Best English tutoring centre? (1 Viewer)

vivillon

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Hi! I was trying to figure out what would be the best place to go English tutoring for Year 11 English Adv (and Ext 1 if they have it). I'm fine with travel so that's not really a big deal for me.
So far, I've been looking at Matrix Education. I'm not that sure though, I've been recommended some places like Ngo & Sons and Dux College as well.

All advice is welcome, thanks! :)
 

Drdusk

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Hi! I was trying to figure out what would be the best place to go English tutoring for Year 11 English Adv (and Ext 1 if they have it). I'm fine with travel so that's not really a big deal for me.
So far, I've been looking at Matrix Education. I'm not that sure though, I've been recommended some places like Ngo & Sons and Dux College as well.

All advice is welcome, thanks! :)
I've heard very good things about Delta from everyone. Perhaps you should consider that as well?
 

Drdusk

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Delta is overall pretty good (Barring certain classes and teachers), but it has jacked up its prices recently to an astronomical $12k/yr. A really good alternative would be Macduff.
Ouch 12k a year JUST for English?!?!? That's the price of like going to one of the top private schools!
Ain't no way I would pay that much when you can get a very good private tutor at $30 an hour
 
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vivillon

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Delta is overall pretty good (Barring certain classes and teachers), but it has jacked up its prices recently to an astronomical $12k/yr. A really good alternative would be Macduff.
I'll look out for both. The price is quite hefty though.
Thanks!
 

iSplicer

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Delta is overall pretty good (Barring certain classes and teachers), but it has jacked up its prices recently to an astronomical $12k/yr. A really good alternative would be Macduff.
Hey Guys,

I'm the director at Delta :). The comments here are correct that we're more expensive than other tutoring places and it's something we genuinely regret (though the quoted figures here are off somewhat). This is a commonly raised issue that we cop much flak for and I wish I could eliminate it altogether but the situation with English is a little complex and we want to do a good job. I'd like to respectfully provide some clarification below as to why the situation is as such:

Why is Delta so expensive?

There is no doubt that Delta is a significant investment for many families. However, the key point to consider is that price and value are different concepts. Below are a few points to help the reader understand the reasons underlying Delta's tuition fees.

Reason 1: Extensive Inclusions. All students at Delta have access to (1) weekly classes, (2) full sets of text-specific course material, direct and ongoing access to a tutor who provides them with all the support they require in the form of unlimited ('unlimited' to the extent that the student improves upon previously marked work) (3) Individual Lessons, (4) Essay Marking Submissions and (5) general support wherever required.

Our staff members work extremely hard and take great pride in their responding to every students' enquiry (both in terms of promptness and thoroughness), an example from just a few hours ago is below:





The amount of academic contact Delta provides to each student is comfortably multiples of what they'd receive from tuition elsewhere for other subjects. This is because English is a ridiculously difficult subject and necessitates a tuition structure concomitant with the rather complex trajectory of improvement it tends to demand. This is especially true for the vast majority of our students from high performing selective schools who tend to excel at Maths and Science, but struggle to intuitively understand rubric outcomes for English due to factors such as a poor history of reading and underinvestment in studying time during the early years of high school.

Reason 2: Text-Specificity. This is a factor non-existent in tuition for all other subjects and astronomically increases our costs. All Year 12 classes at Delta have different sets of course material written for every single text that we teach. The vast majority of our course material is written by those with postgraduate qualifications in English and each course is very thorough. I have thus far spent in excess of $100k in re-writing our course material for the new syllabus and the many new texts and textual combinations involved. Finding high-quality writers and editors is difficult and extremely expensive especially given the time pressures involved where material needs to be ready for our students well in advance.

I really, really miss my days of tutoring STEM subjects where there's a single set of material for an entire cohort - that really was the dream.

Our aim is to provide our students with tertiary-grade analysis to make the collation of key information relevant to syllabus outcomes as easy and painless as possible. This makes writing your essay so much easier. For example, a Module A course at Delta lasts for 8 weeks. As an example, here's a link to the first lesson of our The Tempest/Hag-Seed course material, just one lesson module out of 8: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VZXI6pXk8ndPYvqbnj0a0QkJPjbfjOS4/view.

Reason 3: Staff Qualifications. This is perhaps the most significant point in increasing our costs. All academic staff members at Delta hold compulsorily, a NSW State Rank in English. In addition, we can only hire the most personable and dedicated in the interests of our students' progress and company reputation. The huge problem here is that it massively reduces the number of candidates that are available (only a minority of English state rankers are interviewed as many move interstate and overseas and of this minority, most are not hired due to poor communication skills or misaligned objectives in terms of student interests).

What the above means is that our staff members are very difficult to replace, are in enormously high demand and thus, Delta needs to pay them very lucratively (multiples of an equivalently qualified person teaching Maths or Science elsewhere) to keep them working for us and prevent them from working privately or elsewhere (or more likely, simply decide that they're making enough money from their four scholarships that they don't really need a job).

