Longtail Learning is an initiative borne of recognition of a gap in Bermuda’s market for affordable tutoring and mentorship schemes. Owing to the immense cost of providing such services in Bermuda, many of our youth are barred from receiving the benefits of educational tutoring and mentoring.

Ywione Darrell and Daniel Osset founded the service in March with a mission of providing access to quality education support services, regardless of academic ability or financial resources. To undertake this task, Daniel and Ywione have partnered with an additional four Bermudian university students — McKenzie-Kohl Tuckett, Skye Oliveira, Madison Smith and Gabriella Medeiros — to form the Longtail Learning executive committee.

Given our mission, Longtail Learning aims to implement two initiatives over the coming school year — from this summer through to the spring of 2024. Our primary initiative is the Summer Tutoring Programme, which will be held at Saltus Grammar School on St John’s Road from July 2 to August 17.

Students will receive hour-long, one-on-one tutoring sessions with university students who have had training from Saving Children and Revealing Secrets. With this initiative, we aim to help students maintain and further advance the skills developed throughout the school year in maths and English.

Our curriculum will be based on Ministry of Education and iGCSE content. However, we will also rely on students and their parents or guardians to provide necessary contextual information regarding the child’s academic needs to tailor their experience. We are targeting the middle school and iGCSE grade levels, and aim to accommodate between 20 and 30 students this summer.

From this information, we highlight two key aspects that speak to the priorities of our organisation. As previously mentioned, we aim to promote a student’s academic success. Not only do we achieve this with the intimate nature of our learning environment, but we challenge students to take charge of their academic aspirations. Our sign-up process is organised such that students can take the initiative to register themselves through our various social-media accounts. Furthermore, by developing a rapport between parent, student and tutor, we engage all parties to maximise the student’s utility from our service.

The second, and equally important, priority of our organisation is that we aim to safeguard children by requiring our tutors to achieve a Scars certification. We recognise that the connection we aim to develop between youth, parents and tutors requires necessary interactions between these parties. Thus, by providing our tutors with Scars training, we can remain steadfast in pursuit of academic excellence without compromising the child’s safety.

We are still accepting applications for students who are interested in being tutored and university students who are interested in tutoring. These parties may refer to the contact information mentioned below.

Our second initiative is the University Mentorship Scheme. We plan to facilitate mentor-mentee partnerships between prospective and present university students. This initiative is focused on easing the burden of the application process for university and scholarship applications. Our student mentors will be matched with mentees based on the universities they apply to and the subject matter they choose to pursue.

Our mentors will be able to use their personal experiences in entrance and scholarship-application writing to provide tailored and well-informed guidance for prospective university students. We plan to start this programme in October, as students begin the application process, and will continue throughout the school year.

For more information and to get involved, e-mail us at longtaillearningbda@gmail.com. Visit our website at https://longtaillearningbda.weebly.com. Reach out to our Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts: @longtaillearning. Finally, catch Longtail Learning on The Daily Hour on June 21.