means recording what the student got on a set at the start of a topic and again at the end. If you don't have that, the report will tell you, because you'll sit down on Friday with nothing specific to say. That's worth knowing. It means work is going out and coming back and nobody is writing down what it showed. If you genuinely have nothing measurable this fortnight, say what you observed instead. "She's stopped guessing and started showing working" is an observation a parent can picture. Just don't dress it up as a result. ## Every second Friday, not weekly, not monthly The cadence is a decision, and most centres that start reporting get it wrong in one of two directions. | Cadence | What happens | Why it fails or works | |---|---|---| | Weekly | Four reports a month. The second one gets opened, the fourth doesn't. Nothing has changed in a week, so the report says so. | Noise. A parent learns the email can be skipped, and then skips the one that mattered. | | Monthly | Two or three reports a term. Each one covers so much that the specific gets lost. | Forgotten. By the next one the parent can't remember the last one, so there's no pattern. | | Every second Friday | Roughly five a term, twenty a year. Long enough for a topic to move, short enough to remember the last one. | A pattern the parent can see across a term. Rare enough that each one gets opened. | Friday because the fortnight's work is done and the parent reads it over the weekend. Every second one because a topic takes about that long to move from "not yet" to "mostly." By Term 4 a parent on a fortnightly rhythm has seen roughly twenty short reports. That's a different re-enrolment conversation from the one where they've seen four invoices. ## What to leave out The report gets shorter and better with every one of these removed. | Leave out | Why | |---|---| | Attendance percentages | The parent drove them there. They know. It reads as billing. | | Jargon | "Metacognitive strategies" and "scaffolded learning" tell a parent you're talking to someone else. Name the topic. | | Anything that reads like a school report | Marks, bands, rubric columns, a paragraph per subject. The parent already gets one of those and it didn't answer their question. | | Dashboards and charts | A parent doesn't want to interpret a graph on a phone. Say the number in a sentence. | | A login | If the report needs a password, it isn't a report. It's a task. Nothing to log in to, nothing to install. | | Comparisons with other students | Never. Even when they'd flatter this child. | | The invoice | Separate email, separate day. The report is proof; the invoice is a bill. Don't let one read as the other. | The test for every line: could the parent repeat this to someone at the school gate? If not, cut it. ## The report for the student who did nothing There's a temptation to skip the fortnight when nothing happened. Don't. That silence is exactly the signal a wobbling parent reads as "nothing much is going on." The report for the student who did nothing is short. What was assigned. That it wasn't done. What's due next and when. One line from you, without blame: "No sets came back this fortnight. Is something in the way? The next one is due Wednesday and I'd rather know than guess." It asks a question, which is why it's the one most likely to get a reply. You'll hear about a sport season, a sibling, a change of school, and sometimes the real thing: "we're not sure it's working." You want that conversation now, in writing, not in Term 4 as a form that doesn't come back. The [template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/) has the wording for this one on its last page. ## The term summary for re-enrolment Twenty fortnightly reports have a use beyond the fortnight. At the end of Term 3 they become one page: the topics covered this term, the improvement by topic from week one to week ten, and what Term 1 will start with. That page goes on top of the re-enrolment form. Proof first, ask second. A parent who has just read that their child's accuracy doubled on a named skill reads the form in a different mood from a parent who has opened a bill. By hand, the term summary is an hour per class with the fortnightly reports in front of you. The [re-enrolment email templates](/resources/templates/re-enrolment-email-templates/) have the covering note, including the version for the parent who's been quiet all term. ## From your address, with your logo The report comes from you. Your email address, your logo at the top, your name at the bottom, or your tutor's. Parents reply to you and the reply lands in your inbox. This matters more than it sounds. A parent who receives a report from a publisher's platform is being introduced to a brand. A parent who receives a report from your centre is being reminded who they chose. The relationship is the asset, and the report should carry your name on every line of it. The [for parents](/for-parents/) page is written for a parent to read on their own, and it describes what they should be receiving from whichever centre they're with. ## How to do it by hand this term None of this needs software. Here's the version that runs on a template and a Friday afternoon. | Step | When | How long | |---|---|---| | Print or copy the template, one per student | Week 1 | Ten minutes | | Record, per set, what each student scored by topic | As work comes back | A minute per sheet, if you write it down at the time | | Fill in the five sections for each student | Every second Friday | Five minutes per student once you've done a few | | Send from your email, with your logo in the header | Every second Friday, after class | A minute each | | Keep a copy per student | Same day | A folder | | Build the term summary from the copies | End of Term 3 | An hour per class | For a class of twelve that's about an hour every second Friday. For forty students it's a real job, and it's the point where most centres either delegate it to a senior tutor or stop. If you stop, the parents notice the silence more than they noticed the reports. The recording step is the one that decides whether the third section has a number in it. Write the score by topic down when you mark, not later. ## What changes on the platform By hand, the report is built from what you remember and what you wrote down. On the platform it's built from the work the student actually did. Every question a student answers is marked against your key and tagged to the topic and the page it came from. So the accuracy by topic, before and after, exists without anyone recording it. Sets completed out of sets assigned, questions attempted, time on task: the same. The two-sentence summary names the skill and the class where it was taught. What's next is whatever you assigned on Tuesday. Every second Friday it goes to each parent with your logo, from your address, with your tutor's name at the bottom. You can review each one before it sends and edit the summary in your own words, or let a class go automatically. Most owners read the first fortnight's closely and then trust them. The student who did nothing gets the gentle version, naming what's due. The term summary at the end of Term 3 is one click over the twenty that came before it. Parents never see our name, we never hold their details for any other purpose, and they don't get a login, because there's nothing to log in to. The report is the product. The [parent reports](/platform/parent-reports/) page has the rest. The plan stays the same as the by-hand version. The Friday afternoon comes out of it. ## This week Download the [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/) and fill it in for three students, by hand, from what you know today. If the third section has a number in it for all three, you're ready to send on Friday. If it doesn't, start recording scores by topic as this week's work comes back, and send the first report a fortnight from now. Put "every second Friday" in the diary for the rest of the term. Send from your own address. Sign it. ### A second campus without losing the program that built the first https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/opening-a-second-campus/ The lease is signed, the fit-out is booked, and the thing about to go wrong isn't the building. It's the program. At one site, the program is what you teach. You're in the room, you see a tutor skip the week 4 set and you fix it on Thursday. At two sites, the program becomes what each site remembers. Site two gets a copy of the folder, the site lead reads it their own way, the tutors take their own copies home, and by week 6 the two sites are teaching two versions of the same thing. Parents talk to each other across suburbs. They'll tell you which version is better before you've noticed there are two. This is the ninety-day plan for opening the second site without that happening. Everything in it can be done by hand this year. Where the platform makes a step automatic, it says so. - The consistency problem starts at the material, not the people. Freeze the program before you hire anyone. - The site lead teaches at site one for a month. Nobody learns a program from a folder. - Every family at both sites gets the same welcome, the same homework policy, the same words. - The opening month is a daily five-minute check and a weekly half-hour review. Then the first parent reports. - Five numbers every Friday, both sites side by side. A gap should show in a fortnight, not a term. ## Why the program drifts the moment there are two sites The program at your first site was never only the folder. It was the folder plus you. You wrote the sets, you know why week 3 comes before week 4, you know the sentence you say when a parent asks about the homework. None of that is written down, because it never needed to be. You were always in the room. A second site has the folder and not you. So the site lead fills the gaps from memory and instinct, which is what a good site lead does. The tutors fill their gaps the same way. Every gap filled differently is a small fork in the program, and after a term there are dozens. The tell is the photocopier. Site two starts with the same sheets as site one. Then a tutor annotates a set, copies the annotated version, and that becomes the site two version. Someone drops a page that "never worked" for them. Someone adds a sheet from a previous job. Growth meant more photocopying, and each copy is a slightly different program. You can't fix this by visiting more often. You fix it by making the material the thing that's consistent, so the people can vary the way people always will. ## The ninety days, in one table | When | Do this | Why it works | |---|---|---| | Ninety days out | Freeze the program. Every folder that site two will teach is final, versioned and in one central place. No site-specific copies. | There's now one thing to hand over instead of a drawer to interpret. | | Ninety days out | Audit what's in the folder. Mark what's yours, what's licensed, what's a mystery. | The second site inherits your rights position. Know it first. | | Sixty days out | Choose the site lead. They teach at site one for a month before opening. | The program is learned in the room, not from the folder. | | Sixty days out | Hire site two's tutors and run them through the same onboarding as site one. | Same non-negotiables, same first fortnight, same standard. | | Thirty days out | Write the welcome, the homework policy and the first-term words once. Both sites use them verbatim. | Parents compare notes. Give them nothing to compare. | | Opening week | A five-minute daily check with the site lead. | Small things surface while they're small. | | Opening month | A thirty-minute weekly review, walking the coming week's folder together. | The site lead stays on the program rather than beside it. | | Week 2 | The first parent reports go out from site two, in the same format as site one. | The parent's first proof arrives before their first worry. | | Every Friday | The scorecard: five numbers, both sites, side by side. | A gap shows in a fortnight, not at re-enrolment. | The [second campus launch checklist](/resources/templates/second-campus-launch-checklist/) is this table as a printable page with a box beside each line. Print it the day you sign the lease. ## Ninety days out: freeze the program Freezing the program means deciding that, from this date, there is one final version of every folder site two will teach, and that version lives in one place both sites read from. That's harder than it sounds, because most centres don't have one version. They have the version in the shared drive, the version in the filing cabinet, and the version in each tutor's bag. Step one is choosing which of those is the program. Step two is putting it somewhere central, named the way you say it: Year 6 Selective, Week 3, Ratios. Step three is the rule. No site-specific copies. Site two doesn't get a copy of the folder. It gets the folder. This is also the moment to know what's in it. Go through it with the [material audit worksheet](/resources/templates/material-audit-worksheet/): what exists, what state it's in, and whether you wrote it, licensed it, or aren't sure. A second site doubles your exposure on anything in the third category. Sort it out now, while it's one drawer, and confirm your position with your own adviser if anything's unclear. If you're thinking of putting the program on a platform, this is the week to do it, because the freeze is the conversion. One program, converted once from your material, published to every campus. Updated once, updated everywhere. The site-specific copy stops being a temptation because there's nothing to photocopy. ## Sixty days out: the site lead teaches at site one first The single most useful thing you'll do in the ninety days is this: whoever will run site two teaches at site one for a month before it opens. Not observes. Teaches. Takes the Year 6 Tuesday class from your material, sets the homework the way you set it, marks it against your key, handles the parent who emails on Wednesday. A month is long enough to hear the sentences you say without thinking, and those sentences are the program as much as the sets are. If the site lead is already one of your tutors, this is easy and you've probably already chosen them. If they're a hire from outside, build the month into the start date and pay for it. It's the cheapest month of the whole project. Site two's tutors go through the same first fortnight as anyone you hire for site one, using the same [tutor onboarding checklist](/resources/templates/tutor-onboarding-checklist/): Working with Children Check sighted and recorded before day one, one class shadowed, the folder read end to end, one set marked against the key and compared with your marking. The non-negotiables are the same at both sites, in the same words, signed. A second site is not the place to relax the standard because you're short. ## Thirty days out: the same words to every family Parents at site two will know parents at site one. Same schools, same sport, same group chat. From opening day, both sites are being compared, and the comparison is made on small things: the welcome letter, what was said about homework, what happens when a set isn't done. So write those things once and use them at both sites without variation. The welcome, one page. The [homework policy](/resources/templates/homework-policy-template/), one page: how much, by when, what to do when stuck, what the centre does when it's not done. The three sentences you say to a new family in the first conversation. Give the site lead the exact words and ask them to use them, at least for the first term. They can find their own voice once the program is steady. The first-term offer, if there is one, is the same at both sites. A better deal at the new site is the fastest way to make a site-one family feel like the old customer, and they'll say so, to you and to the group chat. ## Opening month: the daily check and the weekly review For the first four weeks, two rhythms. The daily check is five minutes, by phone or message, once the last class is out. Who came, what was taught, anything odd. It isn't supervision. It's the fastest way to hear that the Thursday class ran short of material or that a parent asked a question nobody could answer, while it's still a small thing. The weekly review is thirty minutes, sitting down with the site lead and walking the folder for the week ahead. Which set, which pages, what the tricky bit is, what you'd say. You're not checking up. You're keeping the site lead on the program rather than beside it, which is where every site lead drifts to without this. Then, in week 2, the first parent reports go out from site two, in exactly the format site one uses. What the child worked on, what improved, what's next, a line from the tutor, the centre's logo. The [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/) is the one-page version you can fill in by hand. The point is that site two's first parent proof arrives before site two's first parent worry, and that it looks identical to what site one's parents get. ## The Friday scorecard, both sites side by side From opening week, five numbers every Friday, on one page, in two columns. | Number | What it tells you | What a gap between sites means | |---|---|---| | Completion rate | Whether the six days between sessions are being used | The homework policy isn't being said the same way, or the sets aren't landing | | Class accuracy by topic | Whether the teaching landed | Same set, different results: someone is teaching it differently | | Parent reports sent | Whether proof is going out | Zero at one site is the first thing to fix, before anything else | | Students gone quiet for two weeks | Next term's losses, early | A new site's routine hasn't formed yet, so a quiet family there needs a call sooner | | Tutor hours | Whether the roster matches the plan | More hours for the same classes usually means someone is rewriting material | The point of the second column is that it makes a difference visible in the first fortnight. Without it, you find out at re-enrolment, in the parent's words, when one site's families renew and the other's don't. On paper this takes the site lead half an hour on a Friday. On the platform the owner view shows every class at every campus without anyone compiling it: completion, topics under pressure, students gone quiet, and the parent reports due. A second campus shows up as another column, not another login. ## What the platform changes Everything above works on paper. What changes when the program is on a platform is that the consistency stops depending on discipline. The program is converted once, from your material, and published to every campus. When you fix a question in week 3, it's fixed at both sites that evening. There are no site-specific copies because there's nothing to copy: a tutor at site two assigns the same Year 6 Week 3 set, from the same bank, that a tutor at site one assigns. Classes are per campus. Each site's tutors see their own classes and nobody else's. The owner sees across both. Parent reports go out from both sites on the same Friday, with the same logo, from the same address, with the improvement by topic pulled from what each student actually did. If a campus needs something of its own, an extension set for a strong group, it can add it, and it's visible only to that campus. The central program stays central. That's what the [multi-site groups](/for/multi-site-groups/) page walks through, and if you run a structured program across many classes already, the [coaching colleges](/for/coaching-colleges/) page covers the same problem at one site. Additional campuses are priced per site, on top of your base plan: $1,500 setup and $590 a month for each additional campus, in Australian dollars ex GST. The [pricing page](/pricing/) has the full table. Tutor logins are unlimited on every plan, which matters when the second site's roster is mostly casuals. The plan stays the same. The consistency stops being something you check and becomes something the [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/) shows you. ## This week Write the freeze date on the calendar: ninety days before opening, or today if you're already inside that. Choose which version of the folder is the program and put it in one place. Name the site lead, and book their month at site one. Open the [checklist](/resources/templates/second-campus-launch-checklist/), put it on the wall, and find the next line. ### Homework that actually comes back: the six days between sessions https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/homework-that-comes-back/ A student gets 90 minutes with you a week, and 8,910 waking minutes without you. Whatever happens in those 8,910 decides whether the 90 worked. For most centres, what happens is a photocopied sheet. It goes home in a bag on Tuesday, gets opened on Thursday, stalls at question 4, and comes back the following Tuesday half done, if it comes back. Then it sits in a pile until Sunday night, when the owner marks it, and the student hears about question 4 a fortnight after they got stuck on it. That's not a homework problem. It's a six-days problem, and it has four parts: what's expected, what happens when they're stuck, when it gets marked, and what you know on Monday. This guide takes them in order, and ends with how the six days turn into the thing a parent re-enrols on. - Paper homework comes back half done because nothing happens at the stuck moment and nothing happens when it isn't done. - Write the homework policy down: how much, by when, what to do when stuck, what happens if not done. One page, no shaming. - The 9pm moment is the whole six days. An explanation from your own page, or a closed book. - Marking at the moment of finishing is a different thing from marking on Sunday night, for the student and for you. - Monday's view of who did it and what the class got wrong is why Tuesday's lesson is better. It's also the parent report. ## Why paper homework comes back half done Trace one sheet. Tuesday, 5:30pm. The set goes into a bag. Thursday, 8:45pm. The bag comes out, because there's a maths test at school on Friday and the sheet is the only revision to hand. Questions 1 to 3 go fine. Question 4 uses a method from three weeks ago that the student has half forgotten. There's nobody to ask. The book closes. The following Tuesday, the sheet comes back with three questions done. Or it doesn't come back, because it's still in the bag, and the student says they did it. Either way, you don't know what happened at question 4, and you won't until you mark it, which is Sunday. Sunday, 10pm. Twelve sets, some half done. You mark them. Question 4 was wrong for eight of the twelve, which would have been useful to know before Tuesday's lesson, which has already happened. You write "see me" on eight sheets. Next Tuesday you'll go over it, two weeks after the class first saw it. Every step in that chain is reasonable. The chain is the problem. Nothing happens at the stuck moment, nothing happens when it isn't done, and the marking arrives too late to change the next lesson. Fix those three and the same sheet comes back. ## The homework policy, written down Most centres set homework every week and have never written down what they expect. So the student guesses, the parent guesses differently, and when a set isn't done nobody's sure whether that was a big deal. Write it on one page and send it with the enrolment pack. It needs five things. | Element | What to write | Why | |---|---|---| | Why | Your child gets 90 minutes a week with us and six days without us. What happens in the six days decides whether the 90 minutes worked. | The parent needs the reason before the rule | | How much | One practice set a week. Thirty to forty-five minutes, spread over two or three sittings. | A number a parent can hold a child to, and a child can plan around | | By when | Before the next session, or by Sunday night if you'd rather it's marked first. | A due date is a due date. "Before next week" isn't one | | When stuck | We'd rather they stop and ask than guess. Here's how. | The stuck moment is where sets die. Tell them what to do at it | | If not done | One missed set, a note. Two in a row, we'll call you. Not to tell anyone off. To find out what's in the way. | Follow-up without shaming. The call is expected, not a surprise | The [homework policy template](/resources/templates/homework-policy-template/) is this as a one-page layout with your logo at the top and a sign-and-return slip at the bottom. Re-send it at the start of every term, because families forget and new tutors invent their own version if there isn't one written down. The "when stuck" line is the one most centres leave blank, because on paper there's no honest answer. That's the next section. ## The stuck-at-9pm moment Everything about the six days turns on what happens when a student hits the question they can't do. Now, on paper: they close the book. Or they search for the topic and find a method you don't teach, learn it, and spend a term unlearning it. Or a parent tries to help, from memory of how they were taught, and the two of them argue. Or they copy the answer from a friend's