Blyth teacher's tutoring business that makes extra help affordable for pupils finds permanent home

Rebecca Maxwell first started the business four years ago, employing local students and sixth formers to tutor and offering the service at a more affordable rate than the bigger companies she competes with.

Now she has signed a long term lease on an outbuilding at Briardale House in Blyth, which will become the company’s home.

Rebecca, from Blyth, said: “I do not do it to earn loads of money. I do it to try and keep prices down, so I still work in a school.

“It has been popular and we have had some fantastic tutors come through that have then gone to the likes of these lovely big universities and have had good references from me.

“We have had hundreds of students come through the doors.”

The company only charges £15.50 per hour for tutoring, and is hoping that at some point in the future grant funding can be obtained to offer some spaces for free.

Rebecca said: “Within Blyth, Bedlington, Ashington, all these places, there are such high levels of poverty that the likes of tutoring comes at the bottom of the list because it always seems so unaffordable.

“Because of that we are then stuck in a poverty trap. Students are perhaps not getting the grades that their peers are getting in other areas, in other towns, and then life chances are not quite as good.

“I have to do something that breaks that cycle, that makes young people, regardless of what family they are from, feel just as worthy as other people.”

The English teacher added: “Tutoring is seen as being a total luxury for the middle or upper class, which I think it has been in years prior.

“I did private tutoring a few years ago. I had just been to this house of this super rich family.

“It was a beautiful £1m house and I came away and thought ‘what about all the kids that are sat in houses where their parents cannot afford this?’”

Rebecca said tutoring’s “benefits are endless” and it can make a “huge” difference to students struggling to get the one-to-one help they need in large class sizes at school.

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