Claire Fennelly of Your English Tutor UK: Stop Selling the Hour and Start Building the Transformation
There’s a big difference between being good at what you do and building a business model around it.
That’s something Claire Fennelly, founder of Your English Tutor UK, has learned very quickly.
Claire is a finalist for Tutor Business of the Year, sponsored by Jo Brianti, at The Class Business Awards 2026. She launched Your English Tutor UK in September 2025 after 15 years in teaching and has just completed her first full academic year in business.
Her background gave her the expertise.
The challenge was learning how to package that expertise into something clear, valuable and scalable.
Fifteen years of teaching, then a complete reset
Claire had built a successful career in education, eventually becoming Head of English.
She loved the teaching itself, but the reality around it had become unsustainable. At the height of her career, she was working more than 60 hours a week, and life outside school was becoming harder to ignore.
Then her mum became seriously ill in Ireland.
Claire left what she described as her “dream job”, moved back to care for her and, when she later returned to England, realised she wanted to build working life differently.
She still loved teaching.
She just didn’t want to go back to the same model.
That became the starting point for Your English Tutor UK.
The skills were already there
One of the things Claire reflected on in our conversation was how easy it is for teachers to underestimate the skills they’ve built.
Teachers make hundreds of decisions every day. They communicate, lead, plan, adapt, manage people and solve problems constantly.
But when you’ve spent your career inside education, those things don’t always feel like business skills.
Claire realised they were.
She also knew that being an experienced teacher didn’t automatically mean she knew how to build a business, so she decided to invest in support early.
“I’d spent 15 years honing my craft as a teacher. I didn’t want to spend another 15 years learning how to build a business.”
That’s a really smart distinction.
Expertise in your subject and expertise in business are not the same thing.
Claire invested in business coaching because she wanted to compress the learning curve rather than spend years trying to piece everything together alone.
Ad hoc tutoring wasn’t the model she wanted
Before launching the business properly, Claire had already done some tutoring on the side.
The model was familiar: a student turns up for an hour, the tutor asks what they want to work on and they tackle whatever comes up that week.
But Claire didn’t think that created the level of transformation she wanted.
She wanted a programme.
So instead of selling a weekly hour, she built a long-term model where students commit for the academic year and work through a structured curriculum towards a clear outcome.
That shift matters because it changes the conversation from:
“What shall we work on today?”
to:
“Where are you now, where do you need to get to, and what journey will take you there?”
Long-term support creates better data and better relationships
Claire works primarily in small groups, usually with around six or seven students.
She also gives personalised written feedback every fortnight, which means she’s regularly looking closely at each student’s work rather than relying only on what happens during the lesson.
That structure has helped her build a model where progress is easier to see and measure.
During her first academic year, students made an average of around two to three grades of progress in nine months, and she achieved a 96% GCSE pass rate. More than half of her students achieved grades seven to nine.
But Claire is equally proud of the student who came in believing they simply “couldn’t do English” and left with the pass they needed to get into college or move on to the next stage of their life.
That’s the transformation the model is built around.
Your offer needs to be easy to understand
Claire says one of her biggest lessons from year one has been getting clear on the message.
She entered a crowded tutoring market with no established social media following and a model that was slightly different from what many parents expected.
She wasn’t simply offering one-to-one tuition whenever a child needed help.
She was asking families to commit to a structured, longer-term programme.
That meant she had to learn how to communicate:
- what the programme actually includes
- why small-group tuition works
- why longer-term support matters
- how personalised feedback is built in
- what kind of progress students can expect
That clarity has been essential in building the brand and standing out in a saturated market.
Results give you something to scale
The next stage for Claire is growth.
She’s now completed a full academic year, built the curriculum, gathered testimonials and proved the model works.
She’s also hit capacity.
So instead of simply adding more of her own teaching hours, Claire is looking at bringing other tutors into the business and creating more group sessions.
She also wants to support teachers who are thinking about leaving education and moving into tuition themselves.
“I’ve invested a lot of time into building this, so then to kind of give back to someone else that maybe is starting from scratch again would be really nice.”
That’s a natural evolution.
First, prove the model.
Then build the systems around it.
Then bring other people in.
Awards can be more than recognition
Claire has also been intentional about using awards as part of her wider visibility strategy.
She won the 2025 New Business Award in Hertfordshire and saw directly how the PR around that recognition helped build credibility.
A potential customer even told her they’d seen her in the local paper and thought: “You must be good.”
That might sound simple, but trust matters enormously in tuition. Parents are choosing someone to support their child through an important stage of their education.
Third-party recognition can help shorten that trust-building process.
For Claire, though, the awards process also creates something else: reflection.
It forces her to stop and look at what’s actually gone well rather than immediately charging into the next target.
Build the business around the result
What I really like about Claire’s first year is that she hasn’t tried to scale before she knows what she’s scaling.
She’s spent the year refining the model, strengthening the message, proving the outcomes and understanding what students actually need.
Now she’s in a much stronger position to grow.
There’s a lesson in that for every class and tuition business.
Don’t just ask how many sessions you can sell.
Ask what transformation you’re actually promising, how your model delivers it and whether someone else could eventually deliver that model too.
Because once you’ve got those things clear, growth becomes a very different conversation.
Watch the full interview
In our full conversation, Claire shares why she left teaching, how business coaching helped her accelerate the first year, why she moved away from ad hoc tutoring and what she’s learned from building a structured programme around long-term student progress.
👉 Watch Claire’s full finalist interview here.
Claire Fennelly is a finalist for Tutor Business of the Year, sponsored by Jo Brianti, at The Class Business Awards 2026.
Join us on Saturday 10 October 2026 at the National Conference Centre in Solihull for The Class Business Live, followed by The Class Business Awards & Afterparty.
The daytime event runs from 9:00am–3:00pm, bringing together finalists, judges, sponsors and class business owners for learning, mastermind discussions and sector connections before the evening celebrations begin at 6:00pm.