sheet. What they don't do is ask you, because you're not there until Tuesday. ## An explanation from your own page, instead of a closed book With the platform, the set is on their phone, and next to the question they're stuck on is one tap for help. The first response is a hint about the method, drawn from your notes. If that's not enough, the second is a worked example from your material with different numbers. If they still need it, the third is the full solution, in your method, in the order you teach it. Every explanation says which document and page it came from. It can't answer from the open internet, can't invent a method you don't teach, and can't be talked into doing the homework. If your material doesn't cover something, it says so and suggests asking on Tuesday. And you can see, for every student and every question, how many hints they needed, which is often more useful than whether they got it right. The [stuck at 9pm](/platform/stuck-at-9pm/) page shows the three stages. The difference for the student is that question 4 gets done at 9:07pm on Thursday instead of being the reason the sheet stalled. The difference for you is that you know it was question 4 before Tuesday. ## Marking the moment it's finished, not Sunday night The second thing paper can't do is mark itself. On the platform, multiple choice, short answer, numeric and fill-in-the-gap questions are marked against your key the moment the student submits. Equivalent forms are recognised, so 1 3/20 and 23/20 both score where your key allows it, and you can require simplest form where it doesn't. Units are checked where your key specifies them. Working out still happens on paper, exactly as now. The answer goes in on the phone and gets marked; extended writing is typed or photographed, your choice. Nothing about how a student thinks through a problem changes. What changes is what happens the second they've finished. A wrong answer gets a worked solution straight away, not a red cross and a fortnight of silence. A right answer gets the solution too, so the student who guessed learns the method and the student who knew it moves on. Extended responses and essays go to the tutor with a suggested mark against your criteria, and the tutor's call is final. Any mark can be overridden, with a note the student sees. The [instant marking](/platform/instant-marking/) page has the detail. For the student, the feedback loop shrinks from a fortnight to a few seconds, at the moment they still remember what they were thinking. For you, Sunday night comes back. Put your own numbers into the [marking hours calculator](/resources/calculators/marking-hours/): students, sets per week, minutes per set. Multiply it out and see what the pile costs at the rate you charge for teaching. ## Monday morning: who did it, who didn't, what they got wrong The third thing paper can't do is tell you anything before you've marked all of it. Monday, 9am, before anyone walks in. The tutor dashboard shows the class as a grid of students against topics, coloured by how they went: strong, ok, weak, not attempted. One glance shows the topic eight of twelve missed and the two students who never opened the set. Click a cell to see a student's actual answers and how many hints they used. Click a topic to see the questions the class got wrong most, with your worksheet beside them. That's Tuesday's lesson, planned on Monday from what the class actually did rather than what you assumed they'd do. It's also two phone calls, made in week 3 instead of week 9. Tuesday's lesson is better for one reason: it starts where the class is. You walk in knowing question 4 was the problem and that it was the method from three weeks ago, not the new topic. Twenty minutes on that, then forward. Without the Monday view you'd have found out on Sunday, after Tuesday, or not at all. The [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/) page shows the class view and the owner view across every tutor. The other thing Monday shows is who's gone quiet. Two weeks with no completed work is the earliest warning of a family drifting, and it's listed without anyone compiling it. It's also the view that makes a new tutor useful. A casual who's never met the class can read the same grid and walk in knowing what to teach, which is most of what the [casual tutors guide](/resources/guides/casual-tutors-consistency/) is about. ## How the six days become the parent report Everything above produces a record: what was assigned, what was done, what was right, what needed a hint. That record is the fortnightly parent report, and it's the reason the six days matter to the business and not just the teaching. Every second Friday, each parent gets one page with your logo, from your address. Sets completed out of sets assigned. Questions attempted and time on task. Accuracy by topic, before and after, so an improvement is visible rather than claimed. A two-sentence summary that names the skill and the class where it was taught. What's next. Signed by the tutor. You can review each one and edit the summary in your own words, or let them go. If a student did nothing that fortnight, the report says so, gently, and names what's due. It's the follow-up line of the homework policy, delivered without a phone call. By Term 4 a parent has seen roughly twenty of them. That's a different re-enrolment conversation from the one where they've seen invoices, and the [Term 4 retention playbook](/resources/guides/term-4-retention-playbook/) is built on it. If four families re-enrol who otherwise wouldn't have, that pays for the platform. The [parent reports](/platform/parent-reports/) page shows one. ## What you can do on paper this term None of this needs a platform to start. It needs the policy and a rhythm. Write the policy this week and send it. Set one set, not three. Pick a marking day that's before the next lesson, not after it, even if that means Monday morning at the kitchen table rather than Sunday night. Keep a tally on Monday: who did it, who didn't, which question most of them got wrong. Write one line to each parent every second Friday from that tally. It's hours, every week, and most of it is the kind of work a platform built from your own material does on its own. But the rhythm is the thing, and the rhythm is yours to start. ## This week Write the homework policy on one page using the [template](/resources/templates/homework-policy-template/) and send it to every family. Fill in the "when stuck" line honestly, even if the honest answer is "ask on Tuesday" for now. Then, next Monday, count who brought the set back and which question stalled them. That number is what the six days are currently worth. ### Digitise fifteen years of material without losing a term https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/digitise-your-teaching-material/ Fifteen years of material is a filing cabinet, a shared drive with three versions of every folder, and a box of practice papers under the desk. The fear is that digitising it means a term of evenings with a scanner. It doesn't. The audit is an afternoon. The first batch is one folder, one class's material, and it comes back converted in about five business days. Everything else can follow when you've seen what the first folder became. This guide is the order to do it in, what to skip, and what happens after the upload. It's written for the owner who built the material and is the only person who knows where everything is. - Audit before you scan. What exists, what state it's in, whose it is. An afternoon with the worksheet. - Start with your best folder, not your biggest. One subject at one year level. - If you'd photocopy from it, it will convert. Straight, 300 dpi, whole page. - Leave handwriting and angled phone photos in the drawer. Re-scan or retype later, or never. - Record the rights basis per document now, while you still know the answer. - One class's material converts in about five business days, a whole centre's in ten to fifteen. Then you approve, assign and report. ## Audit first, scan second The mistake most owners make is to start scanning. The scanner is right there, the Year 6 folder is on top, and by 9pm there are forty PDFs named scan0001 to scan0040 and no idea what's in them. Do the audit first. Take the [material audit worksheet](/resources/templates/material-audit-worksheet/), sit down with the drive and the drawer, and answer three questions for each folder. | Question | What you're recording | Why it matters later | |---|---|---| | What exists? | Year level, subject, format (PDF, Word, scan, paper) | Tells you what to convert first and what to skip | | What state is it in? | Clean, needs a re-scan, unusable | Saves you converting a folder that will come back flagged | | Whose is it? | Wrote it, licensed it, copied it under a licence, not sure | The one question you can't answer later from a PDF | You don't need to open every file. A folder of typed worksheets you wrote in 2019 gets one line. A box of photocopies from a textbook gets one line and a note in the rights column. The point is a page you can look at and see the shape of what you've got. Most owners find the same thing: three or four folders that are the heart of the centre, a lot of duplicates, and a long tail of one-off sheets nobody has used since the tutor who made them left. ## The start-here rule Start with the folder you'd show a parent. Not the biggest one, not the oldest, not the one for the year level with the most students. The one you're proudest of, where the sequence is right, the answer keys are complete and the pages are typed. There are two reasons. The first is that a clean folder converts cleanly, so the first thing you see on the platform is your material at its best, in your order, marked against your answer keys. That's the moment you decide whether this is worth doing for the rest of the drawer, and a tired photocopy would decide it for you. The second is that your best folder is the one your students most need between sessions. It's the program you'd want working on a Tuesday night. Convert that first and it's earning its keep while the second folder is being scanned. One subject at one year level, a term's worth. That's one class's material, and it's the shape the pilot is built around. The [upload and convert](/platform/upload-and-convert/) page goes through what comes back. ## Scan quality: if you'd photocopy from it, it converts Most of the questions we get about scanning have one answer. If you'd be happy to photocopy a page and hand the copy to a student, it will convert. If you'd wince at the copy, it won't. In practice that means four things, and an office copier does all four by default. | Scan | What it looks like | What happens | |---|---|---| | Straight, flat, 300 dpi, whole page, no shadow | A clean office copier scan of a typed sheet | Converts almost perfectly. Scores high on fidelity. | | Slightly skewed, or a faint photocopy of a photocopy | A tired sheet that's been through three tutors | Converts, but pages get flagged for a re-scan. Adds a day or two. | | Phone photo at an angle, page cut off, shadow across it | Someone stood over the desk with a phone | Flagged at upload. Re-scan before it goes any further. | | Handwritten notes, annotated worksheets | Your Tuesday board notes, a marked-up key | Usually doesn't convert. Retype the parts that matter or leave it. | Each document gets a fidelity score before anything is made from it. A clean typed worksheet scores in the high nineties. A skewed photocopy scores lower, and the pages that need a re-scan are named, so you re-scan those pages rather than the folder. Nothing below the line is silently accepted and converted badly. There's a short [glossary entry on scan quality](/resources/glossary/scan-quality/) if you want the settings written down for whoever's doing the scanning. Maths gets a specialist step so that fractions, exponents and symbols come through as maths rather than as a string of characters. Diagrams and graphs are captured with the question they belong to. You don't need to do anything different for a maths folder, but it's worth knowing that a clean scan of a formula-heavy page is what makes that step work. ## What not to bother with Some material isn't worth digitising, and knowing that in the audit saves a weekend. Handwriting, first. Your own annotations, a tutor's marked-up answer key, board notes photographed after class. The conversion can't read it reliably, and you'd spend longer fixing the result than retyping the two rules that mattered. If a handwritten sheet is genuinely the only copy of something you teach every term, retype it. Otherwise leave it. Phone photos taken at an angle, second. They're the most common thing in a shared drive and the least useful. A scanning app on the same phone, held flat over the page, produces something usable. The photo from the doorway doesn't. Duplicates, third. The audit will show you three versions of the Year 9 fractions sheet. Pick one. The platform reproduces whichever you upload, faithfully, and three near-identical sets is confusing for a student and a tutor. Material you're not sure you have the rights to, fourth, until you are sure. That's the next section. If the folder you want to start with is paper and the scanner is the problem, say so on the walkthrough. Scanning a box of paper is something we scope with you first, and it exists for the centre whose best material is in that box. ## Rights, one line per document Every document that goes on the platform records where it came from. Not because we'll check it, but because the first time anyone asks, you want the answer written down already. There are four honest answers, and the [material rights register](/resources/templates/material-rights-register/) is a grid for recording them. | You... | Rights basis | On the platform | |---|---|---| | Wrote it yourself | Yours. No licence needed. | Upload it. | | Licensed it from a publisher | Licensed. Record the terms. | Upload within the terms. | | Copied it from a published text | Statutory Education Licence in Australia, within its limits. Different in New Zealand. | Record the licence and the limit. Confirm with your adviser. | | Aren't sure | Not sure. | Find out before use. Don't upload yet. | The audit is the moment to do this. You're already looking at each folder, and you know which ones you wrote in 2019 and which came from a book. In a year, looking at a PDF, you won't. The licence position in Australia and the different position in New Zealand are described in [the Statutory Education Licence guide](/resources/guides/statutory-education-licence-tutoring-centres/). It isn't legal advice and neither is this. If a folder is in the third or fourth row, the answer comes from the Copyright Agency or your own adviser, not from us. ## Name folders the way you teach The structure your students and tutors see on the platform is the structure you upload. If your drive says Year 6 Selective, Week 3, Ratios, that's what appears. Not board, grade, subject, chapter. Not someone else's syllabus. So the folder names matter, and the audit is when to fix them. Three rules that hold up. Name by how you'd say it to a tutor. "Year 9 Maths, Term 2, Week 4, Linear equations" is a name a new casual tutor can find on their first day. "LinEq_final_v3_USE THIS ONE" isn't. Keep the week or the sequence in the name. Your material has an order, and that order is most of what makes it yours. A folder where the sequence lives in the filenames converts into a program. A folder where the sequence lives in your head converts into a pile. Keep answer keys next to the sheets they answer. Same folder, matching name. The conversion marks your questions against your key, and where your worksheet states an answer, the platform's has to match it or the item is flagged in red. A key that's in a different folder under a different name is a key that has to be matched by hand. None of this is a big job. It's an hour of renaming, once, and it's the difference between your platform reading like your centre and reading like a download folder. ## A realistic turnaround The question behind "how long does this take" is usually "how long until I can use it." Here's the honest shape. | Stage | Who | How long | |---|---|---| | Audit | You, with the worksheet | An afternoon | | Renaming and picking the first folder | You | An hour | | Scanning, if the folder is paper | You or a tutor at the copier | An evening for one class's folder | | Upload | You | Ten minutes | | Conversion of one class's material | Us | About five business days | | A whole centre's material | Us | Ten to fifteen business days | | Approval | You, or a tutor you delegate to | An hour for a clean batch, longer if you edit | | Assigning the first set | You | Three clicks | Poor scans add time, because we ask for re-scans of the flagged pages before converting rather than after. That's the one stage that stretches, and the audit is how you avoid it. Setup converts everything you currently teach, on every plan, so there's no allowance to size the cabinet against, and material you add later for your enrolled students is included. The [pricing page](/pricing/) has the figures. ## What comes back, and the step before students see it A converted folder comes back as a batch. Practice questions in the same order as your worksheet, marked against your answer key. A worked solution for every question that follows the method in your notes. Short explanations drawn from your notes. Flashcards from your rule boxes. Timed sets from your practice papers. Every item tagged to the topic and the page it came from. The conversion only ever works from your pages. It can't fill a gap from outside your material, and an item that can't be traced to a page is rejected before you see it. Then it waits for you. Everything lands in an approval queue with the source page beside it, and nothing publishes until you say so. Where your worksheet had an answer key, each item shows whether the platform's answer matches it. Mismatches are flagged in red. Most of the time the worksheet is the one that's wrong, and now you know. Approve in bulk when a batch is clean. Edit the wording of anything you'd phrase differently, and your edit is what publishes. Bin what you don't want. Most owners read the first folder's batch closely and approve the second in bulk. The [approve before publish](/platform/approve-before-publish/) page has the detail, including how to give a senior tutor approval rights for their own year level. ## After approval: assign, mark, report This is the part the audit was for. Tuesday, after class, you pick the class, the set and the due date. Three clicks, and the week's work from your material is on every student's phone. Wednesday to Sunday they work through it. It's marked the moment they submit, with a worked solution in your method. A student stuck at 9pm taps once and gets an explanation from your page, with the page it came from. Monday morning the dashboard shows who did it, who didn't, and the topic eight of twelve got wrong. That's Tuesday's lesson. Every second Friday each parent gets a one-page report with your logo, from your address: what their child worked on, what improved by topic, what's next. The folder that was doing nothing between Tuesdays is now doing all of that, and you haven't written a word you didn't already have. ## This week Print the [material audit worksheet](/resources/templates/material-audit-worksheet/) and block out an afternoon. Walk the drive and the drawer. Fill in the three columns for each folder, and put a star next to the one you'd show a parent. Rename that folder the way you'd say it to a tutor, check the answer keys are in it, and pull out a term's worth. One subject at one year level is your first batch. If the folder is paper, book the copier for an evening. Don't scan anything else yet. ### Casual tutors and the consistency problem https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/casual-tutors-consistency/ The roster changes every term. The program shouldn't. The university student who was brilliant on Saturdays graduates. The Thursday tutor takes a full-time job. A friend of a friend starts in week 3 because you were short. Every term, some of the people teaching your program are new to it, and every one of them teaches it slightly differently. Parents notice before you do. "She was doing better with the other tutor" is the sentence, and it's not really about the tutor. It's about the program having become whatever the person in the room remembers of it. This guide is about fixing that at the material rather than the person, because you can't hire your way out of it. It covers why the variation happens, the first fortnight for a new tutor, the four non-negotiables, and what changes when the material is on a platform a casual tutor can use in week one. - Quality varies by who's rostered because each tutor teaches from memory and their own sheets. - The fix is one bank of your material, the same sets, the same marking, the same report, whoever's in the room. - A new tutor's first fortnight is planned: before day one, day one, week one, week two. - Four non-negotiables, written down and signed. Child safety, phones, parent contact, your material. - On a platform a casual tutor is useful in week one: assign in three clicks, read the heatmap. ## Why quality varies by who's rostered Hand a new tutor the Year 6 folder and a room, and here's what actually happens. They read the folder once, maybe. They teach the first class from it. By the third class they're teaching from memory of the folder, plus the way they were taught the topic at school, plus a sheet they made at their last job that "explains it better". By week 6 the Thursday version of Year 6 is a different program from the Saturday version, and both are different from yours. None of this is bad faith. It's what any capable person does when given a folder and told to teach. The gaps in the folder get filled from instinct. The bits that don't suit their style get quietly replaced. The marking drifts, because they're marking against their own sense of the answer rather than your key. And the parent report, if there is one, reflects whichever tutor wrote it, in whichever words came to mind that week. Two tutors, same year level, same folder, different results. The parents compare, because parents talk, and the comparison lands on you as inconsistency. It's a hard complaint to answer, because the honest answer is "it depends who's rostered". ## The fix is at the material, not the person You can raise your hiring bar, and you should. It won't fix this. A better tutor teaching from memory is still teaching from memory. What fixes it is making the material the constant. One bank of your material, in one place, that every tutor teaches from. The same sets, in the same order, assigned the same week. Marking against your key, so a right answer is right whoever's marking. One parent report format, with the same five things in it, whoever signs it. When that's true, the tutor's variation shrinks to delivery: how they explain it, how they run the room, how they handle the kid who's behind. That's the variation you hired them for. It's the variation in what's taught, what's marked and what's reported that damages you, and none of that needs to depend on the person. This is the whole argument on the [coaching colleges](/for/coaching-colleges/) page: the program is the asset and the roster changes every term, so put the program somewhere the roster can't rewrite it. The same logic is what breaks when a second site opens. One roster's worth of drift is a nuisance; two sites' worth is two programs with your name on both. The [second campus guide](/resources/guides/opening-a-second-campus/) is the ninety-day version of this one. ## The first fortnight for a new tutor Most centres onboard a new tutor with a chat and a folder. Two weeks with a plan is not much more work, and it's the difference between a tutor who's useful in week 2 and one who's still improvising in week 8. | When | What happens | What you're checking | |---|---|---| | Before day one | Working with Children Check sighted and recorded. Material access set up for their classes only. The homework policy and the program outline sent, with one set to mark against the key before they arrive. | They've read something before they walk in, and their marking is close to yours | | Day one | Shadow one class. Read the folder for their year level end to end. Mark one set against the key and compare it with how you marked it. | Whether they've absorbed the sequence, and where their marking diverges | | Week one | Teach one class with the owner present for the first twenty minutes. Set the week's homework. Field the first parent question, through the centre. | The opening, the pace, whether the homework was set the way the policy says | | Week two | A fifteen-minute review. "What confused you about our material?" Write the answer into the folder. | Whether the folder has a gap, and whether the tutor is on the program or beside it | The [tutor onboarding checklist](/resources/templates/tutor-onboarding-checklist/) has this as four pages with a box beside each line. Use it every time you