In Luxembourg, Nyki's affordable tutoring aims to bridge educational gaps for lower-income families, challenging the inequities of "shadow education."

Shadow education, which encompasses private, supplementary educational activities like private tutoring, cramming schools, online learning, and test prep courses, has far-reaching implications for social inequalities. These services aim to enhance academic performance and provide a competitive edge in exams and university admissions.

While they can be beneficial for academic achievement, shadow education also raises concerns about educational equity and student stress.

One of the main issues is that higher-income households can easily secure more and better-quality educational support than their lower-income counterparts. This disparity contributes significantly to educational inequality.

Motivated by a desire to address this social inequality in education, one social entrepreneur in Luxembourg sought to find a solution.

“Learning how to learn is a key issue for all students,” according to Laure Talavet-Omont. “Add to that the challenge that exists for many students in Luxembourg: learning in a language that is not their mother tongue.”

“School tutoring is one of the main factors in increasing social inequalities in our society today because it is only subject to the law of supply and demand and families who have the most comfortable income can afford the biggest number of lessons and the best quality ones.”

And spurring on demand could be down to statistics like the following from the European Commission's Education and Training Monitor 2022.

The report revealed that in 2021 “27% of 15-year-old students” in Luxembourg showed insufficient command of basic competencies in written comprehension, mathematics and/ or science: that is five per cent more than the EU average.

In order to help as many students as possible face these challenges, Ms Talavet-Omont set up Nyki (Now you know it) over six years ago.

The objective is to make school tutoring accessible to all by offering lessons that are priced according to means-tested criteria. On its standard rate, Kyki offers discounts of 10 to 100 per cent to the most underprivileged families.”

“Often lower-income families would simply not be able to access this academic support were it not for the adapted rates offered,” explained Ms Talavet-Omont.

Social disparities

“Tutoring was increasing social disparities and that's the whole point of social entrepreneurship: to provide different responses to the challenges facing our society.”

“The whole purpose of our model is to redress this social imbalance and social inequality by making sure that everyone can afford the same quality of lessons regardless of their income.” 
 
Nyki is a SIS, 'société d'impact sociétal', meaning they are the best of being a non-profit / company as they are allowed to have investors, but they need to put a large portion of their profit back into society.

Recently partnering with the Luxembourg non-profit crowdfunding platform ‘eticrowd’, Nyki launched a funding raising drive and hope to reach a target of €30,000 before 17 July.

The money will go towards enhancing the services offered to its broad base of students. Aged from six to 20 years old, Kyki provides learning support in a range of subjects such as mathematics and languages.

Although six years of age may seem young to be availing of extra tuition, Ms Talavet-Omont pointed out that most often this is because their parents want to make sure they are confident with a particular language.

“Sometimes it’s English because they are in an international school but English is not their mother tongue. It can be help with French or German, if they are the languages they are exposed to at school.”

One of the key issues that crops up time and time again, she explained, is the actual language proficiency of the student compared to what their school is expecting of them.

Inclusive and affordable means that the classes are open to everyone regardless of income. With studies revealing that one in 15 people in Luxembourg are cash millionaires yet at the same time one in four children here are said to be at risk of poverty, the Grand Duchy throws up an interesting dichotomy.

“This gap between these two pieces of information is probably quite concerning and shows also that we need to be aware of this."
 
A one-to-one class costs between €40 and €57 per hour before the discount, if applicable, is given.

“In 2023, 23.5 per cent of students benefited from discounts on 31 per cent of the lessons. So, on average they benefited from more lesson hours than the students paying the standard price,” Ms Talavet-Omont disclosed.

“This really shows the relevance of the model that we are building. It really shows that most of the time they take advantage of the opportunity that we are giving them to catch up on all the topics on which they fell behind.”

Disengaged and demotivated 

“The main struggle I see for students is related to languages but also with Math. For many many students Math is taught in a foreign language. It’s not just about learning Math, it is learning it in a foreign language, which is an extra challenge. Language is the first issue which underlies many other issues that students face.”

Another challenge is self-confidence for students: “When they have been convinced for years that they were bad at Math, my first challenge is to convince them that they are not as bad as they think. It’s just that maybe they just need Math to be taught to them in a different way.”

She recalled a teenage student she tutored who started off with low grades in the subject but had an ambition to be an engineer.

Instead of abandoning the idea, they worked together for his last two years of secondary school and the boy’s marks rose from 6/20 to 13/20, she recalled, and he successfully got into the engineering school he had hoped for.

Often helping students succeed against the odds, Kyki’s social impact is clear to see and encouraging these young people to take the time to appreciate how far they have come is built into the ethos of the tutoring.

“We have to look at our definition of success, we tend to have this idea of success as equating to social status and level of income but sometimes success, no matter where we come from, can be defined by finding a happy balance in our lives.”

“We try to help them keep that in mind; to build their own definition of what success is.”