How To Make Group Classes Work For You

Sumantha: 00:00

So today I want to talk about group classes, and I want to start by being really clear about something before we get into it. This episode is not me trying to convince you that group classes are the answer. They're not right for every tutor, they're not right for every student, and I work with plenty of clients who never run group classes at all, and we find other ways for them to grow their income in a way that really suits them. So if group classes are not something that you have ever want to pursue, then this episode probably is not for you. But if you are already running them or you are in the process of setting them up, or you've been thinking about it and you are trying to work out how to do it in a way that you know actually makes sense for your business and for your life, then I think this conversation is going to be really useful for you. Because what I see a lot, and I mean a lot, is tutors designing group classes in a way that looks good on paper, but actually creates a huge huge amount of pressure and workload underneath the surface and often they don't realise that it's a problem until they're already in it and they're already exhausted.

Sumantha: 01:00

If you're new here, I'm Samantha McMahon and welcome to the Upgrade Your Education Business podcast. I specialise in working with tutors and education business owners who want to make their businesses more lucrative, but in a way that's sustainable. And that actually works for their lives. So, what I want to do today is walk you through some of the things that I've learnt from my own experience of running groups, as well as from working with so many tutors on theirs, because I really think there's a smarter way to do this than what most of us do. And once you see it, it becomes quite hard to unsee. I'll start with the thing that I think trips most tutors up when they first design a group offer. They design it like a course, or they design it under the guise of a membership because they quite like the idea of recurring income, but it isn't actually true to a membership model that's usually lower cost and more sustainable for the host, the tutor who's running it.

Sumantha: 02:00

And because memberships are on the rise in the tutoring world, I'm actually writing an episode right now all about how to design and run a successful one. That will be released in coming weeks. So if you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, subscribe to the channel so you don't miss that one. So I'll quickly go back to the course thing. How many tutors design group classes like a course? Now I want to be clear about what I mean by this because I'm not using the word course in a negative way. Courses can be brilliant, but there's a really specific structural characteristic that comes with a course, and that is that the content is sequential. So lesson one has to come before lesson two. You need to have done week one to make sense of week two.

Sumantha: 03:00

The whole thing is designed to be followed from beginning to end in order. That's a traditional course, and when you structure group tutoring offer that way, it creates a really specific problem. It means that you have to sell all your spaces at the start, before that first session. Because if someone joins in week three, they've missed weeks one and two, and they're already behind. So you're under enormous pressure to fill the group before it really begins and then hope that everyone stays until the very end. And tutors often sell this in blocks, so six weeks. Half terms, you know, that kind of structure. And that means every six weeks you're back at square one, you're marketing again, you're chasing inquiries again. You are wondering how many students are going to come back and continue for the next block. You're trying to plan lessons without really knowing how many people are actually going to be in the room. I know this because I did exactly this for the first two years that I ran group classes back in 2020.

Sumantha: 04:00

When I first started running groups, I had three groups and they were quite large. I think it was something like 10 to 15 students. And I was selling them in six-week blocks. Now, on the surface, it looked fine. I was teaching groups, I was earning more per hour than I was in my one-to-one sessions. And I told myself that, you know, it was working. But what I was not accounting for was everything that sat around that one hour every week of teaching. Every half term I was gearing up to sell again. Every half term I had that tension of not knowing who was coming back, not knowing how many spaces I had, not knowing what to plan for. I was having to plan the curriculum or at least the six-week plan so that I had some solid information to offer people who were interested. You know, if I'm going to ask them to commit to six weeks, they need to know what's covered in those six weeks. And after two years of doing it like this, I was exhausted.

Sumantha: 05:00

And it wasn't from the teaching, it was from that cycle of uncertainty that that I had built into the structure without really meaning to. And here's the thing that I think is really worth sitting with. The reason that I had built it that way, it wasn't because, like, you know, I hadn't thought it through and decided it was the best model. It was actually because that's how courses work, and therefore it felt like a really logical way to do it. That was the template that I just had in my head: six weeks, block booking, renew at the end. But tutoring isn't necessarily a course, or at least it doesn't have to be a course for most people. So, what changed things for me was stepping back and thinking about how my one-to-one tuition actually worked. And what I noticed was that my one-to-one clients didn't think of their lessons as a block of six. They just learned with me. It was ongoing, it was week after week, and usually it's year after year. There wasn't any moment every half term where they had to decide whether to continue.

