center manager

call center supervisor

data center lead

center director

assistant manager

Explore Learning

The company, while claiming to be creating creating ‘confident, fearless learners’ is nothing more than a for-profit company exploiting parents concerns about their child’s learning and progress at school. 

Pros: 
1. A great team and some really friendly tutors. 
2. Interacting with the members (children) was fun (certainly a different job to most student jobs). 

Cons: 
1. 6 to 1 ratio of members to tutor is an incredibly flawed and target driven scheme. You will never have enough time to actually support the members learning. 
2. Pay is shockingly bad, even after a year there you’ll have to have another income to supplement your explore salary. 
3. Fundamentally it’s not about educating (they do that at school). It’s about saying they’re achieving their potential by coming to an explore centre by writing ‘session notes’ (if you work there, you’ll know all about session notes!). Obviously parents will be concerned about 11+ exams and so on, and certainly if their child is struggling at school. Explore advertises itself as the key to unlock your child’s potential. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a for profit company, not like a public sector organisation. 
4. Managers are bone idle. If the centre were full, they’ll be sitting in their office writing emails/checking on tutors etc. Nothing particularly productive. 
5. This is speculation but I doubt going to explore improves a child’s grades. Some members there were clearly already extremely bright before coming and would thus get decent grades anyway. Some members frankly had no hope (I’m not being funny, it’s true). 
6. They have pointless ‘the office’ level of training every month. Utterly pointless and absolutely nothing is learnt by anyone. It’s just an excuse to discuss retention (again with meeting the targets). 
7. The equipment (computers, headphones etc.) seldom work. And despite a member not being able to complete phonics/English due to faulty headphones, you’ll still have to write something on the session note. 
8. There is clear favouritism. Trust me, tutor of the month will never, as long as the sun has hydrogen fuel, go to the most capable or engaging tutor. It’ll go to the tutor that’s able to improve retentions somehow. (I’ll explain later). 
9. You’ll be dealing with special needs children without any proper training or guidance. In my opinion that’s probably just on the right side of the law, but not far off breaking it. 
10. To actually receive the meagre pay, you’ll have to submit timesheets online. Call me old fashioned but in my varied work experience I had never had to do this so it was new for me. Your timesheets will always be getting declined and pay being delayed. Isn’t the manager/HR meant to handle pay? Well explore has no HR per centre, you’ll have to go above the managers heads to discuss something minor, which isn’t worth it. 
11. A culture of silence. Nobody talks about the problems here. It’s so obvious to everyone but nobody wants to acknowledge them. You can offer occasional feedback to the managers but it either has to be extremely trivial and/or patronising ‘oh, you work too hard’ or it’ll fall upon deaf ears if it’s important. 
12. Members do not respect the tutors. Even the 9 year olds have a developed enough brain to see we’re not ‘educational professionals’, we’re just paid by the hour, uniformed (and sometimes worryingly uneducated) service workers. Some of the tutors know nothing more than rudimentary algebra. 

Let me elaborate the cons (they’re far more important than the pros, like any review). 
Members come in for an hour. That’s one hour you have to tutor them. Fair enough, you can do a lot in one hour. However when you have six members to watch in one hour, and more coming and leaving whenever, you lose track of how everyone is doing. They expect you to give 1 to 1 support for children doing phonics and handwriting, however this is plainly and simply not possible. With 5 other children in the zone, you cannot physically give 1 to 1 with any of them. If more than one is on phonics, you’ve had it. And since you’ve got to write out session notes (we’ll get to what a joke they are later), you’ll catch on quick that the place isn’t designed for tutoring and supporting, it’s about meeting targets. 
And let’s all be honest here, some of the members could be so abrasive and simply annoying. Guess what, the managers don’t care. Their parents are paying so they’ve achieved their aim. Honestly when I saw some of the more ‘charismatic’ members walk in I wanted to feign collapsing to get out of there. 

Now patient reader, lets get to the bane of the organisation (in my humble opinion): the session notes. 
When I started I didn’t have a clue what to write on a session note. Another tutor told me ‘if you can’t think of anything, just make something up’ and if you work here that’s exactly what you’ll be doing. It’s broken down into 4 parts: Fearless learning habit, Understand and convince, Overcome challenge and Respect. Basically for fulfilling the requirements set out on the session note, a member will get a lizard card (a redeemable token for prizes, not a terrible idea). One lizard card for the FLH, U&C, you get the idea. However it’s so overtly structured in a way to make it appear like the child is ‘making progress in the centre with the U&C, however still needs out support with the OC’. Basically ‘we’re helping your child learn, but they still have to come here because they’re still struggling’. And at the end of a session, whether they’ve done the requirements by working hard, or sat about doing nothing, they’ll still get the 4 lizard cards. Pointless waste of productivity and people’s time. 