hire, including the friend of a friend. ## Day one is reading, not teaching Day one is the day most centres skip. The new tutor arrives, there's a class in ten minutes, and they're in the room. Don't. Day one is shadowing one class and reading the folder end to end, in that order. Watching you or a senior tutor teach from the folder shows them what the material looks like in a room. Reading the folder afterwards, all of it, shows them where this week sits in the sequence and why week 3 comes before week 4. Then the marking check. Give them one completed set and the key, ask them to mark it, and compare it with your marking of the same set. The differences tell you where their sense of the answer diverges from yours before it's reached a student. It takes twenty minutes and it's the highest-value twenty minutes in the fortnight. ## Week two: write the confusion into the folder The week two review is fifteen minutes and one question: what confused you about our material? Every new tutor finds something. A set where the instructions assume a method from two weeks earlier. A key with an answer in a form you'd never accept from a student. A worksheet with the page order wrong. They'll have worked around it quietly, which is the problem: the workaround is the first fork in the program. Write the answer into the folder. Fix the set, or add the note, so the next tutor doesn't find the same thing. After a few hires the folder stops having those gaps, which is the point. On a platform, this is an edit in the approval queue, and every tutor sees the corrected version that evening. The review is also where you decide. A tutor who's on the program by week two, with questions about the material rather than around it, is one you roster more. One who's already teaching from their own sheets is a conversation, now, not in week 8 when a parent raises it. ## The non-negotiables Four rules, written down, signed before the first shift, the same for the senior tutor and the friend of a friend. | Rule | What it means in practice | |---|---| | Working with Children Check sighted and recorded | The check itself, its number and its expiry, in your register before day one. Not "they said they've got one". This isn't legal advice: confirm what your state or New Zealand requires and follow it exactly. | | Phones | Away during class. The student's phone is for the practice set, not for messaging, and the tutor's is in a bag. | | Parent contact only through the centre | No personal numbers exchanged, no direct messages, no private lessons for your families. Every parent conversation goes through the centre's address or the centre's phone. | | Material stays in the centre | No copies on a personal drive, no folder in a bag, no sheet taken to the next job. Your material is the business, and it's the thing most likely to walk out with a departing casual. | The last one is the hardest to police on paper, because paper can be copied. On the platform a tutor sees only the classes they're assigned to, and what a student sees is watermarked to that student. The material can be taught from by anyone rostered and taken by nobody. The [homework policy](/resources/templates/homework-policy-template/) is the fifth thing to hand over before day one. It's one page, and it tells a new tutor what the centre has already promised the family about the six days, so they don't invent a different promise. ## Useful in week one: the tutor dashboard The reason a casual tutor takes a term to become useful is that they don't know the material well enough to set the right work, and they don't know the students well enough to teach to them. A platform built from your material shortens both. Setting the week's work is three clicks: the class, the set, the due date. The set already exists, named the way you say it, in the sequence you wrote. A tutor in week one doesn't need to know the folder to assign Year 6, Week 3, Ratios. They need to know it's week 3. The [classes and assignments](/platform/classes-and-assignments/) page shows the three clicks. Marking is against your key, the moment a student submits. The new tutor's marking is your marking, because they're not doing it. Extended responses come to them with a suggested mark against your criteria, and they make the call. ## Reading the heatmap on Monday The class heatmap is a grid of students against topics, coloured strong, ok, weak or not attempted. Ten seconds to read. It tells a tutor who's never met the class that eight of twelve missed the same topic and two didn't open the set. That's Tuesday's lesson and two phone calls, and it's more than most tutors know about a class after a term. They can click a cell to see a student's actual answers and how many hints they needed at 9pm. The [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/) shows a tutor their own classes and nothing else. The owner sees every class and every tutor, which means you know on Monday whether the Thursday tutor set the work, without asking. ## Delegating approval rights to a senior tutor Everything made from your material goes through an approval queue before a student sees it, with the source page beside each item. By default the owner holds that. For most centres that's right for the program itself. Day to day, though, a senior tutor can hold approval rights for their own year level. They approve the batch for Year 9, edit a question's wording, bin the one that doesn't fit, and publish. What they approve is still traced to the page it came from. The [approve before publish](/platform/approve-before-publish/) page covers delegation by class. That's the line to draw. Casual tutors assign and teach. Senior tutors approve for their year level. The owner approves the program. The material never depends on any of them. On logins: unlimited on every plan, so every casual gets their own and nobody shares a password. ## This week Write the four non-negotiables on one page and have every current tutor sign it, not just the next hire. Print the [onboarding checklist](/resources/templates/tutor-onboarding-checklist/) and put it with the enrolment paperwork. Then pick the one folder every tutor is meant to teach from and check it's actually the one in the drawer, not three versions of it. ### AI in a tutoring centre: what to use and what to avoid https://studypro.com.au/resources/guides/ai-in-tutoring-centres/ Every owner has two fears about AI, and neither is silly. The first is that it replaces the tutors. The second is that it makes things up. Both are reasonable because both have happened somewhere, and because the loudest pitches in this space promise the first and ignore the second. This is the honest version. What a general chatbot is good for, what it can't do for a centre, what "makes things up" means in plain words, and the two rules that make any of it safe when it's under your logo. Where the platform is mentioned, it's to say what it won't do as much as what it will. - A general chatbot is a tool for the owner: one PDF, tonight, alone. Use it for that. - It can't run students, classes, marking by topic or a parent report, and it doesn't keep your material private by default. - Hallucination is a fluent, confident, wrong answer. Under your logo, it's your answer. - Two rules make it safe: every item cites its page, and you approve before a student sees anything. - Ask any vendor four questions. Train on my material? Can another centre see it? What happens to it if I stop paying? Who approves? ## The two fears, and why both are reasonable "It replaces my tutors." Parents pay for the person in the room. That's the product, and it's the reason your centre exists rather than a subscription to a study app. Anything that suggests the person in the room is optional is a threat to the business, and the owner who hears "AI tutor" and reaches for the door is reading it correctly. "It makes things up." You've probably seen this yourself. You put a worksheet into a chatbot, asked it a question, and it answered fluently with a method you don't teach, or a number that wasn't on the page. It didn't hesitate. It never does. Now imagine that answer on a phone at 9pm with your logo above it, and a parent asking on Tuesday why the centre told their child to do it that way. Neither fear is about the technology. Both are about what it's allowed to do, and who's responsible when it does it. That's the frame for the rest of this guide. Nothing appears in your platform that didn't come from a page you uploaded, and nothing reaches a student until you've said yes. ## What a general chatbot is good for For you, tonight, with one PDF, use it. You'll learn something. Reading a long document and asking questions of it. Drafting an outline for a new worksheet you'll write yourself. Rewording a parent email that's come out harsher than you meant. Summarising a syllabus change you haven't had time to read. A sounding board at 10pm when there's nobody else in the building. Those are real uses and they cost almost nothing. The owner who uses a chatbot this way for a month usually comes out of it with a sharper sense of what the tool is: a very fast, very confident assistant with no memory of your centre, no accounts for your students, and no sense of what's true. The [comparison with ChatGPT and NotebookLM](/compare/chatgpt-and-notebooklm/) goes through this line by line. The short version is that a chatbot is a tool for the owner, and a platform is a system for the centre. ## What it can't do for a centre The gap opens the moment there's more than one person involved. | What a centre needs | A general chatbot | What it takes | |---|---|---| | 120 students on their own logins, in their classes | One chat window per person, no accounts for your centre | Every student in the class they're actually in | | A set assigned to a class with a due date | No | Class, set, due date, three clicks | | Marking by topic, every answer tracked | No | Every answer marked against your key, fed to a class heatmap | | A parent report with your logo, from your address | No | Every second Friday, automatically, edited by you if you want | | Your material kept private | Depends on the plan and the settings you chose | Your centre's space isolated from every other centre's, no reuse, no training, in the contract | | Hints rather than answers | It will do the homework if asked | A hint, then a worked example, then the solution, with the tutor seeing how many were used | None of those rows is about intelligence. They're about plumbing: accounts, classes, marking, reports, isolation. A chatbot can't be prompted into having them, and an owner who tries usually loses a term working out how to get the results back from 120 students on 120 separate chats. ## Hallucination, in plain words A hallucination is a fluent, confident answer that isn't in the sources or isn't true. It happens because a general chatbot is built to answer everything. Ask it about a worksheet it has and it answers. Ask it about a worksheet it doesn't have and it still answers, in the same tone, because producing a plausible answer is what it does. It has no reliable way of telling you which of the two it just did. In a tutoring context, the risk is specific. A made-up question that looks like yours. A method that isn't the one in your notes. An answer that contradicts your own key. Any of those, delivered to a student, is bad. Delivered with your logo on it, it's yours. When the parent asks why, you can't point to the worksheet it came from, because it didn't come from one. That's the whole reason [hallucination](/resources/glossary/hallucination/) matters more in a centre than it does for an owner at a laptop. At the laptop, you're the check. On a student's phone, there is no check unless one was built in. ## Rule one: grounding, or every item cites its page Grounding is the constraint that the system may only produce something supported by a specific set of documents, and must say which document and which page. On the platform it works like this. You upload your material. Every practice question, worked solution, explanation and flashcard that comes out of it carries a reference to the source document and page it was built from. Anything that can't be traced to a page is rejected before you ever see it. Not flagged. Rejected. That's what makes the sentence "it came from your worksheet" true rather than a slogan. When a question looks wrong, you click through to the page. Usually the worksheet had the error, and now you know. When a student gets an explanation at 9pm, it cites the document and page, and a parent or tutor can check it against the original in one tap. If your material doesn't cover something, the platform says so and suggests bringing it to the next session. It never fills the gap from outside your pages. The [glossary entry on grounding](/resources/glossary/grounding/) has the plain definition; the [upload and convert](/platform/upload-and-convert/) page shows where the citation sits on each item. ## Rule two: you approve before a student sees anything Grounding stops the system inventing. Approval stops anything reaching a student that you haven't looked at. Every converted document lands in a queue as a batch: questions, solutions, explanations, flashcards. Each item shows its source page beside it. Where your worksheet had an answer key, the item shows whether the platform's answer matches it, and a mismatch is flagged in red for you to resolve. Usually the worksheet is the one that's wrong. You approve in bulk when a batch is clean. You edit the wording of anything you'd phrase differently, and your edit is what publishes. You bin what you don't want. Students see only what's been approved, and that's by design, not by a setting someone could flip. If you'd rather delegate, a senior tutor can hold approval rights for their own year level. Most owners read the first few documents closely and then approve in bulk once they trust the conversion of their own material. The [approve before publish](/platform/approve-before-publish/) page walks through the queue. It's the step in a walkthrough where the platform stops being an AI tool and becomes your material, organised. ## Hints before answers, so it won't do the homework The third fear, usually unspoken, is that the student will use it to cheat. So the help a stuck student gets is staged. The first response is a hint about the method, drawn from your notes. The second is a worked example from your material with different numbers. The third is the full solution. Most students never need the third, and the tutor can see how many hints each student used on each question. It won't write an essay. It won't do a whole set. It can't be talked into answering from the open internet, and it can't invent a method you don't teach, because it has nothing to draw from except your pages. The [stuck at 9pm](/platform/stuck-at-9pm/) page shows the three stages on a phone. ## What to ask any vendor Whoever you're talking to, including us, these are the questions. The answers should be short. | Question | The answer you want | Why it matters | |---|---|---| | Do you train on my material? | No, and it's in the contract, not the sales pitch | Your material is your edge. Training on it means it's now in someone else's product | | Can another centre ever see it? | No. Your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, and your material is never shared with or reused for anyone else | Look for that sentence in the contract, not the brochure | | What happens to my material if I stop paying? | Access ends, their copies are deleted within a stated period and confirmed in writing, and you still hold the originals you uploaded copies of | The alternative is a supplier holding the only good copy | | Who approves an item before a student sees it? | You, or a tutor you've named | If the answer is "nobody", the logo on the mistake is yours | | Where do explanations come from? | Only my pages, with the page cited | Anything else is the open internet with your name on it | | Where is it hosted? | A named country | Which privacy law applies, and how fast a request is answered | | Do you contact my parents? | Never | The parent relationship is the business | For this platform, the answers are no, no, any day, you, only your pages, Australia, and never. The [security and ownership](/security/) page has each one in writing, including the commitment we hold our own providers to. This is a description of what exists, not legal advice; anything about your privacy or copyright obligations is a question for your own adviser. ## What's deliberately not built Some of what makes AI safe in a centre is what's left out. There are no video lessons. Your tutors are the video, and that's what parents pay for. The platform covers the days when the tutor isn't there, not the ninety minutes when they are. There's no student-to-student messaging and there are no public profiles. Tutor-to-student messages are a setting for your centre, off by default, and you decide whether they're on. Your child-safety answer stays one sentence long. There's no material of ours. The moment a platform ships a question it wrote, it owns that question's quality forever, and so does every centre that published it. Nothing appears in your platform that didn't come from a page you uploaded. The [roadmap](/roadmap/) lists these under "not planned", with the reasons, because a buyer should be able to see what a supplier has decided against. ## This week Put one worksheet into a general chatbot tonight and ask it three questions about the page. Write down where it answered from outside the page, or answered confidently and wrong. That's your own evidence of what the fear is about. Then take the vendor questions above to anyone selling you anything with "AI" in it. Seven answers, in writing, before a single page of your material goes anywhere. ## Blog ### Why parents leave in Term 4, and it isn't your teaching https://studypro.com.au/blog/why-parents-leave-in-term-4/ Ask a parent who didn't come back and you'll hear one of three sentences. Not one of them is about your teaching. ## "We weren't sure it was making a difference." This one stings, because you know it was. You saw the change in the room. The parent didn't, because the parent wasn't in the room, and nothing came out of the room that they could look at. A parent judges tutoring the way anyone judges something they pay for and can't see: by whatever evidence turns up. For most centres that's a school report they didn't write, a child who says "fine" when asked, and an invoice. Against that, "not sure" is the honest answer. ## "She was doing the work but we never heard anything." Work went home, came back, got marked, went into a bag. Somewhere in that loop was information the parent would have paid to see: what she got wrong, what she got right, what changed since March. Nobody told them, because nobody had a reason to, because the marking was done at 10pm and the record was a tick on a sheet. This parent isn't unhappy. They're uninformed, and an uninformed parent renews on habit until the habit breaks. ## "It just lapsed over the holidays." Six weeks with no contact. The routine goes, the child stops thinking about it, and by late January the parent has found a reason not to restart. Not a decision so much as a drift. ## What the three have in common Every one of them is about what the parent could see between sessions. Which is nothing. Ninety minutes a week in the room, and six days of silence. The fix isn't better teaching. It's proof: short, regular, specific, in writing, from you. A parent who has seen twenty short reports across a year, each one naming a skill that improved, walks into Term 4 with a reason. A parent who has seen invoices walks in with a question. ## What to do this week Write to every parent, one page, about what improved this term. Name the skill. Sign it. Send it before the re-enrolment form, not with it. The [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/) has the layout and a filled example, and the [Term 4 retention playbook](/resources/guides/term-4-retention-playbook/) has the rest of the calendar. If you'd rather the report wrote itself from the work your students actually did, from your own material, that's what [the fortnightly report on StudyPro](/platform/parent-reports/) is. Same idea. No Sunday night. ### Term fees and the re-enrolment moment https://studypro.com.au/blog/term-fees-and-the-re-enrolment-moment/ Your fee structure decides when parents think about leaving. A per-term invoice puts that question in front of every family four times a year, and the parent answers it with whatever they've seen since the last one. ## The invoice is a decision point Most centres bill by the term. Ten weeks in advance, one invoice, due before week one. It's sensible: it matches the school calendar, it's easy to reconcile, and it gives you the cash before the term starts. It also creates a moment. Four times a year a parent opens an email with a dollar figure in it and asks the only question that matters to them: is this worth it? They answer it in about thirty seconds, with whatever evidence is to hand. For most centres that evidence is the last invoice, a school report the centre didn't write, and a child who says "fine" when asked. Against that, the invoice is a bill, and a bill is something you can decide not to pay. Monthly direct debit spreads the moment out. The decision is smaller and more frequent, and it tends to get made at the same time anyway: January, when the debit for a term nobody's started yet lands. The mechanism is the same. What differs is how many times a year you get to put proof in front of it. Nothing about this is wrong with per-term billing. The problem is what arrives before it, which is usually nothing. ## Four moments, and the two that count Not all four invoices are equal. | Invoice | What the parent is weighing | What makes it easy | |---|---|---| | Term 1 | Whether to restart after six weeks off | A booked slot, a confirmed start date, a note about week 1 | | Term 2 | Whether the first term did anything | The first written proof of progress | | Term 3 | Habit, mostly | A report they've started to expect | | Term 4 | Whether to commit to next year | A term summary that names what improved | The Term 4 invoice is the one where the whole year is on the table, because it travels with the re-enrolment form. But the Term 1 invoice is the one that quietly loses the most families, because it arrives after the longest silence. A parent who has heard nothing since November is being asked to restart, not continue, and restarting is a bigger decision. If you only change one thing about your billing, change what goes out before Term 4 and Term 1. ## Proof before the invoice, not with it Here's the pattern that works, whatever your fee structure: the parent reads something about their child before they read a dollar figure. Two weeks before the invoice, send the progress note. One page. What their child worked on this term, what got better, specifically, and what's next. Not "Arjun is doing well". "Arjun's accuracy on two-step word problems went from about one in three to three in four, which is the skill we spent three Wednesdays on." Sign it with your name. Then the invoice, with a one-line reminder of what the note said. Then the deadline, with a reason: "so I can hold his Wednesday spot." The order is the whole trick. A parent who has just read that a named skill doubled is reading the invoice in a different mood from a parent who has opened a bill cold. The [re-enrolment email templates](/resources/templates/re-enrolment-email-templates/) have this sequence written out, including the version for the parent who has been quiet all term. If you send a fortnightly report through the year, the note before the Term 4 invoice is a summary of twenty reports the parent has already seen. If you don't, it's the first written word they've had from you that wasn't a bill. Either way, it goes first. ## Confirm the Term 1 slot in writing The re-enrolment form says yes. That's not the same as being enrolled. A family with a signed form and nothing else has an intention. A family with a signed form, a confirmed class, a named day and time and a start date has a booking. Bookings survive January. Intentions don't. So in the last week of Term 4, every returning family gets one short message: "Confirming Maya in Year 6 Maths, Tuesdays at 4:30, starting 3 February. See you then." Written, not said at the door. A parent forwards it to the other parent, it goes on the fridge, and in late January when the routine has gone and the child is grumbling, there's a specific thing to not cancel rather than a vague thing to not restart. The [Term 4 retention playbook](/resources/guides/term-4-retention-playbook/) puts this on the calendar with everything around it. The confirmation is the last line before the holidays. ## What it's worth If a dozen families don't come back after Term 4, a year of their fees walked out over a summer, and most of Term 1 goes on replacing it. The [retention cost calculator](/resources/calculators/retention-cost/) does that arithmetic with your own figures. The billing change itself costs nothing. It's a note two weeks