The Tuition Industry in Singapore

Yesterday I had lunch with an old friend and wife.  The objective was to brainstorm on the idea of a tuition start-up that:

• Is scalable and preferably can be extended beyond Singapore
• Has a clear differentiating factor
• Will clearly add value to the academic experience for the students and to the tuition industry
• Meets parents' goal of academic excellence for their children. 

I went home to tackle the subject matter in my usual style: gather facts for a feasibility or viability study.  I was totally honest with my friend - at this point, I may not have enough funding nor motivation to want to start a business venture.  I need to be convinced of what is required of me if I should plunge ahead with the idea.  He agreed that it's only worth going into it if we can achieve the abovementioned objectives.

I googled the tuition industry and quickly discovered the following:

1. The tuition industry seems highly saturated - with a few hundreds of tuition centres, mostly established in the last 20 years or so, and an annual turnover of hundreds of million versus a potential market of less than 200 secondary schools and 20 JCs.
2. This is an unregulated industry with no minimum standards to govern the setting up of the agencies and qualifications of the tutors. MOE nor the Private Education Council are involved in regulating these centres; neither is SEAB involved in any form of accreditation.  There is also a lack of a tuition association or sort (unlike Australia) which provides benchmarks and minimum standards for all registered tuition agencies and tutors in Singapore.
3. There are rising concerns over issues such as child protection, consumer protection, truth in advertising, etc yet with no apparent solutions.
4. There are few Singapore Tuition portals or directories to provide the much needed information for approriate decision-making by time-starved parents and students.  The existing ones somehow lack a clear focus and purpose, that is whether they exist to provide unbiased reviews and resources for parents to select appropriate agencies or tutors.
5. There seem to be a preference for either home tutoring or small group tutoring because of the close/personalised attention and customised teaching approaches that can be given to the students which are missing from the large classroom setting in the schools.
6. There seem to be an obvious difference in consumers' requirements: from the parents, they want affordability and accessibility while the students value rapport with the tutors as a key pre-requiste.

The top qualities or factors that parents look out for in a good tuition agency or tutor are:

• experience, track record and qualifications
• familiarity with the syllabus
• access to resources such as past-year exam questions
• costs
• location

The research threw up some questions:

1. Should the industry ie in terms of the centers or the tutors be subject to some form of accreditation?
2. The costs of seeking such accreditation and how they will be passed on to the consumers ie the parents and students?
3. There may be a need for an independent association or body that provides unbiased but essential information for all parents especially those in the lower income family bracket
4. How to help those who are most vulnerable and in need of such assistance?
5. Where is the "blue ocean" in this highly saturated industry that seems to have founded itself already on some well-known success formulae? 

In Singapore where social mobility is an increasing concern given the widening income gap, education remains as the key to helping the lower income or socio-economically disadvantaged, then perhaps there is an important need to provide greater transparency and assistance to this community first.  How will tuition, a fee-based service, be made more accessible, affordable and available to the people who need it most?

Can, and should, I approach it from a social enterprise angle instead?