I would potentially recommend working here as a student. You’ll meet some great people and make friends with the other tutors. Also the members could be really funny at times and was a relaxed place to be on quiet days.  
It’s a shame a place that’s meant to be so benevolent and education focused is so crooked and target driven. If you’re a parent in all honesty I wouldn’t get involved. Scientology is probably cheaper for auditing.

Summary if you don’t want to read all in detail:

Very sales-based role, it’s what everything revolves around. Hours are unsociable and you have to work on weekends. Not much room for growth and development. The teams you work in are very small, maximum of 3 managers including yourself, so if you don’t get along, it can ruin your experience.

Review:

EXTREMELY SALES-ORIENTED

I was an Assistant Director (AD) at Explore Learning and had a completely awful experience. If you are looking for a job in sales, then this is the job for you! It isn’t clear on the website, but it is extremely sales-oriented, whereby you are constantly trying to meet targets to get families and children to sign up for tuition at the centre. Your performance is based on how many ‘trials’ you book (which are like taster sessions with families before they agree to sign up). Then you are also judged on how many ‘sign ups’ you get. Day in, day out, especially on weekends, you are figuring out how to get as many families to join. It’s all about the numbers and which centre can grow the most. What’s worse is that it doesn’t even matter how well you perform as an individual because you’re working as a team of 3 managers. If your boss (the Centre Director (CD)) is not booking many trials, they will still get credit for your work because all that matters is how many trials your team books together. So if you are looking for a sales job, this is for you. Not much actually gets discussed about the kids’ progress and their education. You just have to be good at sales, and marketing a service even though you don’t necessarily agree with what there is to offer.


WORK/LIFE BALANCE

Starting as an Assistant Director (AD), you will either be working Sunday to Thursday, or Tuesday to Saturday. Due to COVID-19, the structure of the company has changed and the AD schedule is Tuesday to Saturday. You’ll be working 11am-8pm (approx.) Tuesday to Friday, and will be working 9am-6pm on a Saturday. Pre-COVID, you were also expected to work an additional weekend day once a month, so once a month you would be working both Saturday and Sunday. You do get this day back in lieu, however, you cannot get this day back on a weekend due to only one manager working on either the Saturday or Sunday. This extra weekend day you are working is not made clear until you’re already in the role, and this is an extra sales day where you are RMUing (marketing) in your local community, standing in a supermarket or an event, talking to the public and trying to get people to sign up. Because you are in such a small team of only 3 managers, you also need to book any annual leave around 3 months in advance to organise who will be working when. If you are ill on a weekend, it is also incredibly tricky to get someone to work on this day. Depending on where you live as well, you may be getting home at 9pm after work, so these unsociable hours are very inconvenient. No wiggle room with these hour either, apart from one weekday a week you get one 9am-6pm day instead of 11am-8pm, however, my Centre Director (CD) didn’t even know the rules of the company properly and I wasn’t ‘awarded’ my 9-6 day until 6 months into the role instead of 3 months in.


DURING COVID-19

When lockdown struck, the company quickly transitioned online. They furloughed a lot of staff meaning the team of 3 managers went down to 2 and consequently, taking any annual leave was even more difficult than it usually was. Communication and any information passed down from head office to the managers was poor, and a redundancy scheme got announced and this communication was not handled well either. During this redundancy process, lots of information was mishandled and dates kept getting pushed back. After managers were made redundant, you still had to work tirelessly, hours on end.


OTHER

Development and progression may be difficult if you don’t have a great Centre Director (CD). They may stunt your growth in the company. Typically, an Assistant Director’s (AD) opportunity to progress would be to a CD position, then a head office role after that, but not much more than that. The salary is alright for a graduate job, and there was a bonus scheme, but that was scrapped and replaced with a poor bonus scheme after. I didn’t even receive a bonus for a month, despite the work that was put in, and when raised with HR/finance/head office, was still not received.

Be prepared to be called an ‘educational professional’ and be asked to make decisions about children’s educational levels, despite not having sufficient training about the matter.

I actually used to be a tutor a few years before I took on the AD role, and had a slightly better experience with that.