earlier and a confirmation one week later. A few retained families pays for a platform that sends the note every fortnight. The by-hand version costs an afternoon. ## What to do this week Find the date your Term 4 invoices go out. Move the progress note to two weeks before it. Draft the confirmation message for the last week of term, with a blank for the class, day, time and start date. If you'd rather the note wrote itself from the work your students actually did, from your own material, that's what [the fortnightly report](/platform/parent-reports/) is for. ### How many students did you lose last summer? https://studypro.com.au/blog/how-many-students-did-you-lose-last-summer/ You probably have a feeling for it. "A few." "Not many." "Some of the Year 6s, but they always go." Sit down with two lists and the feeling turns into a number, and the number is nearly always bigger than the feeling. ## The two lists Get the enrolment list from the last week of Term 4. Then get the list from week 3 of Term 1. Not week 1, because some families come back late, and not the January enrolments, because those are new families and this exercise is about the ones you already had. Put the two side by side. Every name on the Term 4 list that isn't on the Term 1 list goes on a third list. That's the raw count. Now take names off it. Anyone who moved house or changed school across town. Anyone who finished Year 12, or sat the selective test they came to you for and was always going to leave afterwards. Those aren't losses, they're the end of the arrangement, and counting them muddies the number you actually need. What's left is the list of families who could have stayed and didn't. That's your number. Write it down before you do anything else with it. ## Why owners guess low Three reasons, and none of them is carelessness. The first is that leaving is quiet. A family that's unhappy tells you. A family that's drifting doesn't tell anyone. The form doesn't come back, the January email goes unanswered, and by February you've stopped noticing the gap because someone new is sitting in it. You remember the two who complained. You don't remember the nine who just didn't turn up. The second is that January fills the room. Enquiries run hot before Term 1, and if the classes look full in week 3, the feeling is that things went fine. But full isn't the same as retained. A class of twelve with five new faces is a class that lost five, paid to replace them, and starts the year with five families who don't know you yet. The third is that nobody counts. Rosters get rebuilt for the new year, the old list gets archived, and the comparison never happens. Most centres could tell you their enrolments to the student and couldn't tell you their re-enrolments at all. ## What the number is worth Put your own fee against it and multiply. That isn't a scare figure, it's just what those families were already paying you, and it's the same list you'd have taught anyway without a single new enquiry. The [retention cost calculator](/resources/calculators/retention-cost/) does this with your own fee and your own count, then shows you how few of those families you'd have needed to hold. That number is the one to remember, because a few retained students pays for most of what you'd do to retain them, including a platform. The other cost is harder to price. Every seat you refilled took an enquiry, a call, a trial lesson, and a first term where the family was still deciding. A family in its third year doesn't need any of that. They renew on habit, they refer their friends, and they forgive a bad week. Replacing them with a stranger is a step backwards even when the roster looks the same. ## What to do with the number Three things, in order. First, go back through the third list and write one line next to each name about why. Not a guess about what they were thinking. What you actually know: a call that mentioned money, a parent who never replied to anything, a child who stopped bringing work back in Term 3. You'll find the reasons cluster. Often the largest cluster is silence, families you hadn't heard from in months before they left, and [why parents leave in Term 4](/blog/why-parents-leave-in-term-4/) is mostly about that cluster. Second, put the number on the wall as this year's budget. Everything in the [Term 4 retention playbook](/resources/guides/term-4-retention-playbook/) costs time, some of it costs money, and the question every step is measured against is whether it's cheaper than losing the students it saves. Your own number answers that question for most steps before you start. Third, and this is the one that changes next year's count, start the gone-quiet list in Term 3. Every fortnight, list the students who haven't handed anything back and the parents who haven't replied to anything. That list is next summer's third list, five months early, while there's still time to do something about it. ## The version where you don't have to count On the platform this exercise mostly disappears, because the two lists live in the same place and the gone-quiet list builds itself. The [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/) shows students with no activity for two weeks across every class, so the owner sees the drift in Term 3 rather than discovering it in February. The bigger change is upstream of that. A parent who has received twenty short reports across the year, each one naming a skill that improved, has a reason to re-enrol that a parent holding four invoices doesn't. The count still matters. It just gets smaller. ## This week Find the two lists. If the Term 4 one is gone, the invoicing system or the class rolls will have it. Do the comparison, take out the movers and the finishers, and write the number down with the fee beside it. Then run it through the calculator and keep the result somewhere you'll see it in Term 3. ### What a parent report should say https://studypro.com.au/blog/what-a-parent-report-should-say/ A parent report has one job: give the parent something they can repeat. "She's doing well" can't be repeated, because there's nothing in it. "Her adding of fractions with unlike denominators went from one in four to two in three" can be repeated to the other parent, to a grandparent, to a friend at the school gate. That's the whole difference, and everything below is in service of it. ## The five sections In this order, because the order is the argument. | Section | What goes in it | What doesn't | |---|---|---| | What they worked on | The topics, by name, as you'd say them in class | Curriculum codes, unit numbers | | How much | Sets completed out of sets assigned, questions attempted | Attendance percentages, minutes logged | | What improved | One skill, named, with a before and after | "Good progress", "working hard" | | What's next | The next topic and when you'll cover it together | A list of everything left in the year | | A line from you | Two sentences, in your words, about this child | Anything that could be about any child | The first two sections are facts and take no thought. The third is the one the parent reads. The fourth tells them the tutoring has a direction. The fifth is why they chose you rather than a website. ## Specific beats "doing well" "Doing well" is what a tutor writes when they don't have the data to write anything else. Parents know this, even if they couldn't say so. It reads as a courtesy, and a courtesy is not a reason to re-enrol. Specific means a skill, named, and a change in it. "Adding with unlike denominators: one in four to two in three." "Reading for inference: getting the literal questions right and now getting about half the inference ones." It doesn't have to be a percentage. It has to be something that was true in week one and is more true now. If you can't be specific, that tells you something too. It means work is going out and coming back without anyone recording what it showed, and that's worth fixing before the report is. The [parent reporting guide](/resources/guides/parent-reporting-for-tutoring-centres/) covers how to keep the record by hand so the specific sentence is there every fortnight. ## One page, and why A parent reads a report on their phone, in a queue, in forty seconds, and forwards it if it's good. That's the format. Anything longer than a page gets skimmed, and a skimmed report is a report the parent can't repeat. One page also forces the choice. You can't list every topic and every mark. You have to pick the one skill that improved and put it in the third section, and that discipline is what makes the report worth sending. Leave out the attendance percentage. Leave out the jargon. Leave out anything that would look at home on a school report, because the parent already has one of those and it didn't make them enrol with you. ## From your address, with your name The report comes from you. Your logo at the top, your tutor's name at the bottom, sent from your email. Not from a platform, not from a no-reply address, and not from anyone whose name the parent has never heard. This matters for a reason that's easy to miss. When a parent replies, and the specific ones get replies, the reply should land in your inbox. That's the conversation that keeps a family, and it starts with a report they could answer. It also matters in Term 4. A parent who has twenty reports from you in their email, each with your name on it, is holding twenty pieces of evidence that you exist between sessions. A parent who has four invoices is holding four bills. ## Fortnightly, and why not weekly Weekly is noise. A parent can't read a report every Friday, and by the third one it's unopened. Monthly is forgotten. The gap is long enough that each report has to start from scratch, and there's no thread. Every second Friday is the interval where a parent sees a pattern across a term and still opens each one. By the end of the year that's roughly twenty reports, and the re-enrolment conversation is with a parent who has read them. ## What this looks like automatically On the platform, the report writes itself from the work the student actually did. What they worked on comes from the sets assigned. How much comes from what they completed. What improved comes from accuracy by topic, before and after. What's next comes from what's assigned. The two sentences from you are yours to write, or to edit from a draft, and the whole thing goes out every second Friday with your logo, from your address. You can review each one before it sends or let them go. The [parent reports](/platform/parent-reports/) page shows one, and the mechanism is the same as the hand-written version. It just doesn't need your Friday. ## This week Download the [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/). It's one page with the five sections and a filled example for a Year 6 maths student. Pick three families, fill it in by hand for each, and send it on Friday from your own email. Then watch which ones reply. ### The holiday gap: December to February https://studypro.com.au/blog/the-holiday-gap/ A family that's wobbling in November becomes a lost family in late January, and the reason is almost never a decision. It's six weeks in which nothing happened. ## What six weeks of silence does Term 4 ends. The last class is a bit loose, there's a chocolate or two, the form has been signed or hasn't. Then December, and Christmas, and a trip to the coast, and January, and the school lists, and somewhere in there the child stops thinking about tutoring because nothing has reminded them of it. The parent doesn't decide to leave. They just don't restart. By the time the Term 1 invoice arrives they've had six weeks to build a reason, and a reason always turns up: the new sport, the cost of the school year, a child who says "do I have to". Silence gave them the room. That's the mechanism. A wobble in November is recoverable. A wobble plus six weeks of nothing is a loss, and you find out in week 2 of Term 1 when the chair is empty. ## Two touches, not a campaign The fix is small, and it's small on purpose. Two contacts across the break. Not a newsletter, not a holiday program, not a sale. | When | What | Why | |---|---|---| | Second week of December | One message. One piece of holiday work. The Term 1 start date. | Keeps the routine alive. Gives the child something of yours to do. | | Mid-January | One short note: here's what week 1 will cover, and thanks for the holiday work. | The wobbling family remembers why they enrolled. | Two is the number. One touch is a Christmas card. Three starts to feel like chasing. Two, spaced a month apart, is a centre that's still there. ## One small piece of holiday work The holiday work has one job, and it isn't learning. It's to keep a thread between the child and your centre across the break. So it's ten minutes' worth, not an hour. One set from your own material, on the skill you'll open Term 1 with. If week 1 is fractions, it's a fractions set. Something the child can finish in a sitting and something you can pick up in the first class: "who did the holiday sheet? Good. Question 4 is what we're doing today." From your own material matters. It's the same worksheets they've seen all year, in the same voice, with the same layout. A generic holiday pack from somewhere else is a different product from a different place, and it doesn't connect to Tuesday. By hand, it's a photocopied sheet in an envelope with the December message. On the platform it's a holiday set assigned in three clicks from [classes and assignments](/platform/classes-and-assignments/), marked when it's done, so the January note can say "thanks for the holiday work" to the families who did it and "here's where we'll start" to the ones who didn't. ## One date The single most useful thing in the December message is the Term 1 start date, with the class, day and time. A date turns a vague intention into a booking. "We'll see how we go in the new year" is how families leave. "Maya's back on Tuesday 3 February at 4:30" is how they stay. Put it in writing, put it in the December message and again in January, and make it specific enough to go on a fridge. If you confirmed the slot in the last week of Term 4, the December message repeats it. If you didn't, this is where it happens. ## The January note Mid-January, one short message. Three lines is plenty. What week 1 will cover. A thank-you for the holiday work, if it came back. The start date, one more time. That's it. No attachment, no offer, no form. Its job is to arrive in the week the parent is buying school shoes and thinking about the year, and to be the thing that puts your centre back in the picture before a reason not to restart has fully formed. The [Term 4 retention checklist](/resources/templates/term-4-retention-checklist/) has both messages as lines on the calendar, with a box beside each. The [re-enrolment email templates](/resources/templates/re-enrolment-email-templates/) have them written out, including the text-message versions for the parent who doesn't open email. ## The family that was wobbling Go back to the November wobble. Work stopped coming back, the parent went quiet, the form came in late or not at all. With silence, that family is gone by February. With the two touches, they've received something of yours in December, the child has done ten minutes on your worksheet, the parent has a date on the fridge and a note in January saying what's coming. None of that is a sales pitch. All of it is a centre that noticed them over the break. Not every wobbling family stays. But the ones that leave now leave on a decision, not a drift, and a decision is something you can ask about in the week 3 phone call. ## What to do this week Pick the skill you'll open Term 1 with and pull one set from your own material. Write the December message: the set, the start date, the class time. Put the January note on the calendar now so it doesn't get lost in the week you're on holiday yourself. If you counted last summer's losses, that number is the reason to do it. If you didn't, [count them](/resources/calculators/retention-cost/) first. ### It came from your worksheet https://studypro.com.au/blog/it-came-from-your-worksheet/ "It came from your worksheet." Five words, and they're the strongest thing a platform can say to a tutoring centre. This post is about what has to be true underneath them. ## What grounding means Grounding is the rule that anything made from your material has to trace back to a specific page of it, and say which one. A practice question points to the worksheet and page it was built from. A worked solution points to the notes the method came from. An explanation at 9pm points to the page it drew on. The opposite is a system that can produce anything. Ask it a question and it answers from everything it has ever read, fluently, whether or not the answer is in your material or true. That's what the [hallucination](/resources/glossary/hallucination/) entry in the glossary describes: a confident, well-written, wrong answer, delivered with your logo on it. Grounding closes that door. If a question can't be traced to a page, it doesn't exist. The [grounding](/resources/glossary/grounding/) entry is the short version, and the rest of this post is the long one. ## Every item cites its page Every question, worked solution, explanation and flashcard carries its source: the document, the page, and where on the page. Not as a footnote for auditors, but as a link you click when something looks odd. That link is what makes the queue usable. When a converted question reads strangely, you don't have to guess whether the wording was yours or ours. You click through, see the worksheet, and the answer is in front of you. When the answer key doesn't match, the flag comes with the page. When a parent asks why their child was marked wrong on question 7, you open question 7 and the worksheet is beside it. It's also what makes the material yours in a way that holds up. A question with a source page is a question you could have written, and did. A question without one is a question somebody else wrote and put under your name. ## Anything untraceable is rejected This is the half of the rule that's easy to skip, and it's the half that does the work. Citing a page is only worth something if the alternative is refusal. So an item that can't be traced back to a page of your material is rejected before it reaches the approval queue. You never see it, not as a suggestion, not as an option, not as something helpfully filled in from elsewhere. If your material doesn't cover a topic, there's a gap where that topic would be, and the gap is honest. The same rule applies live. When a student is stuck at 9pm on a question your notes don't explain, the explanation says so and suggests asking the tutor on Tuesday. It doesn't reach for the open internet. It doesn't invent a method you don't teach. It would rather say "not covered" than fill the space with something you'd have to unteach. That's a narrower system than a chatbot, and it's meant to be. Narrow is the feature. ## You approve before publish Grounding gets everything to the queue with its page. Approval is where you decide what leaves it. Nothing reaches a student until you've said yes. Each batch lands with every item beside its source, mismatches against your key flagged in red, and three choices per item: approve, edit, bin. Approve in bulk when a batch is clean. Edit the wording of anything you'd say differently, and your edit is what publishes. Bin what you don't want. A senior tutor can do this for their own year level if you'd rather delegate. Unpublished items are invisible to students by design. Not by a setting someone could change, but because there's no path from the queue to a phone that doesn't go through a yes. The [approve before publish](/platform/approve-before-publish/) page has the queue in full. Owners tend to relax at this step in a walkthrough. It's where the platform stops being an AI tool and becomes their material, organised. ## Hints before answers The last piece is what a student gets when they're stuck, because grounding is only half the worry. The other half is a student who asks for the answer and gets it. The first response is a hint about the method. The second is a worked example from your notes with different numbers. The third is the full solution. Most students never need the third, and the tutor can see how many each student used, so "needed three hints on every ratios question" is on Monday's screen before Tuesday's class. It won't write an essay and it won't do a whole set. The [stuck at 9pm](/platform/stuck-at-9pm/) page walks through it on a phone. ## Why the sentence is the strongest one Because everything else a platform can say is about the platform. Fast, easy, branded, secure. Those are good, and the [security](/security/) page goes through the last one properly: your centre's space isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, never shared, never reused, never trained on, and nothing downloading out of it. "It came from your worksheet" is about you. It says the material is yours, the method is yours, the authorship is yours, and when anyone asks, the page is there. A platform that supplies its own material can't say it, because the material isn't the centre's. A general chatbot can't say it, because there's no page. A platform that writes material for you can't say it, because then it came from them. It's a sentence that's only true if grounding, rejection, approval and hints are all true underneath it. That's why we protect it. ## This week Take one worksheet and ask yourself where each question would point if it had to. Then [book a walkthrough](/demo/) and watch it happen on screen: every question with its page beside it, flagged where your key disagrees, and nothing that isn't yours. ### The Monday morning problem https://studypro.com.au/blog/the-monday-morning-problem/ Tuesday's lesson is decided by what the class got wrong last week. The problem is that on most Mondays you don't know what that was, because the only way to find out is to mark everything, and the marking hasn't happened. ## How it works on paper The set goes home on Tuesday. Some of it comes back the following Tuesday, in bags, in various states. It gets collected, and it sits in a pile until someone has an evening free. When the marking happens, the information arrives one sheet at a time. Priya got question 7 wrong. So did Marcus. By sheet nine you have a feeling that question 7 is a problem, and by sheet twelve you're fairly sure, but you've also noticed three other things and the feeling about question 7 is now competing with them. Then you have to do something with it. Question 7 was ratios, so ratios is a problem, so Tuesday should open with ratios. Except that the pile got marked on Sunday night and Tuesday's lesson was planned on Saturday, and the two haven't met. And the three students who didn't hand anything in aren't in the pile at all, so they're not in the feeling either. That's the Monday morning problem. The information exists. It's spread across twelve sheets, arrives too late, and never adds up to a sentence you can act on. ## The sentence you want "Eight of twelve missed ratios." That's the whole thing. One sentence, on Monday morning, before anyone walks in. It tells you what Tuesday's lesson is, and it tells you it isn't Priya's problem or Marcus's problem, it's the class's problem, which means it's a teaching problem, which means you fix it once at the front of the room instead of twelve times at the desk. The second sentence you want is "and two of them didn't open it." Those are your two phone calls, and the sooner you make them the better. A student who skipped one set had a busy week. A student who skipped three is a family that's drifting. You can get both sentences by hand. It takes a tally sheet with question numbers across the top and a stroke for every wrong answer, filled in as you mark. It works. It also depends on the marking being done by Monday, which brings you back to the pile. ## What a heatmap does On the platform the set is marked the moment each student finishes, so by Monday morning there's nothing to mark. What's there instead is a grid: students down the side, topics across the top, each cell coloured by how they went. Strong, ok, weak, not attempted. You read it in ten seconds. A column that's mostly red is the topic the class missed, and that's the Tuesday lesson. A row that's mostly grey is a student who didn't do it, and that's a phone call. The [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/) is built around this grid because it's the one thing a tutor needs before a class and the one thing paper can't give them in time. The [heatmap](/resources/glossary/heatmap/) entry in the glossary is the short version. It goes a layer deeper when you need it to. Click a cell and you see the student's actual answers and how many hints they needed to get there. Click the ratios column and you see which questions the class got wrong most, with your worksheet beside them. So it's not just "ratios," it's "the two questions where the ratio had to be simplified first," and now Tuesday's lesson has a shape. ## The tutors who aren't you If you have casual tutors, the Monday morning problem