Will Orr-Ewing

27 Oct

After reading History Oxford University, Will was a history teacher at a London preparatory school before setting up Keystone Tutors in 2007. Keystone is now one of the UK’s leading tutoring organisations, with offices in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Will has been an active participant in UK education debates, appearing on Newsnight, The Today Programme and at the Wellington Festival of Education. He has advocated the distinctiveness of UK independent education and for the professionalization of tutoring in leading UK newspapers. He is also Director of Education at Concept Education, sits on the Boards of the Harrow Association and the Tutors' Association, and co-runs a free website on learning difficulties called dysTalk.

His new business is called Arka Learning, in which he is seeking to build a network of innovative learning centres across the UK, initially supporting primary age students with Maths and English.

Do you have a mentor of your own?

I’ve had so many mentors, I’m a big believer in mentoring. I’m very impressionable – I am always open to hear ideas put by other people that catch me. It’s been a panoply of mentors in my life! I get these kind of intellectual ‘crushes’ on people. Certain mentors have shown me an attitude to life for example so when I first started Keystone, I met a guy called David Jones who runs the international arm of Kaplan and he showed me that commercial education could be really fulfilling. I’ve always tried to grab coffee or lunch with him and help me reboot my ideas. I go from one intellectual ‘crush’ to another, a big one for me has been Charlotte Mason who’s had a huge influence on my thoughts on education. I feel like I’m an empty vessel constantly being pulled by mentors.

Was it immediately obvious that education was for you?

I wanted to be a fiction writer. I studied History at university, but I found that I had no real talent or material for writing. When I found education, it was everything I was looking for in writing: full of human interest and a curiosity for living and people. It felt easier to interrogate through education, but I had never thought about it before I was twenty-one.

What was the early journey like with Keystone?

It’s always been fun. There was always some human phenomena which was interesting to deal with. The first 5 or 6 years were so dominating to my life that it was unhealthy. My relationships withered a bit, and I was always thinking about Keystone. Most entrepreneurs are unable to be ‘in the moment’ especially in the origination and growth phases and I’m glad I’ve gone beyond that. I was glad I did that at 21, because now I’m married with children and therefore, I can delegate better, because I need to.

Tutoring has had a mixed reputation. What’s your take on the sector?

I love tutoring’s anarchic spirit. Its unregulated nature comes with a lot of benefits and has brought a lot of people into the sector who might not have suited working in a school. Tutoring goes back hundreds of years, and in some way, it predates schools. Schools can slightly mis-characterize it and blame tutoring for problems that are more intrinsic to the contemporary educational culture. Schools generate a lot of that competition themselves. Parents act rationally hire tutors to help them succeed in the system. It is true that tutoring used to slightly revel in its own unprofessionalism and have a slight disregard to professional standards. Now, however, parents have become cannier buyers and standards have risen year on year.

What’s your take on GCSEs and A-levels?

I’m really in favour of seeing the innovation that some schools are doing. Those big public exams have lost some of their market power. Is that a recipe for the rest of the country? No. A lot of teachers and schools can’t necessarily be trusted to make the right decisions and are perhaps too easily swayed by new trends. Things like project-based learning, which have now been proven to be badly managed, indicate that what’s best for a Latymer isn’t necessarily best for the country. The biggest culprit is probably the way exams are taught towards. In far too many schools, independent and state, from Year 9 you get this incredibly monotonous focus on the exams, assessment objectives – ‘how to answer a 4 mark AQA question’ etc.. Therefore, I’m not sure a national policy would work to eradicate that.

A bit more breadth at A-Level would have been bad for me personally! I knew what I wanted to study, and I didn’t find it intellectually narrow. My Maths and Science are terrible, but I’d try to cure that a school level by having survey courses, things like ‘Physics for Future Presidents’ – which give people a grounding across a broad range of things.

I’m from bottom-up organic growth and if you can bring teachers with you, it’s really exciting and I’m all for that kind of experimentation.

What are the key ingredients for a great learning environment?

I’ve become increasingly convinced that screens are viciously undermining for learning environments. I don’t see any need for screens at all. I’m obsessed by attention and how we can train good attentive relationships. Schools shouldn’t be too stimulating in the visual field. Wall to wall imagery and interactive whiteboards are an overload for students. I would like lots of books, a nature table, timelines on the wall which are powerful too. Not enough is made of timelines in schools. Charlotte Mason had this great phrase where she felt teachers should be ‘masterfully inactive’ – authoritative but not dominating.

How do you think the independent sector is going to fare in the next few years?

It’s obviously bad news (Labour’s VAT proposals) for the school sector and maybe our sector too. As the sector becomes less affordable, I’m sure there will be a bit of a dent. If you raise your timeline to the longer term, the independent sector needs to recover its spirit of innovation to stay nimble which historically it always has done. My children attend a school with low fees, and I’d choose that school regardless. It proves it can be done. The standalone independent school is really going to suffer. That version of the ‘enchanted’ school is going to suffer in the context of private equity backed groups.

The rhetoric between tutoring and schools has always been somewhat antagonistic but I wonder whether schools will become more flexible in pricing and increasingly resemble tutoring businesses. You might have courses in the holidays that are accessible for other families from different backgrounds. Schools may seek to diversify their price point and product suite. It’s an interesting landscape emerging. The ISC and the Independent lobby hasn’t really won the argument yet about why we should protect the sector. It’s not just about the economic cost to the sector but instead about offering solutions to bring the schools closer together.

To finish, tell us a little about Arka.

Arka is a new after-school learning business. We hope we might have 100-150 centres around the U.K in 5 years. The first one is going to be in a shopping centre in High Wycombe, opening in Jan/Feb 2024. We want to make the benefits of 1:1 tutoring accessible to a broad range of families. These centres will be calm, under-stimulating visually, no screens. We want to hit a sweet spot between academic rigour and joy. In preparation, I’ve been re-reading the stuff that got me into tutoring including Hoel and Karlsson (see artciles linked below) and learning about famous people from history that have had an exceptional impact on society and who had private tutoring rather than going to school. I’m interested to see if you can conjure up that 1:1 alchemy at scale.