My role was a tutor, in person. Branch I worked in was heavily understaffed. Sometimes would have to be the only tutor for over 10 kids. They'd constantly have to find cover to try and manage the zones. It was nice working with the children but the management did micromanage constantly, but by far biggest problem whilst working was that it was far too much work expected for the time given, from managing all the different students and their activities and timing and marking along with trying to moderate their behaviour. Incredibly underpaid for all the responsibility that the work entailed, was earning less than 9 pounds per hour when I quit (I worked in central London). Not to mention the fact that weekday shifts were 2 hours per, whilst the weekend ones with slightly more hours were too popular so already taken. The one weekend shift I worked, I was not given any proper breaks, and worked the whole way through. Meanwhile, most frustratingly, to be paid you had to fill in timesheets, but the timesheets were always a migraine to fill in, particularly because if your device did not have the right dimensions the website is not coded to accommodate and thus you find yourself spending an hour at home trying to fill in your time sheet because the table would not scroll accordingly. Filling in those timesheets should've taken a minute, but instead they took half an hour to an hour per time as if it was made to be as difficult as possible to fill in. In addition, your manager has to "approve" of the timesheets and for some reason I was rejected two weeks of work and never paid for them. To summarise, high stress and underpaid, but the management did remain fairly supportive when the children's behaviour became too out of hand and my coworkers were also good people. The children were nice to get to know too and the only reason I stayed is because the location was close so it was still pocket money to me, and my first ever job. But don't go in expecting fair compensation for the role, although if you're looking for a first job and some experience, go ahead. If you're looking for a job where you want fairer compensation, working at a pizza place would've provided far less stress and much more compensation. 

For a part-time Tutor role, Explore is fantastic. It’s (generally) flexible and rewarding, even in the very busy periods. 
I wish I could say the same for the managerial roles. I was an exceptional Tutor, and was therefore encouraged to apply internally for the Assistant Director post.
I would advise Explore to advertise this role as sales-lead within the Education Sector, rather than an education-lead role with ‘a bit of sales’. If you care about and value physically teaching children, this is not the role for you. It is heavily sales and target lead, with constant accountability checks and pressures. So much of the job relies on saying X, Y, and Z that you think your superiors want to hear and you have very little actual involvement with the children you are supposedly providing for. The entire company is based on a façade; the passion for education is merely skin-deep and those who are successful in the company are money and target driven. You find yourself blagging (lying) your way through most interactions because the main incentive is a trial booking/sign up/box to tick. I actually had my line manager tell me they ‘didn’t care about the children’ and that their motivation was ‘the monetary bonuses for target hitting’. 

This is an education provider for children. 

There is no such thing as a work/life balance. The hours are long and very unsociable, and your only socialising is available within the Explore bubble. You end up working your days off, traipsing around neighbourhoods dropping leaflets through people’s doors or standing for hours at a time in some shopping centre accosting families in the hopes of booking a trial. Time in lieu does not mentally compensate for this.
The pay is reasonable if you are in a London centre, but not worth the mental anguish. Bonuses are not an incentive when your main concern is the children. 
I can see why the company prefers fresh-faced 21yr old graduates who don’t know any different, as anyone with an iota of life experience soon realises how false and degrading this job is. The high staff turnover surely speaks for itself.

Job overview:
Managing the running of an education centre in a team of three. Jobs are inclusive of, but not limited to, marketing, sales, recruitment, and finance. Creating and tutoring appropriately tailored programmes for children tutoring children aged 4 to 15, including those with SEN, in English and maths. High level of customer service, dealing with customers and various community members face to face and over the phone.

There is no typical day at work, though interacting with children is always a big part of the day. In the week you generally work 11-8 and you work one weekend day either Sat (9-6) or Sun (9-4). Some days you are out marketing in the community and others you're running workshops. You learn new things everyday and are constantly trying to better what you have learned as there is such a wide variety of tasks. This can be a little daunting but if you love a good challenge then this is for you. 

The hardest part of the job is the working hours. It's great to have a lie in but to work so late and to work on the weekends proves pretty anti-social. The best part of the job is the responsibility you are given from the onset - if you are organised and creative you can help to maintain and develop a smooth running education centre providing great customer service to parents. There is the scope to advance quickly in the company if you are happy to take on responsibility.