Sumantha: 06:00

It was just continuous. And the stability that created for them and for me was completely different to what I had in my groups. So I decided to basically just build that into how I ran groups instead. I don't know why I didn't do it in the first place. The first thing I did was I reduced my group sizes significantly. That was my choice purely because of my teaching preference. I went down to a maximum of four students per group, and I also increased my prices significantly alongside that. And what I found was that parents didn't have any resistance to that price at all because when I explained the model, it made complete sense to them. A group of four is small enough that their child is still getting personalized attention alongside all the benefits of learning with peers. And that combination is really valuable, and parents could actually see that. But the bigger change wasn't actually structural, I actually just stopped selling in blocks. I stopped thinking about a curriculum for the next six weeks and instead my groups just became ongoing tuition.

Sumantha: 07:00

Students joined, they stayed, they continued, just like my one-to-one clients. And the results of that were so significant. My income became more stable than it had ever been. I stopped spending energy on remarketing every half-term. I stopped carrying that uncertainty, that stress about who was coming back, how many places would I have to fill. And students who started with me in year five or year six because they were doing, let's say, 11 plus exams, they were still with me in year 11 doing their GCSEs. In fact, that is since then, that's how my tuition business has continued to work. And it's why I don't even sell it anymore, market it anymore, because it's so ongoing that I very rarely have spaces. So my groups, they were no longer fluctuating. They were really settled, and they still are. My workload also dropped in a way that I hadn't really fully anticipated. Because I was managing fewer students, fewer parents, fewer moving parts, and my natural teaching style, which is very fluid and responsive and not particularly wedded to a pre-prepared lesson plan.

Sumantha: 08:00

It was suddenly an asset rather than something that I was trying to work around. I never needed a rigid curriculum because I have a large resource bank that I dip into and I freestyle when a lesson calls for it. My groups stopped feeling like something that I was actually managing and started to feel like something I enjoyed and was it was really low stress and it still is, and it it just lines up with how I like to work and the relationships that I build with my students. So now the reason I'm telling you all of this is to illustrate a principle, not because you need to follow this exact model and make the same decisions. And the principle is that the structure of your group offer determines how sustainable it is, not just financially, but in terms of your time and your energy and your enjoyment of the work. And a lot of tutors are building their group offers on a structural template.

Sumantha: 09:00

That actually creates far more pressure than they realize, you know, before they've even had a chance to think it through differently. So I'll talk about what thinking it through differently can actually look like. One of my clients works in the entrance exam world and she runs group classes and you know they're really well established. But when we started working together, one of the things that she was really grappling with was the variability in her students. Because she's working with at quite a high level, and the students who come to her groups can have quite different starting points in terms of their knowledge and you know, confidence, and sometimes ability. And what that was creating in practice was planning headaches. Planning was taking are absolutely ages because you know when you've got a range of ability in a room, then lesson planning does take a lot longer. You have to think of a lot more. You're trying to stretch the students who are already confident while making sure that the others can access the material.

Sumantha: 10:00

And that extra planning time was eating into the efficiency of running the group in the first place. So we worked on a pre assessment process, a piece of work that students complete before they join the group, which basically tells her whether they are at the right base level to access what she's teaching. Essentially, she sort of streamlined her group, not formally, but in a way that would make her teaching, her planning load easier, but also make the lessons more effective. So it didn't mean that every student had to be identical. There was still room for varying needs and different strengths. It was up to her to make that judgment call. But she created this kind of baseline standard that everyone had to meet before they joined. And that really changed her planning process. It changed it entirely, in fact. Now, initially that felt like more work to set up, but once it was created, it just became a reusable asset. She's not writing a new pre-assessment every single time she gets a new student. It's built, it's streamlined, and it does a job that really protects her time every single week going forward.

