The Tutor Trust is delighted to welcome its newest member of staff to the office, Matt Wallis, who is the first to take up the mantle of our brand new role of Quality Manager.  Matt joins us from Claremont Primary School in Moss Side, Manchester, where he was Assistant Headteacher.  Claremont has been an important partner school of Tutor Trust since 2013.

A fully qualified teacher, Matt’s new role will be invaluable to us here at Tutor Trust.  With over 1,000 tutors having been trained so far, Matt will now be overseeing the training, continued professional development, and quality auditing of our tutor base, which will be crucial in our fast-growing charity.  The upcoming EEF project, as well as our further establishment of our expansion into Leeds, means that we will be requiring even more tutors over the course of the next year, and so having an entirely new role will help us to ensure that all of our tutors are trained and qualified to the high level we have always expected.

With over 14 years of experience working in schools and teaching, Matt is the perfect individual to fill this role.  Matt has worked in inner city schools, from Sheffield to London, and has had a number of teaching roles within these schools, having worked as a teacher, head of subject, supply teacher, and Assistant Headteacher in the past, as well as having been responsible for supporting children with Special Educational Needs in schools in both Manchester and London.  This experience will come in extremely helpful in Matt’s new role, as he told us, “What’s similar between teaching and my new role at The Tutor Trust is that the end result is all about improving outcomes for children.  Working out how to get there is the best bit as good teaching and tutoring need a good team of people sharing the same goals and working together on how to achieve those end results.”

After all of his years of teaching, Matt decided to leave Primary Schools because he was ready for the challenges of a new role, and he said, “I wanted to work in a different setting and apply the skills, knowledge and experience of working in challenging primary schools to a different type of work.”  He applied for the role with The Tutor Trust specifically because, as he said “The Tutor Trust’s ethos matches really well to my own personal ethos for learning.  Making sure that disadvantaged children have just as many opportunities as others is exactly why I went into education in the first place.  So being able to continue that as part of The Tutor Trust is a fantastic way of promoting equality and fairness for those who really need it.”

Matt is already working on establishing an entirely new system of quality auditing here at The Tutor Trust, and we can already feel the positive effects of his experience and expertise.  We asked Matt about how he’s feeling about his career change, and what he is hoping to achieve in his position.  “I’m really excited to get stuck in and start working with everyone!  With it being a new role, what’s great is that I can really shape the role to what the children need and work with the whole team to make sure that tuition can be the best it can possibly be.”

The whole team are certainly very excited to have Matt on board! Co-founders and Directors of Tutor Trust, Abigail Shapiro and Nick Bent, commented:

“It’s another big step forward for Tutor Trust to have our first qualified teacher on staff, and we are particularly pleased to have somebody with the first class teaching expertise and school leadership experience that Matt has.  Matt’s input will help to ensure we take on the very best tutors, that we give them the best possible training for their work in schools and that every single hour our tutors spend with a pupil has the most positive impact possible on that pupil’s attainment, confidence and aspirations.”