Oppidan Education
20 St James Street
London
W6 9RW
Tel: 0203 409 3359
Email: office@oppidaneducation.com
Web: www.oppidaneducation.com
We have met with Oppidan Education’s staff. In addition, 31 clients and 20 mentors completed an online survey (sent to 750 clients and 250 mentors) and we followed this up with additional short phone interviews with some of those surveyed.
Impossibly cool, effortlessly charming. And young too – just check out the ‘meet the team’ page of their super-slick website. There are 19 staff altogether – covering brand, tech, operations, client management, mentor management, impact measurement, mentoring in schools etc – all of whom work in stylish, open plan offices in Hammersmith, overlooking the river. As with any self-respecting start-up, there’s the obligatory table football, giant Union Jack on the wall and – you guessed it - bowls (well, entire fridges if their tongue-in-cheek website video office tour is anything to go by) of sweets.
At the helm are Walter Kerr (BA in theology from Durham) and Henry Faber (BA in Spanish and Italian from Oxford) who met aged 9, then attended Eton together. ‘If you’d told us in our teens that we’d one day run a business together, we’d have spat out our tea,’ they laugh. But, having both had a brief stint working in education, they found themselves increasingly disconcerted by the ‘crazy, cloak-and-dagger tutoring market’ and decided there must be a more holistic, less pressured and stressful way of supporting children. ‘No parent seemed proud of using a tutor and no child seemed that enamoured with the experience either,’ says Henry. ‘Even schools seemed to regard tutoring with scepticism.’ And so, in 2016, they founded Oppidan (historic Eton slang for a pupil who boarded in town rather than at the school itself) to focus on mentoring instead.
OPPIDAN EDUCATION REVIEW CONTINUED >>
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