is worse for them than for you. You've taught the Year 6 set for years and could probably guess what they got wrong. A university student in their second term with you can't, and shouldn't have to. A heatmap gives every tutor the same Monday morning, whether they've been with you three years or three weeks. They walk into Tuesday knowing the topic and knowing the two names. It's the closest thing to consistency across a changing roster that doesn't involve you being in every room. ## Why the set has to come back first None of this works if the work doesn't get done. A heatmap of a class that didn't do the set is a grey rectangle. The [homework that comes back](/resources/guides/homework-that-comes-back/) guide is about the other half of the problem: making the six days between sessions produce something, so that Monday morning has something to show. The two halves feed each other. Work that's marked instantly, with a worked solution the moment a student gets one wrong, is work students are more willing to finish, because they get something back for finishing it. Work that vanishes into a bag for a week is work that's easy to skip. So the marking isn't only how you get the Monday sentence. It's part of why there's a set to read on Monday at all. ## This week Make the tally sheet. Question numbers across the top, one row per student, a stroke for each wrong answer. Fill it in as you mark this week's set, and on Monday, before you plan Tuesday, read the columns. Find the topic. Find the names that have no strokes because they handed nothing in. Then look at what it took to get that one sentence. If it took your Sunday, the [instant marking](/platform/instant-marking/) page shows what it looks like when the set marks itself and the grid is already there. ### NCEA is changing. What happens to your material? https://studypro.com.au/blog/ncea-is-changing-what-happens-to-your-material/ If you run a centre in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch, you're already revising. NCEA is being changed through 2026, with updated standards, new co-requisites and a restructured credit framework, and the notes and practice sets you built around the old standards need re-sequencing. The question isn't whether to do that work. It's whether to do it once or twice. ## Revising on paper means revising twice Here's the trap. You spend Term 2 and Term 3 re-sequencing your Level 1 material to the updated standards. New order, some sets retired, new ones written, the answer keys checked. Then, some time later, you decide your students should be able to practise it between sessions, so you go looking for a platform, you upload the folder, and now you're checking every converted item against material you only just finished checking. Same material, two passes, months apart, by the same person. The alternative is to treat the revision and the conversion as one job. You revise a document, you upload it, it comes back as practice sets with worked solutions, and the approval pass is the check you were going to do anyway. The revised version is what goes on the platform, and there's no old version on a drive waiting to confuse a tutor in Term 1. ## What conversion does to a revised folder Nothing appears on your platform that didn't come from your material. That rule is the whole point for a centre mid-revision, because it means the platform has no view on the new standards. It has your view. Whatever you uploaded is the program. A revised set of notes and practice questions goes in and comes back as practice questions in your order, marked against your answer key, with a worked solution for every question that follows the method in your notes. Every item cites the page it came from. Items that can't be traced to a page are rejected before you see them. Then it sits in an approval queue with the source page beside it. You approve, edit or bin. Where your revised worksheet states an answer and the converted item disagrees, it's flagged, and often enough the flag is pointing at a typo in a key you rewrote in a hurry. That's a useful thing to find in August rather than in a Term 4 lesson. Nothing publishes until you say so. For a centre that's mid-reform, that step is the difference between a platform and a liability. ## Start with the level you've already revised Don't upload the whole cabinet. Start with the folder you've finished revising and are most confident in, which for most centres this year is one level of one subject. That's the pilot: one class's material, a term's worth of one subject at one level, converted in about five business days and run on one class for ten weeks. The [senior secondary](/for/senior-secondary/) page has the shape of the week for a Year 11 to 13 program. Assign a set after the session. Students work through it during the week, marked instantly. Extended responses go to the tutor with a suggested mark. The parent gets a report every second Friday showing what was covered and how accuracy moved. NCEA externals fall in November and preparation builds from Term 3, so a revised folder converted in Term 2 is working between sessions when it matters. ## The copyright position, in one paragraph This is where New Zealand differs from Australia, and it changes which of your folders you should convert first. Under the Copyright Act 1994 an educational establishment must be not conducted for profit, so a commercial tutoring centre can't rely on the educational copying exceptions and generally needs a CLNZ business licence to copy published material. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence at all. That's why self-authored material is the safer base, and why at upload we ask a New Zealand centre one extra question: how much of this did you write yourself? None of this is legal advice. Confirm your position with CLNZ or your own adviser. The [CLNZ licence](/resources/glossary/clnz-licence/) entry in the glossary has the short version, and the [NCEA](/resources/glossary/ncea/) entry has the reform in a sentence. The practical upshot: most good New Zealand centres wrote most of their own material anyway. Convert that first. ## What it costs, in New Zealand dollars Priced in NZD at a published rate reviewed quarterly, so you never convert in your head. All prices ex GST at 15%. | Plan | Students | Setup | Monthly | Material converted at setup | |---|---|---|---|---| | Studio | up to 60 | NZ$2,100 | NZ$320 | Everything you currently teach | | Growth | 61 to 150 | NZ$3,200 | NZ$760 | Everything you currently teach | | Established | 151 to 300 | NZ$4,300 | NZ$1,320 | Everything you currently teach | The pilot is a flat NZ$1,500 for one class, one term, one subject at one level, a term's worth of your material, credited in full against setup if you continue. Material you add later for your enrolled students is included, and the pricing page has the New Zealand figures. Nothing renews automatically. Your centre's space is hosted in Australia, two hours apart, inside the same working day, isolated from every other centre's, and your material is never shared with or reused for anyone else. The [New Zealand](/nz/) page has the rest, including the walkthrough arrangements for Auckland. ## What to do this week Pick the one folder you've finished revising. Note beside each document whether you wrote it, licensed it, or aren't sure. Then bring that folder to a walkthrough and see what your students would see, branded to your centre, before you commit to anything. ### The report for the student who did nothing https://studypro.com.au/blog/the-report-for-the-student-who-did-nothing/ Every fortnight there's one. The student who was assigned two sets and opened neither. The report is due Friday like everyone else's, and the temptation is to skip it, soften it, or send the same "doing well" you'd send anyone. Don't. This is the report that matters most, and it's the one that gets answered. ## Why it's the hardest Because it feels like an accusation. You're writing to a parent who is paying you, to tell them their child did nothing, and there's no way to say that without it landing as a judgement on the child, on the parent, or on you. So most centres don't. The student who did nothing gets no report, or a vague one, and the fortnight passes. Then the next one. By the end of the term the parent has received nothing that told them anything, the child has done nothing for ten weeks, and the re-enrolment form arrives at a house where nobody can name a reason to sign it. The silence was meant as kindness. It reads, from the kitchen table, as not noticing. ## Why it gets the fastest reply A parent who gets a report saying their child improved at fractions is pleased and does nothing. A parent who gets a report saying their child did neither set this fortnight has to respond, because the report has asked them something, and because it has told them something they didn't know. Most of the time, they didn't know. The child said "yeah, done it." The bag went in and out of the car. A report that says, plainly, that two sets were assigned and none were attempted is the first time the parent has had a fact rather than a reassurance. The reply tends to come fast, and it tends to start with "I had no idea." Sometimes the reply is a reason you couldn't have known: a grandparent in hospital, a changed custody week, a phone that's been confiscated. All of those are things you'd rather hear in week 4 than work out in Term 4. That reply is the whole point. It's a conversation, started by you, before Term 4, with a family that was drifting. ## The wording Honest, specific and without adjectives. The facts do the work; the adjectives make it a telling-off. Here's the shape, section by section, using the same five sections as every other report. What they worked on: nothing this fortnight. Say it in those words. "Two sets were assigned on the 3rd and the 10th. Neither was started." How much: the numbers, as they are. "0 of 2 sets. 0 questions attempted." What improved: leave the before-and-after blank, and say why. "No work this fortnight, so nothing to measure against last time. Her last set, on the 27th, was two in three on equivalent fractions, which was a good result." What's next: this is the section that carries the report. Name what's due, when, and how long it takes. "The two sets are still open and take about thirty minutes each. The Tuesday group is starting decimals this week, and the second set is the bridge into it. If she can get through it before Tuesday she'll be with the group. If not, we'll catch her up in the first fifteen minutes." A line from you: the question. "Is something in the way this fortnight? If it's the timing, the sport season, or she's stuck on how to start, tell me and we'll adjust. I'd rather know than guess." No "unfortunately." No "disappointing." No "we expect." Just what was assigned, what was done, what's due, and a door left open. ## Naming what's due The line that changes the outcome is the one that names the work still open. A report that says "nothing was done" is a complaint. A report that says "nothing was done, and here's exactly what's waiting and how long it takes" is a plan the parent can act on that evening. How long it takes is the detail most reports leave out, and it's the one a parent needs. "Two sets" sounds like a weekend. "About thirty minutes each" is tonight and tomorrow. It helps if the expectation was written down at enrolment. The [homework policy template](/resources/templates/homework-policy-template/) is one page: how much is set, by when, what to do when stuck, and what the centre does when it isn't done. Its wording for the last part is "if a set isn't done two weeks running, we'll call you. Not to tell you off. To find out what's in the way." A family that signed that at enrolment isn't surprised by the report. They were told it would come. ## What it looks like automatically On the platform this report writes itself, and it's the one owners tend to read most carefully before it sends. Where a student did nothing that fortnight, the report says so, gently, names what's due, and goes out on Friday with your logo from your address like all the others. You can edit the two sentences from you before it sends, and for this student, you probably should. The [parent reports](/platform/parent-reports/) page has the full layout. The point of the automatic version isn't that it's automatic. It's that the student who did nothing never falls off the list, because there's no list to fall off. ## This week Find the student. There's at least one. Open the [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/), which has wording for exactly this case, and write the report by hand using the shape above. Send it Friday from your own email. Then notice how quickly the reply comes, and what it says. ### Selective season, from the centre's side https://studypro.com.au/blog/selective-season-for-centres/ Selective season is the one time of year when parents want more from you, not less. Families arrive in the months before the test, they want to see movement every week, and they're comparing you to the centre down the road in a group chat you'll never read. Here's how to run it from your material, and how to keep the family when it's over. ## What the season looks like from your side Enrolments build in the months before the test. Most of the families are new to you, they've paid for one outcome on one day, and they're anxious. They talk to each other, they compare notes, and silence from the centre reads to them as nothing happening. Meanwhile the work itself is heavy. Timed practice is the whole game, and timing, marking and collating paper tests eats the tutor's week. The papers are your edge, built over years, and they can't sit in a drawer, but they can't leak either. Paper can't show a parent weekly movement. It can barely show you. ## Timed sets, on their phones The unit of selective preparation is the timed set. A reading set, a mathematical reasoning set, a thinking skills set, a writing task, each on the clock. On your own platform, your practice papers become timed sets your students sit at home during the week. Set the duration per component, lock the order if you want it locked, and the set runs under the clock on the student's phone. Marked the moment they finish, against your key, with a worked example from your paper when a question type trips them up. The week changes shape. Saturday after class, assign a timed reasoning set and a reading set, due Wednesday. Sunday to Wednesday, students sit them. Thursday, you see the cohort. That's two timed sets a week per student without a photocopier, an invigilator or a Sunday. ## Accuracy by component What you see on Thursday is the thing paper never gave you: accuracy by component, across the cohort, and the students slipping on timing. The class heatmap shows which question types the cohort is missing and which students are missing them. A student strong on mathematical reasoning and weak on thinking skills is visible in a glance, and so is the one who's accurate but running out of time. That's Saturday's lesson, decided on Thursday, from evidence rather than a feeling. It's also the answer to the anxious parent. "How's she going?" stops being "well, I think" and becomes "reading accuracy is up since she started, thinking skills is where we're working, here's the number." ## Your practice-paper library is the edge The thing that makes your selective program yours is the papers. Years of sets tuned to the test, in your sequence, with your keys. That's what a family is buying when they choose you over the centre down the road. So it matters where they live. On your platform they sit in your centre's space, isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, and never shared with or reused for anyone else. They're not a generic bank, and every item in the platform cites the page of your paper it came from. Nothing appears that didn't come from your material, and you approve every item before a student sees it. The [selective and scholarship prep](/for/selective-and-scholarship-prep/) page has the material list and the week in detail. The [guide to running a selective prep program](/resources/guides/running-a-selective-prep-program/) covers the program design, and the [New South Wales](/au/nsw/) page has the local calendar. ## The report during the run-up Every second Friday through the season, each parent gets a one-page report with your logo, from your address. Accuracy by component. The trend since enrolment. What's next before test day. A line from the tutor. This is what the group chat can't argue with. A parent holding a report that shows reading accuracy across six weeks, with the numbers, has something to say when another parent asks how it's going. The parent with nothing in hand says "I think it's fine" and starts wondering. Review each report before it goes or let them send automatically. Most owners read the first fortnight's closely and then let them run. ## Keeping the family after the test Here's the part most centres lose. The test is sat, the season ends, and the family that came for one outcome leaves with it, whatever the result. The report is what changes that. A family that has seen a term of fortnightly proof, by component, in writing, from you, has a reason to stay that a family who received nothing between sessions does not. They've watched a skill move. They know what the next one is. So the report keeps going after the test, and the next program starts before the result arrives. The next year level's material, the next scholarship round, whatever your centre teaches next. "Here's what we'll start with next term" in the last report of the season is a very different ending from a final invoice. ## What to do this week Pull your best practice paper, the one with the cleanest key. That's the first thing to convert. List every selective family by enrolment date so you know who's been with you long enough to have a trend. Then decide what the last report of the season will say about what comes next, and write that line now, before the season gets busy. ### Sunday night marking, and what marks itself https://studypro.com.au/blog/sunday-night-marking/ It's Sunday, it's after ten, and you're the owner, the principal, the person who wrote the worksheet, and the person marking it. The teaching finished on Saturday. This is the part nobody pays for. ## The arithmetic Marking feels like a small job because each sheet is a small job. Multiply it out and it isn't. Say you have forty students, each doing one set a week, and a set takes you six minutes to mark properly. That's four hours a week. Across a ten-week term it's forty hours, a full working week, spent on the one task a student learns least from, because by the time the sheet comes back marked the question is a week old and they've forgotten what they were thinking. If you charge by the hour for teaching, put that rate against forty hours and the number is uncomfortable. If you don't, it's still forty hours you didn't spend planning, calling a parent, or being at home on a Sunday. The [marking hours calculator](/resources/calculators/marking-hours/) does this with your own students, your own sets and your own minutes. The total tends to be a surprise, because the marking never happens in one block. It happens in half-hours, after everything else, and half-hours don't feel like a week. ## What the student gets from it Not much, and this is the part that makes the forty hours worse rather than just long. A student does a set on Wednesday. It's collected Tuesday, marked Sunday, handed back the Tuesday after. Two weeks between the attempt and the feedback. The red cross on question 7 arrives so long after the thinking that produced it that there's nothing to connect it to. The student sees a mark, not a mistake. Multiply that by a term and the marking has cost you forty hours and taught the class almost nothing, which is a poor trade in both directions. The feedback that changes anything arrives while the thinking is still warm. Wrong, here's why, here's the method, try the next one. That's what happens in the room. Between sessions, on paper, it can't happen at all, because the person who'd give it is you and you're not there. ## What marks itself On the platform, most of the marking doesn't exist as a job. It happens the moment the student submits, against the answer key in your material. | Question type | What happens | |---|---| | Multiple choice | Marked instantly against your key | | Short answer | Marked instantly, with equivalent forms recognised where your key allows | | Numeric | Marked instantly, units checked where your key specifies them | | Fill in the gap | Marked instantly | | Extended response, essay | Assessed against the criteria in your material and shown to the tutor with a suggested mark | Equivalent forms matter more than they sound. A student who writes 23/20 when the key says 1 3/20 has the right answer, and a system that marks it wrong teaches them something false. Where your key allows it, both score. Where your key says simplest fraction, only simplest fraction does. Every marked question comes with a worked solution, right then, following the method in your notes. Wrong answers get it so the mistake is corrected while it's warm. Right answers get it too, because a student who got there by luck learns the method and a student who got there on purpose moves on. The [instant marking](/platform/instant-marking/) page walks through what that looks like on a phone. ## What still needs a person Extended responses. An essay, a long-form explanation, a proof, anything where the mark is a judgement rather than a match. These aren't marked automatically, and shouldn't be. What happens instead is that the response is assessed against the criteria in your material, your rubric, your band descriptors, and goes to the tutor with a suggested mark and the reasons for it. The tutor reads the work, adjusts the mark if it's wrong, adds the feedback the student actually needs, and finalises it. That's still work. It's the work that was worth doing all along, and it's less of it, because the first read is done and the tutor is starting from a position rather than a blank page. For an English centre with thirty essays on a Sunday, that's the difference between a whole evening and part of one. And a tutor who knows that Priya always rushes her conclusions writes a different comment from one reading her essay cold. That comment is what the parent is paying for. Any mark, on any question, can be overridden by the tutor with a note the student can see. The final call is always a person who knows the student. The platform gets the mechanical part off your desk and leaves the judgement where it belongs. ## What you get back Not only the hours. The marks feed a grid by topic on the [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/), so on Monday morning you can see what the class got wrong without having marked anything. They feed the fortnightly [parent report](/platform/parent-reports/), so the parent sees improvement by topic without you writing it up. The forty hours don't just disappear. They turn into two things you were never getting on paper. ## This week Run the arithmetic. Students, sets a week, minutes a set. Multiply it out, then multiply by the weeks in a term, and write the number down. Then list which of your question types are a match against a key and which are a judgement. The first list is what marks itself. The second is what your tutors should be spending their time on. ### NAPLAN families and the Term 2 drift https://studypro.com.au/blog/naplan-families-and-term-2/ Every year the same shape. A rush of Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 families in Term 1, a full timetable for the first half of the term, and then a drift in Term 2 once the test has passed. The families didn't leave because the teaching was poor. They enrolled for one event, and when the event was over, nothing replaced it. ## The Term 1 spike NAPLAN families arrive with a purpose and a deadline. They've seen last year's report, or a friend's, and they want practice in reading, writing, conventions of language and numeracy before the test. For a centre that's been doing this for years the material already exists, organised by strand and year level, and the season is mostly a matter of rostering it. It's good business for eight weeks. The problem is the ninth. ## The Term 2 drift Once the test is sat, the reason the family enrolled is gone. Nobody rings to cancel. They just stop rebooking, or the Term 2 invoice sits unpaid until a polite email arrives saying they'll "see how the year goes". What's missing is a second reason. The first reason was the test. The second has to be something the parent can see, and for most centres the parent has seen nothing between sessions except a child coming home with a sheet. There was no proof that the eight weeks did anything beyond the test, so there's no case for a ninth. Here's the reframe: a NAPLAN family is a year-round family that hasn't been given a reason yet. ## The report that keeps going The lever is a short written report, every second Friday, from week 2 of Term 1, and it doesn't stop when the test does. Each