Our Client Success Stories

A ‘struggling’ student generally understands little of what is regularly taught in class, and feels close to or has already given up on understanding what is being taught by the teacher.  As a result, a ‘struggling’ student will be told they have bad behaviour and parents may regularly hear of how their child has been misbehaving or disengaged at school in parent-teacher interviews.  A student who struggles will often reject help at school because they don’t want other students to know they’re struggling.  Because of this, the individual may become more reserved, less confident and less likely to share ideas in front of people for fear of being the one who ‘always’ says something obvious or stupid.  They will usually score around 55% or lower in their exams for core subjects of Mathematics, English and Science because they don’t know how to study or organise their learning and no one has ever helped them to their feet.  No matter how much effort they put in to their work, it still seems like they are falling behind.  With meaningful, consistent intervention from Tutoring and Private Education, a ‘struggling’ student can steadily catch up to their peers, positively re-engage in school and understand how to begin learning independently. 

A ‘gifted’ student can understand almost everything taught in class with little-to-no effort.  However, like the ‘struggling’ student, the teacher may often reprimand the gifted student for bad behaviour and misdiagnose their lack of interest in the boring subject matter for a ‘bad attitude’ where it is evident that the ‘gifted’ student is not actually being challenged intellectually or in their cognitive processing in a meaningful way.  As good as scores above 80-85% with no effort and no study appear, it is disappointing to see a lack of encouragement and development of the skills the student has.  Even though they do well on their own,  ‘gifted’ students may not know how to properly organise efficient study and often need help with time management and allocation of slots to study and pursue intellectual and creative activities.  Even recently, we have a story of a student from a selective school who was creating computer viruses and was suspended!  What kind of a bored schooling system would propel a student to do this? And why is this interest in coding not being harnessed to create something more challenging and beneficial than a virus?!  Our Tutoring incorporates practical application of learning through our Academy – stretching a ‘gifted’ student’s abilities and keeping them engaged in active learning and conventional schooling.

A student with learning challenges is a student, diagnosed or undiagnosed, operating with visual, auditory or cognitive disorders such as ASD, dyslexia, dyscalcula, ADD or the many other disorders that fall under this list.  Usually, the student with learning challenges struggles with the extra effort required to understand what is being taught from the teacher to the class and requires individual 1-to-1 aid to stay up to date with the rest of the class.  This is commonly, but not always provided by a second support teacher in regular classes.  Students with learning challenges often fall behind up to 2 stages of learning by Year 10 and require intensive work and a personalised curriculum to succeed.  Parents will often be frustrated at the lack of help in both private and public schools for their children and seek outside help from speech pathologists, balance theory, tutors and special education programs.  Students with learning challenges often have very specific interests, enjoy and thrive in routine and need 1-1 learning and a specialised curriculum which enriches their interests and broadens their abilities across other areas found less interesting.  Students with learning challenges have mixed results, some fail, some pass, and some do well in specific subjects, but the common thread is that a deep  struggle exists for the student and often the parents and teachers helping.  Consistent 1-1 attention enables a student with learning challenges to gain confidence in their abilities and begin to develop patterns and routines with study that will steadily reveal improvements.

An ‘accelerated’ student is not necessarily a gifted student, although in accelerated classes, we do see a higher percentage of gifted students.  An accelerated student is almost always a conscientious student, with an effective study routine and a generally sound understanding of how to work at school.  This usually comes from having had years of tutoring within 1-to-1 and/or class environments.  An accelerated student thrives on being taught content and given thorough marked feedback.  Often schools struggle to help these students balance extra-curricular activities and school-work.  Much like ‘gifted’ students, ‘accelerated’ students should be given enriching projects to work on outside of their school work to ensure development of fundamental people skills, language and hobbies.  ‘Accelerated’ students perform extremely well academically, with scores usually 85% and above regularly achieved and a capacity to know how to study and learn from mistakes in exams and assessments with minimal 1-1 aid.  Therefore, accelerated students need stretching academically through small-class style longer lessons which give them the opportunity to enhance their understanding of subject content and perfect examination performance. 

The ‘average’ student is the student who does not experience any noticeable learning impairments or difficulties, but is content to sit in class, listen to what is going on, understand what is being taught and does little-to-no work or study at home.  This student will usually score between the c and b range regularly and is happy with their achievements.  Often, the average student will complete a TVET course while at school, but still go on to finish their HSC.  An average student is comfortable; too comfortable with their performance and needs to be shown the benefits of performing above par.  Unfortunately, many teachers, because the average student is usually attentive in class, will not push an average student to perform better or motivate them towards achieving a higher goal than they set themselves.  An average student works well in groups and enjoys the social interaction at school.  Average students will receive results between 60-75% and tend to be apathetic towards schooling.  Average students need to be pushed beyond the boundaries they have created for themselves and start to apply themselves and believe that they have something more to offer to the world than they currently think. 

The ‘good’ student is the student like the average student, who listens attentively in class, understands what is going on and what is being taught, but unlike the average student, will attempt to study in an effective way (even though often they cannot seem to find enough time to study for absolutely everything they want), tries really hard, but can’t seem to score higher than mid 80s in their assessments, no matter how ‘hard’ they try.  These good students often appear to get frustrated and can sometimes be envious of gifted students that can achieve good marks with relatively or comparatively little effort.  A good student has to be taught more effective methods of study and revision and examination technique than they currently have if they are to improve.  Often a good student gets attached to a method of learning which is actually stopping them from improving their learning efficiency.  A good student needs encouragement to continue their work and actual direction and specific guidance on where they need to improve because they will improve quickly following this.  They will score regularly in the 80s and can’t seem to improve and they don’t know why! The ‘good’ student is a student we often see come to us in Year 11 and 12 frustrated and angry that they haven’t been told how to improve by their teachers and through 1-1 correction they see massive improvements in a small amount of time.

The perfect student is the student that sits in class, does not interrupt the learning of other students, listens attentively, answers the teacher’s questions, finishes homework, study, revision, assessments and extra tasks on time and achieves full marks all the time.  This student often teaches other students and helps teachers to monitor the behaviour of the class.  The perfect student juggles sport, music, school work and extra curricular projects perfectly and still has time to go out and enjoy time with friends.  Some say the perfect student even has full scholarship offers to ivy league universities already.  They beat everyone in handball and have no problems getting along with the canteen ladies. Often, they even give the perfect student free lunch.  They always score above 99%, know how to improve each time, know how to study and have their life planned out 5 years in advance.  The perfect student isn’t most people.  We’re not saying the perfect student doesn’t exist, it’s just really rare. But this is what we are aiming for when you come to us, because aiming for a high goal, you can get really close to being a great individual with something to offer the world!