There are so, so few such tutors available of the caliber we require at Delta it's not even funny (compare this to the comparatively huge number of people who are excellent at teaching Maths and Science). Every one of my colleagues at Delta is incredible, amazing and deserving of every dollar of pay; but the fact remains that a huge portion of your tuition fees acts as insurance in keeping the very best people in the state teaching you. This not only applies to your class teachers at Delta but also your tutors who're paid a very lucrative salary (again, for the reasons mentioned) to help you with your work.

Indeed, we stopped the intake of Year 12 enrolments in March this year (at a massive cost to our financial performance) simply because there aren't enough tutors available with the qualifications and willingness of dedication towards student progress we require. Sure, we could relax our standards (even slightly) and take on hundreds more students; but then we'd turn into your regular mediocre tutoring company which is not what I want for Delta.

I really am very sorry that Delta is unaffordable for some families (we currently charge $1950 and $2450 per term for Years 11 and 12 respectively) but the fact remains that even with the mentioned prices, our profit margins are much lower than most other tuition companies simply because of our astronomical expenses. I should also mention that the majority of the parents I speak to consider our prices cheap from a value perspective after adjusting for the thoroughness, structure and rarity of the service they're given access to.

You can do very well in English without coming to Delta but the fact remains that we make things much easier for you, especially for English where private tutors are a huge hit and miss. If you have any concerns please feel free to get in touch with us via our website (not allowed to link here as it violates BoS advertising rules) and we'd be delighted to help.
 

iSplicer

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Delta is overall pretty good (Barring certain classes and teachers), but it has jacked up its prices recently to an astronomical $12k/yr. A really good alternative would be Macduff.
Hey blizzardblizzard,

Thanks for the kind mention. Your figures are slightly off; we currently charge $1950 and $2450 per term for Years 11 and 12 respectively.

What you mentioned about some classes and teachers not being as good was correct in 2019. Although this was definitely the absolute minority (and in a situation where students receive help from numerous staff as part of their enrolment - the actual final impact is minimised), we did screw up here and even if to a very limited extent, this absolutely is not good enough for what we charge. We hold ourselves to a standard of excellency across the board and are committed to this. I do note however, that we had a refund policy in place for all of 2019 (and onwards) so students were never locked in with academic staff they weren't happy with. A tiny proportion of students discontinued in 2019.

The story is that I screwed up and hired some staff members in early this year whose work ethic ended up being shocking. You may have heard about some recent controversy involving these ex-employees where after leaving, they've been making up horrifying stories about our workplace practices out of spite. As the director, I take responsibility but what happened with these few ex-employees was something that had never occurred at Delta before and will never happen again. Our refund policy will continue to remain in place so that students are never locked in and always free to explore alternatives if they feel Delta is not for them.

I want to be transparent about this to the public even at a huge cost; you'll never see tutoring companies do this but I want Delta to be better. English is very difficult to tutor, this year was a massive transition for us given the new syllabus, a new academic program (this was the reason prices were increased, please read my above post for more info) and mistakes were made. We'll learn from these mistakes and be the best that we can for those that place their trust in us.

The small number of these problematic staff have now left and our entire team is amazing again, as it's always been. I've paid dearly both financially and reputationally for this screw-up but we're so keen to return to our amazing standard of work we've always adopted, across the board. We're taking on board some amazing new staff members in 2020 and would love for you to give us a try, you can quit any time with a full refund for the time you haven't attended! After giving us a go, please return to this thread and provide your thoughts. If we weren't good enough - please roast us (but tell us why), but 99% of the time (as was in this thread!) you'll only hear about the incredible work our staff members do - and you'll know that all comments are genuine :)
 

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Talent 100 for English: I highly recommend it!! If you go to CBD Campus you also get the Head of English - Jenny Wells, she's so good
 

Reagan Peng

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Hey there! If anyone is looking for English tuition, we have STATE RANKER and JAMES RUSE alumni covering Year 7-12 English. To get a feel of what our lessons are like, send us a message on our FB page to be invited to our FREE online seminars and check out our students' past achievements on our page. :) https://www.facebook.com/jpenglishspecialisttuition/
 

Velocifire

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Hey there! If anyone is looking for English tuition, we have STATE RANKER and JAMES RUSE alumni covering Year 7-12 English. To get a feel of what our lessons are like, send us a message on our FB page to be invited to our FREE online seminars and check out our students' past achievements on our page. :) https://www.facebook.com/jpenglishspecialisttuition/
December 13, you clown, she has most likely selected tutoring with somebody else already.
 

beetree1

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Unpopular opinion - The Brain Education, if you are lucky enough to get Chris.
He has like 1000 little minions that mark your work so you are guaranteed marked work within like 12 hours of submitting.
I don't have him but my friends do, and they are all EXCELLING so~
 

Eduard_Khil

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Right, but they should make their own post!
I don't find anything wrong with this, they're using the popularity of this post to promote their tutoring services. The more attention this page gets, the more likely it's able to end up on Google Searches. And if it does, it will help this forum, their tutoring services, and the people looking at it. (because they're able to see the vast amounts of recommendations 👍 ).

I agree with you, but let's face it, if they made their own post, they wouldn't be getting much attention because not many people really comment on posts dedicated to that (not getting bumped often or clicked often??)

:)
 

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