one is a page. What their child worked on this fortnight, by strand. How much. Where accuracy moved, before and after, in plain words. What's next. A line from the tutor. Your logo at the top, sent from your address. By the test, a Term 1 family has seen four or five of them. They've watched numeracy accuracy move on a named skill and read a sentence from you about their child every fortnight. That's the second reason, and it was built before the test, not after. Then the next report arrives, the one after the test, and it says what's next: the skill Term 2 opens with and why it matters for the rest of the year. The family that received that has something to continue. The family that received an invoice has something to cancel. The [parent reports](/platform/parent-reports/) page has what's in the report and why fortnightly rather than weekly or monthly. ## What "by strand" does for a parent A NAPLAN parent came in thinking in strands, because that's how the results are presented to them. Reading, writing, conventions of language, numeracy. So the report should speak that language from the first fortnight. "Improved in maths" is nothing. "Numeracy: accuracy on place value to thousands went from about one in two to four in five across three sets" is proof, and it's proof in the frame the parent already uses. When the school's results arrive months later, the parent has their own trail of numbers from you, and a reason to believe the next term matters as much as the last. On the platform this comes from the work the student actually did on your sets, marked against your key, with the accuracy by topic feeding the report automatically. By hand, it's the [parent report template](/resources/templates/parent-report-template/) filled in from your marking record. Either way, by strand. ## Turning the season into a year A few things that separate a NAPLAN centre from a centre with a NAPLAN season: | In Term 1 | After the test | |---|---| | Report from week 2, not from the test | Report keeps its fortnightly rhythm | | Name the strand in every report | Name the Term 2 skill in the post-test report | | Assign one set a week between sessions | Assign the first Term 2 set before the Term 2 invoice | | Confirm the Term 2 slot in the last report before the test | Call the families who haven't rebooked, and ask, don't sell | The [NAPLAN prep](/for/naplan-prep/) page has the material list by strand and the shape of the week. The [Term 4 retention checklist](/resources/templates/term-4-retention-checklist/) is written for the summer, but the gone-quiet list and the confirm-the-slot step work just as well at the end of Term 1. ## The honest version Not every NAPLAN family becomes a year-round family, and a report doesn't change the parent who only ever wanted eight weeks. What it changes is the default. Right now the default after the test is "we'll see". With five reports in hand and a sixth that names what's next, the default becomes "let's keep going", and the families who leave do it on a decision you can ask about rather than a drift you find out about in May. ## What to do this week If it's Term 1, send the first report this Friday, by strand, even if it's handwritten. If it's later in the year, write down how many NAPLAN families stayed past Term 2 last year. That's the number to move. Then decide now what the post-test report will name as the Term 2 skill, so it's ready when the test is over. ### The answer key is wrong https://studypro.com.au/blog/the-answer-key-is-wrong/ A question comes through conversion, gets checked against the answer key on your worksheet, and the two don't agree. Our answer says 3/8. Your key says 3/4. Before you see anything else, the item is flagged red in the approval queue with the page it came from beside it. More often than not, it's the worksheet. ## How the mismatch is found Every question converted from your material is checked against whatever answer your material gives for it. Where the worksheet has a key, the answer we generate has to match it. If it does, the item goes into the queue as clean. If it doesn't, it goes in flagged, and it stays flagged until you resolve it. Nothing flagged can be published. Nothing at all can be published until you've approved it. So the mismatch never reaches a student. It reaches you, with the question, both answers, and one click to the original page. That click is the important part. You're not looking at a question in isolation and guessing which answer to believe. You're looking at your worksheet, the one you've been handing out, and working the question yourself with the page in front of you. ## Why it's usually the worksheet Because the worksheet has been wrong for years and nobody was checking. Keys get written in a hurry at the end of a long afternoon. A question gets edited, the numbers change, and the key doesn't. A worksheet gets copied from an older version and inherits the older version's mistake. A tutor marks against the key, trusts the key, marks a correct student wrong, and the student assumes they're bad at fractions. None of this is careless. It's what happens to any document that's been in use for a decade with nobody paid to audit it. Conversion is the first time every question on every page has been worked through independently and compared with the answer beside it, and it finds things. Sometimes it's the conversion that's wrong. A skewed scan, a fraction that came through as three characters in the wrong order, a diagram that got separated from its question. When that's the case you'll see it from the page, because the original is right there and the converted question isn't. Tell us and it's fixed that day. The [upload and convert](/platform/upload-and-convert/) page covers what makes a scan convert cleanly in the first place, so this case stays rare. ## Finding it is a gift Here's the reframe, because the first reaction to a red flag is usually irritation. That error was live. It's been on the sheet that goes home every Tuesday. Students have been marked wrong on it, or marked right for the wrong answer, and a few of them have carried a misunderstanding out of your room because the key told them to. You didn't know, because the only person who'd have caught it was you, at 10pm, marking fast against the same key. Now you know, and it cost you a click. The question gets fixed, the fix publishes, and every student who does that set from here on gets the right answer marked right. If you want to go further, the flagged item tells you which page of which worksheet, so you can fix the paper version too. If you go through a first batch, expect a handful of these. It's not a comment on the material. It's a comment on how long it's been since anyone checked, which for most centres is never. ## Fixing it in the queue Resolving a flag is a small job. You can edit the question or the answer in place. Change the wording, swap a number, correct a typo that was in the original. Your edit is what publishes, and the item keeps its link to the original page so there's always a record of what it came from and what you changed. Or bin it, if the question wasn't worth keeping. Or approve our answer over the key, if you've worked it and agree. Or approve the key, if we got it wrong. The choice is yours on every item, and once you've made it the flag clears and the batch moves on. The [approve before publish](/platform/approve-before-publish/) page has the queue in full. Clean batches can be approved in one click. Flagged items can't, and that's deliberate. ## "It came from your worksheet, here's the page" This is the sentence the whole thing rests on. When a parent asks why a question was worded a certain way, or why their child was marked wrong on it, the answer is on your screen: the question, the worksheet it came from, the page, and whether you changed it. That's what [grounding](/resources/glossary/grounding/) means in practice. Every item traces to a page. Anything that can't be traced is rejected before you see it. So a flagged answer is never a mystery about where a number came from. It's a disagreement between your page and our reading of it, and you're the one who settles it. A platform that supplies its own material can't say that sentence, because the material isn't yours. A general chatbot can't say it, because there's no page. It's the strongest position a platform can put a centre in, and a red flag in the queue is that position doing its job. ## This week Pick one worksheet you've used for years and work the answer key yourself, cold, without looking at what you wrote last time. You'll probably find at least one thing. If you'd rather see it checked on screen, bring it to a [walkthrough](/demo/) and watch the mismatches get flagged. ### A casual tutor's first fortnight https://studypro.com.au/blog/a-casual-tutors-first-fortnight/ A new casual tutor teaches your program slightly differently from the last one, and the parents notice before you do. The fix isn't a better tutor. It's a fortnight with a shape, and one question at the end of it. ## Before day one Most of what goes wrong in a tutor's first month was decided before they walked in. The Working with Children Check, or the equivalent where you are, sighted and recorded before anything else. Not "bring it on Tuesday". Before. Then access. The new tutor gets your material for their classes only, not the whole drive. A Year 6 tutor doesn't need the Year 11 folder, and a tutor who leaves in Term 3 shouldn't leave with fifteen years of your work on a laptop. On the platform that's the default: tutors see their own classes and the owner sees everything. By hand, it's a folder, not the cabinet. Send the non-negotiables in writing before day one. Child safety. Phones. Parent contact, which is: parents talk to the centre, not to the tutor's personal number. And your material, which is: we teach from this, in this order, with this method, and we don't improvise a different one from a video. The [tutor onboarding checklist](/resources/templates/tutor-onboarding-checklist/) has all of this as a page with boxes. ## Day one Day one is not a teaching day. It's three things. Shadow one class. Yours, ideally, or the most senior tutor's. They watch how the material is used in the room, not how it looks on paper. Read the folder end to end. The whole year level, every worksheet, every note, every key, in the order you teach it. It takes a couple of hours and most centres skip it, which is why a new tutor teaches week 8 without knowing what happened in weeks 1 to 7. A tutor who's read the folder knows your method before they've taught a minute of it. Mark one set against the key and compare. Give them a completed student set and your answer key. They mark it. You mark it, or pull last term's marked copy. Compare. Where they differ is where the tutor's standard differs from yours, and it's much cheaper to find that on day one than in a parent's email in week 6. ## Week one The first class, with you in the room for the first twenty minutes. Not to take over. To see the opening, the way the material is introduced, whether the method matches what's in your notes. Then leave. A tutor who's watched a class and read the folder will mostly get it right, and the twenty minutes is for the part they'd most easily get wrong. The first marking comes back this week. On the platform most of it is done the moment a student submits, against your key, and the tutor's job is the extended responses, where a suggested mark is waiting and the final call is theirs. By hand, check the first set they mark. Same idea as day one: compare. The first parent question also lands in week one, and the answer is the one from the non-negotiables. Parents talk to the centre. The tutor passes it on, the same day, in writing. ## Week two A fifteen-minute review. Not a performance conversation. One question, and it's the one that pays for the whole fortnight. "What confused you about our material?" A new tutor reads your folder the way a student does: without the context you carry in your head. The worksheet where the instructions assume something from a lesson they didn't see. The key with a typo. The set that's out of order because someone moved it two years ago. What confused a tutor in their first fortnight will confuse a student in Term 2, and they're the only person who'll ever tell you. Write the answer into the folder. Fix the typo, reorder the set, add the missing sentence to the instructions. Then the next tutor doesn't hit it, and neither does the next student. That's the sign-off. Checks done, material read, marking compared, first class observed, one improvement to the folder. Two weeks. ## Why this is a material problem, not a people problem Casual tutors change every term. That's the job. If your program's consistency lives in the tutors' heads, it leaves when they do, and every fortnight like this one starts again from nothing. If it lives in the material, in the folder, the keys, the method in the notes, then a new tutor inherits it by reading, and the review question makes the folder a little better each time. The [guide to keeping casual tutors consistent](/resources/guides/casual-tutors-consistency/) goes into this properly. The short version is that the folder is the thing you're onboarding people into, so the folder has to be worth reading. On the platform, the folder is the program. Every tutor sets work from the same converted material, the marking is against the same key, and the [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/) shows the owner every class on Monday morning, whoever's rostered. The parent relationship and the results stay with the centre when the tutor moves on. ## What to do this week Open the folder your next casual tutor will teach from and read it end to end yourself. Write down what confused you. Then fix it before they arrive, and put the fortnight above on paper so the next hire, including the friend of a friend, gets the same two weeks. ### Who owns the worksheets? https://studypro.com.au/blog/who-owns-the-worksheets/ Somewhere in your drive is a worksheet nobody remembers the origin of. It's been taught from for years, it's good, and the day someone asks where it came from you'd like the answer to be written down already. That's the whole case for a rights register, and it takes an afternoon. ## Four categories, one per document Every worksheet, note, passage and paper you teach from falls into one of four honest categories. | Category | What it means | What you can do with it | |---|---|---| | Wrote it | You or your staff authored it, as centre work | Anything. No licence needed. | | Licensed it | You bought or were granted a licence from the publisher | Whatever the licence says, and no more | | Copied it under a licence | Photocopied from a published work under a statutory or collective licence | Within the licence limits, for the licensed purpose | | Not sure | Nobody remembers, or it arrived with a tutor | Find out before it's used again | The fourth category is the one that matters. Most centres have some of it, and it's rarely a problem until the day it is. A register turns "not sure" into a list of things to check rather than a surprise. ## Why a register, and why now Three people will ask where your material came from, and none of them will give notice. A publisher, if a passage from their book turns up somewhere it shouldn't. A buyer or a partner, if you sell the centre, open a second campus with someone, or license your program. And any platform that takes your material seriously, because it should ask at upload. A register is a grid: document, origin, rights category, and where it applies the licence and its number. The [material rights register](/resources/templates/material-rights-register/) is a printable version with a spreadsheet layout, the four categories in plain language, and a takedown note for the day a publisher writes to you. Fill it in during your material audit. Update it every time a folder is added. It's not a legal document. It's the document a professional centre keeps. ## What the Statutory Education Licence covers In Australia, the Copyright Act 1968 includes a statutory licence, administered by the Copyright Agency, that allows educational institutions to copy limited portions of published works for educational purposes in return for a fee. It explicitly covers tutoring organisations, not just schools. The usual limit is up to 10% or one chapter of a published work. For a centre that photocopies from textbooks, this is what makes the photocopying legitimate. If you copy from published texts, you should hold one regardless of any software you use. What the licence does not clearly settle is whether copying under it extends to uploading that material to a third-party platform for conversion. That is a question for the Copyright Agency or a lawyer, not for a software company, and the [guide to the Statutory Education Licence for tutoring centres](/resources/guides/statutory-education-licence-tutoring-centres/) sets out what exists and who to ask. Material you wrote yourself needs no licence at all, which is why "wrote it" is the safest folder to convert first. ## New Zealand is different Under the Copyright Act 1994 an educational establishment must be not conducted for profit. A commercial tutoring centre in New Zealand therefore can't rely on the educational copying exceptions and generally needs a CLNZ business licence to copy published material. Self-authored material is, again, the safer base, and most good New Zealand centres wrote most of theirs. Same register, same four categories. The "copied it under a licence" row just names a different licence. None of this is legal advice. It's a description of what exists. Confirm your position with the Copyright Agency, CLNZ, or your own adviser. ## What a platform should require at upload If you're handing years of material to any software company, the upload step tells you a lot about how seriously they take rights. A serious platform asks, per document, which of the four categories it's in, and records the answer. It asks whether you hold a Statutory Education Licence if you've marked anything as copied under one. In New Zealand it asks one more question: how much of this did you write yourself? And it treats the answers as part of the record, so that when a question comes later the basis for each document is already there. That's what we do at upload, and it's why the [security and ownership](/security/) page spends as much time on your rights as on ours. The other half of the same page: you keep every right to your material and everything derived from it, we claim none, we never reuse or redistribute it, and we never train on it. A register on your side and a clear position on the vendor's side is the whole arrangement. ## The rule that makes this simple Convert what you wrote first. It's the folder with no licence question, it's usually your best material anyway, and it's the one a parent is paying for when they choose you over the centre down the road. The licensed and copied folders can follow once the register is filled in and your adviser has said what they say. ## What to do this week Open the drive. Pick one year level. Beside each document write one of four words: ours, licensed, copied, unsure. Count the unsures. That's your list for next week, and the first rows of your register. ### Scan quality: what converts and what doesn't https://studypro.com.au/blog/scan-quality-what-converts-and-what-doesnt/ If you'd be happy to photocopy from it, it will convert. That's the rule, and most of what follows is that rule with the reasons attached. ## The four things a scan needs | It needs to be | Because | |---|---| | Straight | Skewed text is read as skewed text. A degree or two is fine; a page photographed from the side isn't | | 300 dpi or better | Below that, small type and subscripts blur into each other. Most copiers default to 300 | | The whole page | A cropped margin is a cropped question. Number 12 is usually at the bottom | | Evenly lit | A shadow across half the page reads as a dark band, and whatever's under it is lost | An office copier set to scan-to-PDF produces all four without being asked. That's why most centres already have what they need. Put the worksheet on the glass, press the button, and the file that comes out will convert cleanly. A phone photo usually fails at least two. It's taken at a slight angle, the lighting is whatever the room had, and the edges are cut off or in shadow. A scanning app on the phone fixes most of that by flattening and cropping the page, and a scan taken that way is usually fine. A photo from the camera app, held over a desk, usually isn't. ## What converts well and what doesn't Typed documents, clean PDFs, decent scans and spreadsheets of questions all convert well. That covers most of what a centre has: the Word file the worksheet was written in, the PDF that got printed, the scanned copy of the paper original. Handwriting doesn't, in general. A handwritten worksheet, or a typed one with handwritten annotations you want kept, is the case where a re-type is faster than a re-scan. Phone photos at an angle don't, for the reasons above. Neither is a surprise on the day. The [upload and convert](/platform/upload-and-convert/) step tells you which documents will fight you before conversion starts, not after a student has seen a garbled question. ## The fidelity score Every document you upload gets a score before anything is made from it. It measures how faithfully the page was read: how much of the text came through cleanly, whether the formulae are intact, whether the diagrams were captured with the questions they belong to. The [fidelity score](/resources/glossary/fidelity-score/) entry in the glossary has the definition. A clean typed worksheet scores in the high nineties. A tired photocopy of a photocopy scores lower, and when it does, the pages that dragged it down are flagged for a re-scan. Not the whole document, just those pages. Nothing under the line is silently accepted and pushed through, because a question that came out wrong and got published under your logo is worse than a question that was never converted. In practice the score is the first thing an owner looks at in a new batch, and the second thing they stop looking at, because after a few documents from the same copier it's the same number every time. ## Maths is the special case Maths material has a problem that English material doesn't: a fraction is a picture, not a word. Ordinary text recognition reads a page as a stream of characters. Run it over three-quarters and you get a 3, a line and a 4, in some order, and the question is now wrong. Run it over an exponent, a square root, a long division layout or a matrix and the result is worse. So maths goes through a specialist step where formulae are read as formulae. A fraction comes out as a fraction. An exponent stays raised. The question a student sees on their phone is the question you wrote, and the answer key it's marked against is the one on your sheet. If your centre is mostly maths, this step is most of the reason the conversion works at all, and it's why a skewed phone photo hurts maths more than it hurts a comprehension passage. Diagrams and graphs are captured with the question they belong to, and shown exactly as they are on your worksheet. They don't need to be redrawn and they don't need to be described. ## The practical run Before a first batch, walk through the folder with one question: would I photocopy from this? For most pages the answer is yes and there's nothing to do. For a few it's no, and those are the ones to re-scan from the original, or to re-type if the original is lost. If the whole folder is paper and the scanner is the problem rather than the pages, the [digitising your teaching material](/resources/guides/digitise-your-teaching-material/) guide covers how to get through a drawer in an afternoon, and there's a prep service if you'd rather post the folder and have it scanned, sorted and curated before conversion. The [scan quality](/resources/glossary/scan-quality/) entry in the glossary is the short version of this page, if you want something to send a tutor who's been asked to scan the Year 9 folder. ## This week Pick the folder you'd convert first and scan three pages from it on the office copier. Open the PDF on a phone. If you can read every subscript and the page is straight, that's the standard, and the rest of the folder scanned the same way will convert. If you can't, the copier settings are the fix, not the pages. ### Why we don't build video lessons https://studypro.com.au/blog/why-we-dont-build-video-lessons/ We don't build video lessons, and we're not going to. Not because we couldn't. Because your tutors are the video, and that's what parents pay for. Here's the thinking, and the three other things we also don't build. ## The ninety minutes are yours A parent chooses your centre for what happens in the room. The tutor who knows their child, the way you explain a method, the fact that a real person noticed when she got it. That's the product. It's why a family pays you and not a subscription. A video lesson competes with that. It says the explanation can come from a screen, in which