Circles exist to give all interested children the sort of education which now is limited almost entirely to a very small group – those with very rich parents who can afford private tutors.
Circles take the opposite approach. Nothing is paywalled – we are making our resources available to all everywhere so that any parent can access the materials for their child. There are some wonderful maths textbooks and problems available but it’s impossible for a non-specialist to be confident about what is truly high quality. Most textbooks now are simply written to help children grapple with the ever-changing National Curriculum.
We will not build a big bureaucracy with HR and legal teams. We will not impose normal bureaucracy. We will keep everything very simple and easy for parents and teachers to deal with us. Many people want to help such ventures but they do not want to fill in lots of forms and deal with all the usual stuff that comes from dealing with normal charities. Charity regulation in the UK is a nightmare so we are not a registered charity. We’d rather get £800 without bureaucratic nightmares than £1,000 with the nightmares.
We want to grow but our priority is to maintain the quality of the teaching and the materials rather than to grow fast. After we get to a certain point (perhaps in a year) we will evaluate this trade-off and see how much faster we could and should grow. Obviously this depends partly on the use of technology. It’s already been established in Circles in secondary schools that some secondary children prefer working online, others prefer being taught in-person, and a hybrid can work. We do not yet know what best suits 4-11 year olds.
‘Large Language Models’ (like GPT and Claude) are already being used as personal tutors. We will explore this and other technologies, like ‘adaptive testing’ which automatically gauges a child’s ability and adjusts the difficulty of the questions depending on their answers.