As of December 2014, the statistics in respect of the level of performance by secondary school students in the WAEC examination is on serious declination path with over 70% failing the exams.
There is no doubt that there is a serious challenge with the quality of our education, the curriculum, school system and the teachers. Helping students and parents solve this problem is what PrepClass.com.ng is all about.
PrepClass.com.ng which stands for Preparatory class is the brain child of Olumide Ogunlana and Chukwuwezam Obanor, both classmates of the Electrical Electronics Engineering department of the University of Lagos. They are both co-founders while Olumide is also the Head of Tutor Relationships.

PrepClass was started as a Preparatory Class platform that helps students preparing for JAMB exams to prepare for their exams and also serve as an additional source of revenue for cyber-café partners that work with us.

On evolving it was discovered that there is a high need for skilled home tutor by parents in order to work with the kids towards passing their exams such as WAEC, IGSE, JAMB, CheckPoint, to mention a few.

“On starting out we knew we want to do something in education, we want to help students. On starting out our main focus is to help students get better scores in their tests and exams but as we kind of evolved we realised that in the value chain the major value is actually getting the best teachers for the child, not just helping them pass the exams but getting a teacher that can take them on the fundamentals and impart the best knowledge to them,” says Mr Obanor on explaining the need for home tutors.

To be a tutor with PrepClass, teachers go through different process and tests which includes, phone calls, physical interviews, Personality Test, teacher-student scenario testing and academic test. More importantly background check is doen on the approved tutors and checking with the guarantors is a key part before you are assigned a tutor status.

“We do not just provide parents with the best tutors, we provide them with the best person , doing background checks and making sure that they get someone that is responsible, reliable and trustworthy to come into their home. We also make sure these people are professionals. We keep in constant touch with our tutors and ensure they arrive on time during their tutoring session and give us feedback on how the student is improving,” explained Mr Obanor.

On their impact with tutors and the impact they’ve had so far, Mr Ogunlana explains.
“In Nigeria, teaching is seen as a menial job, it’s very bad because of the large unemployment rate and because of their ease of replacement and the school owners are not necessarily treating these teachers as well as they should, they are not paid properly.
The value that PrepClass brings to the table for teachers is that we pay them almost the same thing and even in some cases more than what they will normally earn in a school.
That puts us in a very interesting place to bargain with these teachers to have them work full time with PrepClass as oppose to just working for a school that don’t necessarily compensate you as you deserve.”

Mr Stephen Daniel, a tutor with prepclass who has been a teacher for five years, part-time for three years, full-time for Two years and he converted to been a Full-time tutor with Prepclass for a year now.

“I found out about PrepClass from Jobberman website when I discovered that I needed more challenging work to do after my normal hours in school. I teach sciences, that is Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Economics and Further Mathematics. I needed an extra source of income. I had three different choice to make of the tutoring agency to work with, but on going to Prepclass platform online I loved their process from the beginning to the end, especially their background checks. It is not only the parents that get concerned about who is coming to their houses but we the tutors do get concerned about whose home are we going into. And with PrepClass there has been no challenge whatsoever. That was part of the reason why i resigned and became a full-time tutor with them. The remuneration is good and I am also in control of my time.”

“We’ve been doing this for more than 2 years, It’s been very exciting journey entrepreneurship and there has been very rewarding moments for us. Speaking specifically about the education sector, we’ve come to learn a lot and we think we’ve carved a niche for ourselves where we’ve really provide value,” says Mr Obanor.
Talking further, “We have about a 1% conversion rate for our tutors, only about 1 out of 100 tutors that apply on our platform that eventually gets to meets a client and get the job. We have noticed that there are a lot of people out there but not enough people are really good to teach and give students the best.
We think we are providing real value in terms of selecting the best tutors for parents. We have about 100% retention rate of all our parents, we’ve barely have parents rejecting tutors sent to them or not wanting to work with us again.”
On its difference with other tutoring agency, “We are different from a typical online company in the sense that we are realistic about the needs of the market and what the market is currently ready for.  We are also different from a formational offline company say a normal tutoring agency because we use a lot of online tools to automate almost 70% – 80%  of our processes apart from the real tutoring. So we automate a lot, which put us in a very interesting hybrid position and I don’t think there is a tutoring company in Nigeria that does this,” says Mr Obanor.

PrepClass can be find online at www.PrepClass.com.ng

QUOTE: “The bedrock of education is actually the quality of teachers not textbooks or necessarily online materials that matters but how good and skilled the teacher is, because it is actually a skilled job for we tend not to realise it. How skilled is the person that ought to teach the child?” ~ Chukwuwezam Obanor