case why is the family driving to you on a Tuesday. Every platform that ships video is, quietly, telling the parent that the tutor is optional. We'd rather not tell your parents that. So we stay out of the ninety minutes entirely. What we cover is the other six days: roughly 8,910 waking minutes a week when the student isn't with you and the material you built is doing nothing. Practice from your worksheets, marked the moment it's done, a worked solution in your method, an explanation at 9pm drawn from your page. Then a report to the parent about what moved. That's the whole job. [How it works](/how-it-works/) walks through it in the order it happens. ## What a stuck student gets instead of a video Thursday, 9pm, question 7, stuck. Right now that student closes the book and turns up Tuesday not having done it. On the platform they tap once and get help drawn from your material and nothing else. First a hint about the method. Then a worked example from your notes with different numbers. Then the full worked solution. Most students never need the third, and the tutor can see how many hints each student used. It can't answer from the open internet, can't invent a method you don't teach, and can't be talked into doing the homework. If your material doesn't cover something, it says so and suggests asking the tutor on Tuesday. Every explanation cites the document and page it came from. That's as close to "AI" as this gets, and it works under one rule: it only ever works from your material, and you approve everything before a student sees it. Not a tutor on a screen. Your worksheet, explained the way you'd explain it, at 9pm. ## Three more things we don't build Video isn't the only line. The [roadmap](/roadmap/) has a "not planned" column, and it's there on purpose. | Not planned | Why | |---|---| | Our own content | The moment we ship a question we wrote, we own its quality forever. Nothing appears in your platform that didn't come from your material. | | Student-to-student messaging | None, and no public profiles. Tutor-to-student messages are a setting for your centre, off by default, and you decide whether they're on. Your child-safety answer stays simple. | | Scheduling, invoicing, payroll | Keep your admin tool. We don't overlap with it. | | A parent-facing app | The centre owns the parent relationship. Parents get a report, not a login. | Messaging deserves a sentence more, because centres ask. There's no student-to-student messaging and there are no public profiles. Tutor-to-student messages are a setting for your centre, off by default, and nobody but you turns it on. When a parent or a school asks how a child could be contacted through the platform, the answer is that they can't, unless you've switched on messages from your own tutors, and that's the end of the question. An open chat feature would make the platform livelier in a demo and would make that answer a paragraph long. We'll take the short answer. The parent app is the same trade. An app is a login, a password reset, and a brand between you and the parent. A report is a page with your logo, from your address, read on a phone in forty seconds and forwarded to the other parent. The report is the product. ## What that leaves us free to do well Every feature we don't build is attention we can spend on the ones that carry the model. Conversion that keeps your material intact: your order, your method, your diagrams, your formulae as formulae. Marking against your key, with equivalent forms recognised where your key allows them. The approval queue, with the source page beside every item and a flag wherever our answer disagrees with your key. The fortnightly report, which is the one item on the roadmap that cannot slip. Your centre's space isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, with your material never shared with or reused for anyone else, because your material is your business. Those five things are hard to do well. They're much easier to do well when there isn't a video studio, a chat product and a parent app competing for the same team. The [security and ownership](/security/) page is the long version of why the last one matters. ## The honest cost of the line Saying no has a price. Some centres want video and will pick something else. Some want an open chat feature because a competitor has it. We'll lose those conversations, and we'd rather lose them early than build a product that makes your tutor optional and your child-safety answer complicated. What we're asking a centre to bring is the thing they already have: ninety minutes a week in a room with a person, and years of material in a drawer. We cover the six days. That division is the product. ## What to do this week Look at your own material and ask what it's doing between Tuesdays. If the answer is nothing, that's the problem worth solving, and it doesn't need a video. Book a walkthrough and see what your students would see on a Thursday night, built from your pages, with your name on it. ### ChatGPT for tutoring centres: an honest take https://studypro.com.au/blog/chatgpt-for-tutoring-centres-an-honest-take/ If it's you, one worksheet and tonight, use ChatGPT. It's good at that. The problem starts at the point where it's 120 students, their parents, and a term. ## What it's good for Genuinely good, not grudgingly. You've got a PDF of your Year 9 algebra notes and you want five worked examples with different numbers. Paste it in, ask, and you'll have them in a minute. You want a parent email reworded so it's shorter. Done. You want to check whether your explanation of a method is clear to someone who isn't you. Ask it to explain it back. You want a rubric turned into a checklist a casual tutor can hold. Done. That's real work it saves, for one person, on one document, in one evening. If you're not doing it already, try it, and the [AI in tutoring centres](/resources/guides/ai-in-tutoring-centres/) guide has more of these. NotebookLM is a step better for the one-document case, because it answers from the documents you give it and cites them rather than answering from everywhere. Give it your notes and ask it questions about your notes and you'll get answers about your notes. For an owner sitting alone with a folder, that's the better tool. ## The question to ask before you scale it "How would I get the results back from 120 kids?" Sit with that for a moment, because it's the whole gap. Say you've had a good evening with the chatbot, made a set of practice questions from your material, and you like them. Now what? You send them to the students. How? A PDF, by email, to 120 families. They do them, on paper or on a phone. Then what? The answers come back, or don't. Who marks them? Against what? Where do the marks go? Which student got which question wrong, and which topic did most of the class miss? Who tells the parents, and what do they say? ChatGPT doesn't know who your students are. It has no classes, no due dates, no marking against your key, no grid on Monday morning, no report on Friday. It made a document. Everything after the document is still you, and everything after the document is where the hours were. ## What it can't do for 120 students | You need | ChatGPT | What it takes | |---|---|---| | Set a week's work for a class with a due date | No classes | Classes and assignments from your material | | Mark 120 submissions against your answer key | It doesn't see submissions | Instant marking, equivalent forms recognised | | See which topic the class got wrong | No grid | A tutor dashboard with a heatmap by topic | | Send 120 parents a report with your logo, from your address | No parents, no logo, no address | Fortnightly parent reports, branded to you | | Stop a student getting the answer handed to them | It gives the answer | Hints before answers, from your page | | Approve what students see before they see it | No approval step | Approve before publish | None of that is a criticism of the tool. It's a chatbot. It was built to answer one person. A centre is a system of 120 people plus their parents plus tutors who change every term, and a system needs plumbing a chatbot doesn't have. ## The two risks that matter more than the plumbing The first is what it answers from. A general chatbot answers from everything it's ever read, which means a student who asks it for help with your ratios worksheet gets a method from somewhere, and it might not be yours. If you teach cross-multiplication one way and a student learns it another way at 9pm from a chatbot, you spend Tuesday unteaching it. It also, sometimes, gets things confidently wrong, and a student can't tell. The [hallucination](/resources/glossary/hallucination/) entry in the glossary is the short version. The second is that a student can ask it for the answer. They will. A general chatbot writes the essay, does the set, and hands it over, because that's what it's for. There's no hint, no worked example with different numbers, no "try this first," and no record for the tutor of who needed help with what. And a smaller one, worth reading the terms on: what a consumer tool does with what you paste into it. Your worksheets are your business. Before a folder of them goes into any tool, it's worth knowing what that tool's terms say about storing and training on it, and if you're not sure, ask someone who reads terms for a living. ## Where the platform sits The platform uses AI too, under one rule: it only ever works from your material, and you approve everything before a student sees it. The explanation a student gets at 9pm is drawn from your worksheet and cites the page. It gives a hint first, an example second, the worked solution last, and the tutor sees how many steps each student used. If your material doesn't cover something, it says so and suggests Tuesday. The [stuck at 9pm](/platform/stuck-at-9pm/) page goes through it. That's a narrower thing than a chatbot, on purpose. The [comparison with ChatGPT and NotebookLM](/compare/chatgpt-and-notebooklm/) lays the two side by side, including where the chatbot wins. ## This week Use ChatGPT tonight on one document, for yourself, and notice how much it saves you. Then write down what you'd have to do to get that document to a class, marked, back in a grid, and reported to the parents. That list is what you're actually deciding about. ### Start with your best folder, not your biggest https://studypro.com.au/blog/start-with-your-best-folder-not-your-biggest/ The first batch of material you convert decides whether you trust the rest. Not because the conversion changes, but because you do. So the first batch should be the folder you're proudest of, not the drawer with the most paper in it. ## Why the first batch sets the account Everything converted from your material lands in an approval queue before a student sees it. You go through the first batch closely, item by item, with the source page beside each one, because you should. That's where you decide whether this is your material, organised, or something else. If the first batch is your best folder, that pass is quick and reassuring. The questions are the ones you wrote, in the order you wrote them, marked against the key you supplied. You approve most of it in bulk, fix a few things you'd phrase differently, and from then on you spot-check. The [approve before publish](/platform/approve-before-publish/) page shows the queue. If the first batch is the biggest drawer, the pass is long and irritating. Half the pages were photocopies of photocopies, some sheets have no answer key, a few are things you stopped teaching in 2019, and the queue is full of items you're binning rather than approving. The conversion did what it was asked. The folder was the problem. But what you remember is the afternoon. Trust built on the first folder carries to the second. Trust lost on the first folder has to be rebuilt page by page. ## What "best" means Not the hardest material or the most impressive. The material that meets three tests. It's yours. Written by you or your tutors, so there's no rights question to work through on the first go. Textbook pages can come later, once the rights basis is recorded, and the [material audit worksheet](/resources/templates/material-audit-worksheet/) has a column for exactly that. It has answer keys. A worksheet with a key converts into questions that mark themselves against your answers. A worksheet without one converts into questions with generated solutions that you have to review. Both work, but the first is faster to approve, and the first batch should be fast. It's what you teach most. The Year 6 sets you run every Tuesday, the Year 9 maths program, the comprehension passages every English class starts with. Material that's in use is material with a class ready to use it, which means the first batch goes to students within the fortnight and you see something come back. ## One subject at one year level Pick one. Not one of each, and not a sample from across the centre. A single subject at a single year level converts into something coherent: a program a class can be assigned, a topic order a tutor recognises, a report that can say what improved because there's a sequence to improve along. A sample from everywhere converts into a collection of unrelated sets that no one class can use, and the first thing students see is a fragment. It also keeps the approval pass to one person's expertise. The owner who wrote the Year 6 maths program can approve the Year 6 maths program in an evening. The same owner approving Year 6 maths, Year 9 English and Year 11 chemistry has to keep changing hats, and the pass drags. If you run both maths and English, pick the one where you have the keys and the classes lined up, and let the other be the second batch. ## One class's material is a pilot That's not a rule about the platform, it's a rule about a term. One class, one term, one subject at one year level. A term's worth of that material is enough for a cohort of 15 to 40 students to work through a term's program, get marked, and have their parents receive a report every second Friday from week two. It's also small enough to approve carefully, teach from immediately, and judge honestly at the end. The [pilot](/pilot/) runs on exactly that shape, and the read-out at week ten tells you what happened, including what didn't work. It also keeps the timing honest. One class's material converts in about five business days, so a folder sent in the last week of the holidays is a program students can be assigned in week one. A first batch of the whole cabinet is a different thing. It takes longer to convert, longer to approve, and by the time it's published the term has moved on. The rest of the filing cabinet doesn't go anywhere. Setup converts everything you currently teach if you continue, and you approve it in the order you choose, once the first folder has earned your trust. ## What to do with the biggest drawer Nothing yet. Leave it where it is. The audit worksheet is the place to write down what's in it: year level, subject, format, whether it's clean or needs a re-scan, and whether it's yours or licensed. That takes an afternoon and produces a list you can approve from in order, best folder first, once setup has converted the lot. It also tells you which subjects and year levels are yours outright, which is what the pilot should be drawn from. Owners who do the audit often find the drawer is smaller than it looked, because a lot of it was duplicates and superseded versions. The best folder was always the same fourteen worksheets. ## This week Open the shared drive or the filing cabinet and find the folder that meets the three tests: yours, has keys, in use. One subject at one year level. If it's a term's worth, that's the pilot. If it's more, pick the term's worth. Then bring three pages from it to a [walkthrough](/demo/) and see what they become with your branding on it, before you decide anything about the rest. ### What to ask a software vendor about your material https://studypro.com.au/blog/what-to-ask-a-software-vendor-about-your-material/ Before you upload fifteen years of material to anyone, including us, there are six questions to ask. Each has a good answer that fits in a sentence. A vendor who can't give it in a sentence is telling you something. ## The six questions | Question | A good answer sounds like | A vague answer means | |---|---|---| | Who owns what I upload? | "You do. We claim no rights to it or anything derived from it. It's in the agreement." | The agreement gives them a licence you haven't read. | | Could another centre see it? | "No. Your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, and your material is never shared with or reused for anyone else." | A promise with nothing behind it in the agreement. | | Do you train on it? | "No. Not on your material, not on your students' answers, not anonymised." | Anonymised training, at least, is happening. | | Where is it hosted? | A country, named. | They don't know, or it's somewhere the privacy law is different. | | What happens if I leave? | "Access ends, we delete our copies within a stated period and confirm in writing, and you still hold your own originals." | Nobody has thought about it, or the answer is "contact support". | | Will you contact my parents? | "Never. We hold their details only to send the reports you approve, from your address." | Your parents are on a list somewhere. | The rest of this post is what's behind each row and why the vague version costs you. ## Ownership and isolation The honest answer to the first question is "you do", and it should be followed by "and anything derived from it". Derived matters. A converted practice set, a worked solution built from your notes, a report generated from your students' work: if the vendor owns those, they own the version of your material that's actually useful, and you own a folder of PDFs. Look for the words "no rights", "never reuse", "never redistribute", and look for them in the agreement, not the brochure. Ours are on the [security and ownership](/security/) page and in the contract. If a vendor's answer is "of course it's yours" with nothing in writing, the agreement probably says otherwise. The second question is about where the line between you and the vendor's other customers sits. Every platform will say another centre can't see your material. What matters is what's behind the sentence: whether your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, where it's hosted, and whether the vendor commits in writing to never sharing your material with, or reusing it for, anyone else. Ours is: your centre's space is isolated from every other centre's, hosted in Australia, and your material is never shared with or reused for anyone else. Ask any vendor for their version in the same plain words, then find it in the agreement. "Enterprise-grade isolation" isn't an answer. A sentence you can hold them to is. ## Training and hosting The training question is the one to push on, because the vague answer has a specific shape: "we don't train on customer data" followed, a paragraph later, by "aggregated and anonymised data may be used to improve the service". Anonymised training on your material is still training on your material. Your practice papers, your sequence, your method, going into a model that serves the centre down the road. The good answer has three parts: not on your material, not on your students' answers, not in anonymised form. And a fourth, which is that the vendor makes the same commitment in its own contracts with the providers it uses. If they can't speak for their suppliers, they can't speak for the answer. Hosting is simpler. A country. That's the answer. It decides which privacy law applies to your students' and parents' details and how quickly a request for data can be answered. For a centre in Australia or New Zealand, "Australia" is a clean answer: inside the Australian privacy regime, inside a working-day timezone. A vendor who has to check, or who says "the cloud", hasn't thought about it, and you'll be the one explaining it to a parent. ## Leaving, and your parents The good answer to "what happens if I leave" has two halves. First, possession: who ends up holding the only good copy of your material. Second, deletion: the vendor removes its copies within a stated period and confirms it in writing. Possession is the half most owners skip past. The fear behind the question is a supplier sitting on fifteen years of your worksheets, and the fix people reach for is [export on demand](/resources/glossary/export-on-demand/), a button that pulls everything back out. It's a reasonable ask of a platform that took your only copy. It's the wrong first question. The better one is whether the vendor needs you to hand over anything you won't still have afterwards. Ask it plainly. If you upload copies and your drive and your drawer are untouched, there is nothing to hold hostage, and the button matters a great deal less than it sounds like it should. Ours is worth saying plainly, including the part that costs us a sale now and then. The platform is a hosted service and nothing downloads out of it, for a student or for an owner. That's the same rule that stops a student saving your worksheets and walking off with them, and we don't get to have it both ways. What you keep is what you always had: your own material, which you never gave up. When you leave, access ends and we delete our copies within 30 days and confirm it in writing. The last question is about the business itself. A vendor who holds your parents' email addresses holds the one list you can't afford to share. The good answer is "never", and it has a mechanism behind it: the reports go out from your address, with your logo, and the vendor holds parent details for no other purpose. Replies land in your inbox. Your parents never see the vendor's name. If a vendor's platform sends anything to a parent under its own brand, or offers the parent an app, a login or a newsletter, then it's building a relationship with your customer, and one day it may sell to them directly. ## What a good conversation looks like Six questions, six sentences, all in the agreement. The [FAQ](/faq/) has our answers to each, in the words we'd use across a table. If a vendor's answers are longer than ours and less specific, that's the information. None of this is legal advice. It's a checklist for a conversation you should have before you hand over the drive, and your adviser should read whatever agreement comes out of it. ## What to do this week Write the six questions on one page. Ask them of any platform you're talking to, including us, and write the answers beside them in the vendor's own words. Then find each answer in the agreement. Where you can't, ask why. ### The second campus consistency problem https://studypro.com.au/blog/the-second-campus-consistency-problem/ The second campus is where the program stops being what you teach and becomes what each site remembers. Not because the new site is worse. Because you can't be in both rooms, and the program was living in yours. ## Two sites, two versions It starts with photocopies. Site one has the folder you built. Site two gets a copy, and within a term the copy has drifted: a set skipped because the new tutor didn't see the point, a different pace because the Thursday group is stronger, a key corrected at one site and not the other. Nobody decides to run two programs. It happens by Term 2. Then the parents talk to each other. A family at site two hears what a family at site one is getting, or the other way around, and the question arrives: why is it different? There's no good answer, because you didn't know. Reporting drifts too. At the site you're at, parents hear from you. At the other one they hear from whoever's there, or they don't. The second campus becomes the one where nothing goes home. ## The owner can't be at both Every fix that depends on you being in the room fails at the second site, by definition. A monthly visit catches the big things and misses the drift. A site lead helps, if you've got one who taught at site one for a month first, but a site lead running from a photocopied folder is running their own version of the program too, just a better one. The instinct is to fix it with people: hire better, visit more, write a manual. People fixes leak, because casual tutors change every term and the manual goes in a drawer next to the folder. Fix it at the material. ## One program, converted once If the program lives on a platform rather than in a folder, there's only one of it. The central program is converted once, approved once, and published to every campus. Update a key at site one and it's updated at site two, because there is no site two copy. A tutor at either campus sets this week's work from the same material, students at either campus are marked against the same answers, and the worked solution follows the same method. Each campus has its own classes and tutors. Site two's Year 6 Tuesday group is its own class, with its own students, and its tutors see only their classes. A campus can add its own sets, visible to that campus alone, for the extension group or the local school's exam. The program underneath stays central. And the owner sees across all of it. A second