Working for explore learning was an experience, and had I had the knowledge I have now surrounding workplace rights and expectations, I would have quit long before I did. This company exploits young workers, paying minimal wages on virtually none/very little training, and yet uses their workers freely and with little regard for their physical and mental wellbeing. 
Reported issues to managers, was ignored. Reported bad and damaging behaviour by children to the managers (was stabbed in the hand with pencils and pens), and was told to 'accept' that children's behaviour can simply be "off hand" at times (of course I was told this by someone who was sat comfortably in the chair in the managers' office, not by someone actually working with the children). 
It was overall a bad experience, and if you do the math yourself before purchasing their services for your own child (and it definitely isn't 'tuition' by the way, the children effectively play computer games for an hour and then are left to their own devices for another half hour in 'surf time'), you can see that if you hired a private tutor for e.g. £30 p/h only once a week, you'd spend the same in a month as you would at this company - except you'd actually fund your child's education, not some corporate pipe dream sold under the guise of 'broadening young minds'. 
Explore Learning is a waste of your money, it doesn't specialise or prioritise children's learning needs and as for other young people looking for work - make this place your last resort.

You are given responsibility from day one which is great for people who want to get stuck into management. You lead a team of tutors and help develop and motivate them in their roles. The training for managers is thorough and involved yet you do feel like a jack of all trades, a master of none. There is an opportunity to specialise in education, marketing, sales etc. as you become more experienced. 

The culture is a fast-paced and stressful one, where accountability is inconsistent dependent on whether you were 'liked' by senior management or not. I personally struggled to be promoted despite my skills set due to me being an introvert. It was often pointed out that I was 'too quiet' or 'didn't speak enough'. If your personality doesn't fit, it can be hard to progress. After 5 years in the company, my skills were recognised by my new manager and things did begin to improve, but it was too little too late for me after I'd spoken up several times. 

The children and tutors are a joy to work with and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know them and supporting them in their educational goals. For me, this was the most rewarding aspect of the job. Working with managers from other centres was also a highlight, building great friendships. 

The role as a tutor involves working in a 6:1 ratio with children working mainly on the computers and you helping them when they need it. Training is provided every so often, but you learn mostly through on the job experience. If you want to progress in your career, from my personal experience the management are very supportive, all you have to do is ask. However, sometimes they don't have enough time to give the support you need due to the workload and other responsibilities. I would say the hardest part of the job is dealing with SEN children while being responsible for 5 other children in your zone, but with experience and time you learn to deal with this. 

The most enjoyable part of the job is watching the children develop in their skills and personality, You build great relationships with them and it is a amazing opportunity if you want a career in education. 

I don't really understand the complaints about tutor hours as you only have to commit to 8 hours a week which is normally divided into 2x4 hour shifts and you choose your availability. Yeah, it can be challenging sometimes, but what job isn't.

I would definitely recommend explore learning to anyone passionate about helping children and getting some great work experience.

A typical day at work involves being a tutor, offering maths and english help to a maximum of 6 children at a time. The programme the children use is all on computers, so you walk around the centre attending to the children when they need help, or asking probing questions to the children in order to check they understand what they are learning and challenging them. I learnt lots of things on the job, like how every person is unique, and thus how you engage with different people is ultimately tailored to the student. I learnt how to become organised so I wasn't leaving any students behind when working, which is ultimately the hardest part of the job, making sure your time is split fairly and you believe your help is accurate. The workplace culture was a very fun environment, with lots of tutors interacting on the job, whether that was playing games with all the children or making jokes, it just helps create a comfortable place for the children to work. Staff were always friendly and willing to help you whenever you had any queries. They were always looking to push you in your training so that you would become a better tutor, and I can say I feel I most certainly did. I don't think there is a more rewarding job than actually helping out people, and being able to see the improvements over time.

I love my current job as a tutor on a typical day at work consists of working with up to six children simultaneously, supporting them with Maths and English skills. I have learnt how to speak to different ages of children as each age group requires a different approach. Also, I have learnt how to refer back to the parents the tasks their child had to overcome and what they did well in a session. 

The management team are very supportive as they hold regular training to help boost our business and personal relations with the children. The workplace atmosphere is fun and the job is truly rewarding as you get to spend time with young enthusiastic children who are positive and keen to learn. 

The most enjoyable part of my job is again knowing that I have taught a particular method to a child or helped to overcome writing difficulties. 

My job can be challenging at times as some children desire to push the limits and behave inappropriately so I have to really make the effort to manage this in a professional manner. Finally, the last inconvenience of my job is that it is part time work so the maximum hours on the weekday is 4 and this is simply not enough for an eager determined individual so I am looking for something with more hours.

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