MATH - Third Space Learning

Primary school provides a child's foundation for numeracy, however UK primary schools face
a severe shortage of teachers with maths related degrees, currently less than 2%. Poor
numeracy costs UK economy £20bn/yr and people with poor numeracy are twice as likely to
be unemployed. It disproportionately impacts underprivileged children, with UK children
from poor backgrounds twice as likely to fail academically (National Numeracy, 2015).
UK Govt spends £2.8bn on Pupil Premium (DfE, 2014), intended to supplement maths
education for disadvantaged pupils. Schools receive £935 per eligible secondary-aged pupil
and £1,300 for primary (Demos, 2014). However, PP is failing to address the issue as 48% of
local authorities saw attainment gaps increase in 2014 (Demos, 2014).
1-to-1 tuition has a positive impact on learning, particularly for primary school maths as it
enables learners to catch up (Educational Endowment Fund, 2015). Schools can identify
pupils requiring support and access PP funding, however schools lack the system to
effectively implement 1-to-1 tuition at scale.
TSL helps to solve the issues by recruiting maths graduates from around the world to provide
1-to-1 maths tuition in UK schools. TSL tutors work from offices in India and Sri Lanka,
connecting to children in English schools through online, virtual classrooms. TSL is already
used in 186 schools across UK and conducts over 2K sessions a week.
TSL assessors currently manually review and grade 5% of sessions each week to ensure
quality, which is a costly, inefficient and inconsistent process, that restricts TSL’s scalability.
The MATH project will develop an automated session grading algorithm, to monitor teaching
quality and determine its correlation to learning outcomes. This quality assurance system will
ensure high quality teaching at scale, leading to better outcomes. MATH will allow TSL to
automatically analyse tutor performance, identify best practice and develop excellence at
scale.