campus shows up on the [tutor dashboard](/platform/tutor-dashboard/) as another column, not another login. Who did the work at both sites, which topic each site's class struggled with, which students at either site have gone quiet for two weeks, and the parent reports due this Friday at both. The [multi-site groups](/for/multi-site-groups/) page has how this is priced, which is per campus on top of your base plan, and the shape of the week across sites. ## The parent report at the site you're not at The report covers the other half. Every second Friday, every parent at every campus gets the same one-page report, with your logo, from your address, about their own child: what they worked on, what improved by topic, what's next, signed by their tutor. Site two's parents now hear from the centre as often as site one's, in the same words, whether or not you were there that fortnight. When parents compare across sites, they're comparing two reports in the same format, and the difference they find is about their children, not about which site they picked. ## The Friday scorecard across sites Consistency is a habit, and it's checked on a Friday. Five numbers, both sites, side by side: | Number | Site one | Site two | |---|---|---| | Completion rate this week | | | | Class accuracy on this week's topic | | | | Parent reports sent this fortnight | | | | Students gone quiet for two weeks | | | | Tutor hours rostered | | | The point isn't the numbers themselves. It's the gap between the columns. Completion at one site and not the other is a tutor who isn't setting work. Accuracy diverging on the same topic is a method drifting. Reports sent at one site and not the other is the second campus going dark. Every one of those is visible a week after it starts rather than a term. On the platform the first four fill themselves in from the owner view. By hand, it's an hour on Friday with two registers. Do it either way. ## Before you open Most of this is easier if it's set up before the lease starts than after. Ninety days out, freeze the program: every folder that will be taught at site two is final and central, and there are no site-specific copies. Sixty days out, the site lead teaches at site one for a month. Thirty days out, every enrolled family at both sites gets the same welcome and the same homework policy, in the same words. The [second campus launch checklist](/resources/templates/second-campus-launch-checklist/) is the ninety days before and after as a printable page. The [guide to opening a second campus](/resources/guides/opening-a-second-campus/) is the long version, including the parts that aren't about material. ## What to do this week If you've already opened, put the five numbers on a whiteboard this Friday for both sites and look at the gaps. If you haven't, freeze the program now, before the copy is made. And whichever it is, pick the folder that will be taught at both sites first and convert that one, because a program that exists once can't drift. ## Glossary ### White label https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/white-label/ Software that carries your brand and none of the supplier's. A white-label platform is one that runs under your name, your logo and your web address, with no visible trace of the company that built it. Your students sign in at your address. Your parents get reports from your email. The supplier's name appears in the contract and nowhere else. For a tutoring centre the point is the parent relationship. A parent who receives a report from a publisher's platform is being introduced to a brand that may sell to them directly. A parent who receives a report from the centre is being reminded who they chose. ### Single tenant https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/single-tenant/ Software where each customer runs on separate infrastructure. StudyPro isolates every centre's space and data; separate infrastructure per centre is planned. Most software is multi-tenant: every customer's data sits in one shared system, separated by permissions. Single-tenant software goes further and gives each customer separate infrastructure of its own, so one customer's records sit apart from every other customer's at the machine level rather than by permission. StudyPro isolates each centre's material, students and reports from every other centre's and never reuses any of it, which is the promise that matters day to day. Fully separate infrastructure per centre is planned for centres that want it. ### Bring your own content https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/byoc/ The centre supplies the material. The platform supplies everything else. A bring-your-own-content model means the platform ships with no teaching material at all. The customer uploads their own, and the platform converts, organises, delivers, marks and reports on it. The alternative is a content library, where the supplier writes the material and every subscriber gets the same thing. For an established centre, bring-your-own-content is the model that keeps them distinctive. Their material is the reason a family chose them. A library makes them the same as every other subscriber. ### Content library https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/content-library/ A supplier's own bank of lessons and questions, the same for every subscriber. A content library is teaching material written and owned by a software company and licensed to schools, centres or parents. Atomi, Edrolo and Education Perfect are examples. The material is professionally produced and identical for every customer. The trade-off for a tutoring centre is differentiation. A library is fast to start with and impossible to be different with. It's also, in several cases, sold directly to the parent who is the centre's customer. ### Grounding https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/grounding/ The rule that every generated item must trace to a source page. Grounding is the constraint that an AI system may only produce output supported by a specific set of documents, and must cite where each piece came from. A grounded practice question points to the worksheet and page it was built from. An ungrounded one could have come from anywhere, including nowhere. For a centre, grounding is what makes the sentence 'it came from your worksheet' true. Without it, a platform is publishing under the centre's name things nobody at the centre wrote. ### Hallucination https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/hallucination/ When an AI system states something confidently that isn't in its sources or isn't true. A hallucination is a fluent, confident, wrong answer. General chatbots produce them because they're built to answer everything. In a tutoring context the risk is a made-up question, a wrong method, or an answer that contradicts the centre's own key, delivered to a student with the centre's logo on it. The defence is grounding plus approval: only produce from the centre's material, cite the page, reject anything that can't be traced, and let the owner see everything before a student does. ### Approve before publish https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/approve-before-publish/ Nothing reaches a student until the centre has seen it and said yes. An approval step between conversion and publication. Everything generated from the centre's material lands in a queue with its source page. The owner or a delegated tutor approves, edits or bins each item or batch. Students see only what's been approved. It moves authorship where it belongs. When a parent asks why a question was worded a certain way, the answer is on the owner's screen with the worksheet beside it. ### Fidelity score https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/fidelity-score/ How faithfully a document was read before anything was made from it. A score assigned to each uploaded document after extraction: how much of the text was recovered cleanly, whether formulae came through intact, whether images were captured. A clean typed worksheet scores in the high nineties. A skewed photocopy scores lower and gets flagged for a re-scan of the affected pages. It exists so that bad input is caught before conversion, not after a student has seen a garbled question. ### OCR https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/ocr/ Optical character recognition: turning a scanned image of a page into text. Scanned worksheets are pictures. OCR turns the picture into text a computer can work with. Quality depends on the scan: straight, well lit, 300 dpi scans convert almost perfectly; phone photos at an angle don't. Maths needs a specialist step so that fractions, exponents and symbols come through as maths rather than as a string of characters. ### Scan quality https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/scan-quality/ What makes a scan convert well: straight, 300 dpi, full page, good light. A scan converts well when the page is flat and straight, the resolution is 300 dpi or better, the whole page is in frame, and there's no shadow across it. Most office copiers produce this by default. Phone photos usually don't unless taken with a scanning app. The practical rule for a centre: if you'd be happy to photocopy from it, it will convert. ### Worked solution https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/worked-solution/ The method, step by step, not just the answer. A worked solution shows how to get from the question to the answer, in steps, following a specific method. On a platform built from the centre's material, the method is the centre's method, drawn from their notes, so what a student sees at 9pm matches what they heard on Tuesday. ### Instant marking https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/instant-marking/ Marked the moment a student submits, against the centre's key. Automatic marking of a submitted answer against the answer key in the centre's material, with recognition of equivalent forms where the key allows it. Multiple choice, short answer and numeric questions mark instantly. Extended responses are assessed against criteria with a suggested mark for the tutor to finalise. ### Equivalent forms https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/equivalent-forms/ Recognising that 1/2, 0.5 and 50% are the same answer, when the key allows. Marking that accepts mathematically equivalent answers as correct: a fraction in a different but equal form, a decimal, a percentage, a rearranged expression. The centre's key can also require a specific form, such as simplest fraction, in which case only that form scores. ### Explanation https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/explanation/ What a stuck student gets at 9pm: a hint, then an example, then the solution, from the centre's page. On the platform, an explanation is help drawn from the centre's own material and nothing else, offered in stages: a hint about the method, a worked example with different numbers, then the full solution. Each explanation cites the document and page it came from, and the tutor can see how many stages each student used. ### Parent report https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/parent-report/ A fortnightly one-page report to each parent, with the centre's logo, from the centre's address. A short written report sent to each parent every second Friday: what their child worked on, how much, what improved by topic, what's next, and a line from the tutor. It carries the centre's branding and comes from the centre's email address. It requires nothing of the parent: no login, no app. It's the retention mechanism. A parent who has seen twenty reports by Term 4 has a reason to re-enrol that a parent who has seen nothing does not. ### Term 4 churn https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/term-4-churn/ The students who finish Term 4 and don't come back in Term 1. The share of enrolled students lost across the summer break. Exams finish, holidays start, and a portion of families don't re-enrol. The cause is usually not the teaching. Nothing happened between sessions and the parent couldn't see progress, so the decision defaulted to no. Most centres don't track it. Working it out is the first step, and the calculator on this site does the arithmetic. ### Re-enrolment https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/re-enrolment/ The Term 4 decision, made by a parent who has either seen progress or hasn't. The point each year, usually in Term 4, when a family decides whether to continue. It's decided by what the parent has seen across the year, which for most centres is an invoice each term and nothing else. A written record of progress changes the default. ### The six days https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/the-six-days/ The time between one session and the next, when the material could be working and usually isn't. A student gets around 90 minutes a week in the room and roughly 8,910 waking minutes outside it. Whatever happens in those six days decides whether the 90 minutes worked. For most centres, nothing happens in them, or a worksheet goes home and comes back half done. The six days are what a platform built from the centre's material fills. ### Homework policy https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/homework-policy/ A one-page statement of what's expected between sessions and what happens if it isn't done. A short written policy given to parents and students at enrolment: how much work is set, by when, what to do when stuck, and what the centre does when it isn't done. Most centres set homework and have never written this down. It makes the six days a shared expectation rather than a hope. ### Cohort https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/cohort/ A class as the centre names it: Year 6 Selective, Tuesday 4pm. A group of students who are taught together and assigned the same work. On the platform, cohorts are named the way the centre says them and contain the students who are actually in the room. Tutors see their cohorts; the owner sees all of them. ### Assignment https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/assignment/ A set from the centre's material, given to a cohort with a due date. A topic set, a timed paper or a revision set from the centre's material, assigned to a class with a due date. Students see it on their phones the same evening. Completion and results appear on the tutor dashboard as they come in. ### Timed set https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/timed-set/ A practice paper from the centre's material, run on the clock. An assignment with a time limit, usually a practice paper for an exam or a selective test, run on the platform under exam conditions with results by question type afterwards. Used heavily in selective, scholarship and senior secondary preparation. ### Tutor dashboard https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/tutor-dashboard/ The Monday-morning view: who did it, who didn't, what the class got wrong. The tutor's screen for a class: a grid of students against topics, coloured by how they went, plus completion, the weakest topic and the students who've gone quiet. The owner's version shows every class and every tutor across every campus. ### Topic heatmap https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/heatmap/ Students against topics, coloured strong to weak. Ten seconds to read. A grid where each row is a student and each column a topic, with each cell coloured by accuracy. One glance shows the topic most of the class missed and the students who need a call. It's the fastest way to plan Tuesday's lesson on Monday morning. ### Export on demand https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/export-on-demand/ The industry term for pulling everything back out of a platform. We do not offer it, and here is why that is not the risk it sounds like. Export on demand is the contractual right to pull everything a platform holds for you back out at any time: original material, converted sets, student records and reports, in standard formats. It exists because most platforms end up holding the only good copy of a customer's material, and the customer wants a way out. This platform works the other way round. It is a hosted service and nothing downloads from it, for a student or for an owner, which is the same rule that stops a student walking off with a centre's worksheets. A centre uploads copies and keeps its own originals, so there is nothing to hold hostage. When a centre leaves, access ends and we delete our copies within 30 days and confirm it in writing. ### Data residency https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/data-residency/ Where the data physically lives. For this platform, Australia. The country in which a platform's servers and databases are located. It determines which privacy laws apply and how quickly a request for data can be answered. Centres on this platform, in both Australia and New Zealand, are hosted in Australia, in a space isolated per centre. ### Privacy Act https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/privacy-act/ The Privacy Act 1988 in Australia and the Privacy Act 2020 in New Zealand. The laws that govern how organisations collect, hold and use personal information. Both apply to a tutoring centre holding student and parent details, and to any supplier holding them on the centre's behalf. Both include notifiable data breach schemes. The practical response for a centre is to collect as little as possible and know where it's held. This is a description, not legal advice. Confirm your obligations with your adviser. ### Data minimisation https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/data-minimisation/ Holding the least personal information the job needs. A centre can run on first name and initial. The principle of collecting only what's needed. A tutoring platform can run on a student's first name, initial and class. It doesn't need a date of birth or a student email address. Less held means less risk and shorter answers to every privacy question a parent asks. ### Statutory Education Licence https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/statutory-education-licence/ The Australian licence that lets educational institutions, including tutoring organisations, copy limited portions of published works. Under the Copyright Act 1968, a statutory licence administered by the Copyright Agency allows schools, TAFEs and around a thousand private providers, explicitly including tutoring organisations, to copy up to 10% or one chapter of a published work for educational purposes, in return for a fee. For a centre it's the thing that makes photocopying from textbooks legitimate. Whether the licence also covers uploading that material to a third-party platform for conversion is a question for the Copyright Agency or a lawyer, not for a software company. Material the centre wrote itself needs no licence at all. ### CLNZ licence https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/clnz-licence/ The New Zealand copyright licence. A for-profit centre needs the business one, not the education one. Copyright Licensing New Zealand administers licences for copying published works. Under the Copyright Act 1994 an educational establishment must be not conducted for profit, so a commercial tutoring centre falls outside the education licence and generally needs a CLNZ business licence to copy published material. The practical consequence is that a New Zealand centre's self-authored material is on much firmer ground than its photocopied textbook pages. Confirm your position with CLNZ or your adviser. ### Material rights https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/material-rights/ Who owns each document a centre teaches from: wrote it, licensed it, copied it, not sure. For every worksheet, note and paper, the question of where it came from and what the centre may do with it. Four honest categories cover most centres: written by the centre, licensed from a publisher, copied under a statutory or CLNZ licence, or unknown. Recording the answer per document, at upload, is what a professional centre does and what a platform should require. ### Selective test https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/selective-test/ Entrance tests for selective government schools: NSW Selective, Victorian select-entry, WA GATE, SA Ignite, Queensland Academies. Competitive tests that decide entry to selective or academically focused government schools. The names and years differ by state: the Selective High School Placement Test in Year 6 in New South Wales, the select-entry exam in Year 8 in Victoria, GATE in Year 6 in Western Australia, Ignite in Year 6 in South Australia, and Queensland Academies entry from Year 6. Preparation programs are a large part of many centres' business. ### Opportunity Class https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/opportunity-class/ The NSW placement test sat in Year 4 for Year 5 and 6 opportunity classes. In New South Wales, opportunity classes are academically selective classes for Years 5 and 6 in government primary schools. Entry is by a placement test sat in Year 4. Preparation for it brings Year 3 and 4 families into Sydney centres, often as the first step toward Selective preparation in Year 6. ### Scholarship test https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/scholarship-test/ Tests run by or for independent schools to award scholarships, typically Years 5 to 8. Independent schools award scholarships on the basis of a test, often set by ACER or Edutest or run by the school itself. Families prepare from Year 5 onward. Centres run scholarship programs from their own practice papers alongside selective preparation. ### NAPLAN https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/naplan/ The national assessment in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 across reading, writing, language conventions and numeracy. The National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy, sat by Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. For centres it's a Term 1 spike in enrolments and a Term 2 drift once the test has passed. The fortnightly report is what turns a NAPLAN family into a year-round one. ### Senior secondary https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/senior-secondary/ Years 11 and 12: HSC, VCE, QCE, WACE, SACE, and NCEA in New Zealand. The final two years of school and the certificates that end them: the HSC in New South Wales, VCE in Victoria, QCE in Queensland, WACE in Western Australia, SACE in South Australia, and NCEA Levels 2 and 3 in New Zealand. Senior tutoring is past-paper driven and extended-response heavy, and the material is entirely the centre's own. ### NCEA https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/ncea/ New Zealand's National Certificate of Educational Achievement, Levels 1 to 3, mid-reform. The main secondary qualification in New Zealand, assessed through internal and external standards at three levels. It is being changed through 2026 with updated standards, new co-requisites and a restructured credit framework, which means every New Zealand centre is revising material built around the old standards. ### Pilot https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/pilot/ One class, one term, the centre's material, credited against setup. A paid ten-week trial on one cohort of 15 to 40 students using one class's material, one subject at one year level, branded and set up for them. It ends with a written read-out of who used it, what moved, and what the parents opened. The fee is credited in full against setup if the centre continues, and nothing renews automatically. ### Setup fee https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/setup-fee/ A one-time fee for converting the centre's material and setting up the branded platform. Charged once, at the start, for the work that happens once: conversion of everything the centre currently teaches, branding, the web address, the setup itself, tutor onboarding. It's separate from the monthly fee, which covers hosting, marking, explanations, reports and support. The pilot fee comes off it in full. ### Banded pricing https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/banded-pricing/ A monthly fee set by the size of the centre, not per student. Pricing in three bands by enrolled students, with every feature in every band. Not per student, because a per-student price makes an owner ration the one thing that makes the platform work, and because paying per student to use your own material is a hard sentence to say. Not flat, because a 300-student centre and a 40-student centre aren't the same business. ### Read-out https://studypro.com.au/resources/glossary/read-out/ The written report at the end of a pilot: usage, movement, parents, and what didn't work. A short document delivered at week ten of a pilot: material converted and what the centre approved or rejected, usage per student, completion by week, topic-level movement from week one to week ten, parent reports sent and opened, and a section on what didn't work. Every read-out has that last section. One that's all good news is a sales document.