Foreign Perspectives

The two little guys get assessed at the Kip centre this afternoon for both maths and English though we’ve not actually decided on jumping ship from Kumon as yet.

Whereas Kumon is by and large a franchised very standardised system, Kip is supposed to be more tuned to the child and is much more of a franchised tutoring system than Kumon. That in itself brings significant differences eg the Kumon franchisees can come from any walk of life whereas the Kip people are generally from a teaching background. I suspect there’s probably more variability between Kip franchises as a result of that but that’s something that you’d not notice unless you changed from one to another at some stage.

The standardisation in Kumon should make it more scalable but, as we’ve seen, there are limits to that. Since Kip sets limits to the class size there’s an overall maximum number of students that can be taken on by a single franchise eg given that it’s an after school thing, there’s a maximum of around four classes a day (they’re 80 minutes long) ie around 25 kids per day.

As with Kumon, they only do maths and English but rather than a single fixed sequence of things to go through, there are a range of classes from pre-school through to university level and special interest ones too like English as a second language and intensive versions.

At this point, I think we’ll likely move James over to Kip completely and probably leave John doing just the English with Kumon but we’ll see how the assessment and costs pan out.