Foreign Perspectives

Thanks to our Kumon centre taking on rather too many new students than they seem to be able to cope with and hence arbitrarily halving the number of worksheets per session (without reducing the fees, of course), we’ve been looking around at other options.

The Kumon issue arose because there’s no set limit to the number of students that a given centre can take on. Thus, with a sudden increase in numbers following the free trial at the end of August, the numbers in the class seemed to pretty much double. Due to the way the in-class marking is handled that in turn meant that the time taken to get through the work in class went up from around 40 minutes for our guys to over an hour which might not sound like much of an increase but had the overall effect that there just wasn’t enough time to get through all the students. Rather than recruit more supervisors, the centre just halved the number of worksheets so that 60 minute time-slot now takes about 30 minutes.

So we’ve started looking for something similar that places explicit limits on the maximum number of students that they can take on. That’s thrown up Kip McGrath which operates rather differently in that rather than trying to run the kids through a standardised programme, they tailor their programmes to the children and there’s a maximum of six per class. Anyway, we’re getting the kids assessed for their programme later this week.

Ironically, we would have stuck with Kumon as it showed steady progress for the kids but it’s just too expensive for what they’re providing at the moment.