I want to start a private education provider. Currently I'm working two jobs, one as an English and maths tutor after school for a private company and one during the day as an adult literacy and numeracy tutor. At my after-school job we scan all of the work the students produce and I file the images according to a hierarchy of year->student->subject->date. I've also been categorising some of the maths work by content, and this is the part that I think would be most useful. I want to build a hierarchy of exercises that we have the students go through and show their progress over time. My boss is okay with me building this and using it, but at the moment its only real purpose is to help me understand his system of tuition and use it as a guideline to produce work-sheets.

So what I want to do is eventually have a system of exercises and skills along with how they depend on each other, and a way to automate the classification so that new work coming in from the students can build up the base. I'd also like it to be extensible so we can include related subjects like chemistry and physics, which we also teach, as well as maybe some of the more rigorous parts of the English tuition, which borders on linguistics like when I'm explaining how to correctly use semicolons or whatever.

The organization that I work for as an adult literacy tutor isn't the best and is beset by nepotism and disorganization, and survives on government funding, whereas the small business I work for depends on its reputation as being able to provide results. What I'd like to do is finish my English degree and do a few more papers to complete a maths major as a graduate, then become a qualified teacher and work for a few years in a state school but eventually branch out on my own. Along with building a system of teteaching I'd like to maybe develop some educational software, because the software we use at my work is all customized and some of it is pretty easily extensible, allowing for the possibility of generating new programs based on what we already have.

The way I'd like to set up my own educational provider would be to base it on a narrow but highly focused curriculum, where we explicitly teach only two subjects, English and mathematics, but expect a high level of performance from the students as a result of this focus. Apart from that, I'd encourage the students to study other disciplines independently using the skills they developed from our core curriculum. I actually think I would be teaching something slightly different from just English and mathematics, in that it'd be one unified subject that involves logic and informal reasoning, because as part of reading comprehension students have to develop critical thinking skills that tie in directly to the logic curriculum, and symbolic logic obviously has a strong overlap with mathematics. I need some time to develop this further while I continue to study, so a big part of it is just to keep working in the jobs I currently have. Mostly I think the current curriculum is too broad and too shallow and that we need focus and flexibility. The flexibility comes from the idea of student-directed learning, where any subject beyond our core program of drilling basic skills is up to them and is a way for them to exercise the skills they develop. One example of this would be a task where the students have to independently research a topic and then write a "retrieval practice" essay, which has been shown to be one of the most effective ways of improving memorization but which also works as a way to practice their English composition skills.

That's pretty much it. The only other thing is the idea that I'd recruit students to help each other, having the more advanced students practice their skills by tutoring their peers, and I might look at educating a single cohort together through multiple levels of education instead of just teaching different levels simultaneously. Another part of the idea is that if we start developing education software and other possible programs then it'd be cool to get the students working on projects with the company as (a) free labour and (b) god work experience for them. The idea is that the project would be scalable, in that some of the students from one cohort can become tutors and development staff for future iterations.

What do you guys think? Do you have any advice?