Sumantha: 11:00

And that's what I mean by designing for sustainability. It can come in so many different forms. It might take a bit of thought and effort up front. But the decisions that you make at the design stage determine how much energy your group classes take over the longer term. And that brings me to something I want to be really direct about. When tutors first start thinking about running group classes and they're doing the maths, the appeal is usually about the hourly rate. And it makes complete sense. If you're currently earning X per hour, seeing one-to-one students, and you put four students together in a group and charge each of them even a slightly discounted rate, the maths looks very attractive. But I want you to think about something. Your income from a group class is not just about what you earn in that hour of teaching. It's about what you earn across your entire working time that's connected to running that group. So that might include your planning time, your admin time, your parent communication time, your marketing time, you know, if you're selling in blocks and refilling spaces regularly, your assessment and feedback time, basically everything connected to that group.

Sumantha: 12:00

And if you add all of that up and you look at what you're actually earning per hour of your total working time on that group, not just the teaching hour. The picture can actually look quite different to the one that you started with or that you hoped for. Now I'm not telling you this to put you off. It's here to help you think about it strategically. Because if you can design your group offer in a way that keeps that wider time investment low and the income stable and predictable, then the financial case for it becomes really compelling. But if you design it in a way that creates constant reselling, high planning demands, and lots of parent management, you might find that the hourly rate advantage very quickly disappears. So let's think beyond the obvious solutions. One of my clients has been running well-established groups, well, I say quite well-established groups actually, for some time, and they're going quite well.

Sumantha: 13:00

But she wanted to think about how to give herself a little more breathing room. She didn't want to step away from them, she didn't want to hand them over by growing a team of tutors, but just to release herself from some of the time they were taking. She was worried that, you know, as an independent tutor, essentially as a freelancer, if she was ill, she didn't earn, she had a young son, and what if that caused disruption? So she just wanted to build in some safety. Her instinct was that the only way that that could be possible is to bring in another tutor, but she really didn't want to build a team. It wasn't the direction she wanted to go in. So we got creative. What we landed on in the end was bringing in other professionals, not tutors, but people with relevant expertise to come in and deliver really specific elements to her students that sit alongside and complement what she's teaching, but they're not necessarily related to her course subject.

Sumantha: 14:00

Skills and knowledge that would really add value for those students. And that actually allowed her to charge more and made her groups a lot more attractive. In fact, I had a meeting with her this morning. And she's on track to make six figures this quarter. So these things actually really enhance what she's already offering, and it's gone and reduced how much she's working. She's still at the centre of it. She is still delivering her lessons as an independent tutor. But she has created space in that offer for other people to contribute, and in doing so, importantly, has released some of her time without compromising on the quality or value of what her students are receiving. If anything, she's added to it. That kind of thinking is only really possible when you stop looking at group classes as a fixed template and you start looking at them as something that you can actually design really intentionally, something you can shape around your strengths, your goals, and the life you actually want to be living.

Sumantha: 15:00

It's a huge part of the work I do, especially with my one-to-one clients. So the tutoring industry tends to talk about group classes in quite a narrow way. Run them, fill them, charge per head, and manage the admin. And that version of it can work, but it's not the only version. The version I really want you to think about is one where the structure actually serves you as much as it serves your students, where the model that you design makes you the income more stable, your workload more manageable, and your enjoyment of the work more consistent. That doesn't happen by accident. It does happen when you think it through really carefully and properly before you build it, or when you are willing to revisit and redesign something that's already running but is costing you more than it should. And if you would find it really helpful to think this through with someone, that's exactly the kind of work that I do with tutors in my bespoke one-to-one accelerator. We look at your specific situation first, actually, your goals, your setup, and we work out what the right model looks like for you.

Sumantha: 16:00

And it may not even be a group class. We don't follow a template. It's something that is designed around you. And you can find out more information at upgrade your education business.com, or if you want the shortcut, I have popped the direct link to find out and more about the program in the description. If it feels like the right next step for you, I'd love to have a chat, I'd love to meet you. So as always, thanks for giving me your time, and you will hear from me on Wednesday.