How Brightfield Education replaced four tools with one Bitir group per student

Sophie Marchant founded a tutoring agency in London with 20 self-employed tutors and around 100 active students. Her Friday mornings were consumed by chasing missing progress updates. Eight weeks after switching to Bitir, parent communication response rate rose from 47% to 91% and agency coordination time fell from six hours a week to 90 minutes.

Where she started

Sophie set up Brightfield Education in 2021 after five years as a secondary school English teacher in Camden. The idea was straightforward: build a small, reliable network of specialist tutors — mostly former or current teachers — and match them with families whose children needed one-to-one or small-group support for GCSE and A-level exams.

By 2024 she had 20 tutors on her books and was managing roughly 100 active students at any given time, the majority studying for GCSEs in Maths, English, and Science. She was the sole administrator. The operation ran across four separate tools:

• A Notion database for student records — exam board, target grades, session history, and parent contact details.
• WhatsApp as the primary channel between tutors and parents. Each tutor managed their own parent contacts independently.
• A shared Google Doc template that tutors were supposed to fill in after every session as a "lesson summary".
• A spreadsheet that Sophie updated manually each Friday, tracking which tutors had submitted notes and which had not.

It worked, technically. But it was held together by Sophie's Friday morning chase routine, which had grown from 45 minutes in 2021 to over two hours by early 2024.

What was actually going wrong?

The core problem was visibility — or rather the absence of it. Because each tutor managed their own WhatsApp channel with each parent, Sophie had no window into what was being communicated. Parents who had concerns about progress messaged tutors directly at inconvenient hours. Tutors who wanted guidance on a particular student had no private channel to raise it. Session note compliance sat at around 60%: four in ten tutors were not filling in the shared Google Doc after each session, and Sophie only knew this because parents occasionally called her asking what their child had done last Tuesday.

The other problem was onboarding. Every new tutor joined to the same informal three-week process: a call with Sophie, access to the Notion database, a WhatsApp group for tutors, and a copy of the Google Doc template with a note asking them to fill it in. Most new tutors found their own rhythm after a month. But the cognitive overhead of remembering four separate platforms before their first session was high, and Sophie was answering the same procedural questions — "where do I log the session notes?" "what's the parent's WhatsApp number?" — three or four times with every new hire.

Why she chose Bitir

Sophie had been looking for an alternative to the four-tool stack for most of 2023. She tried two tutoring-specific platforms, both of which had scheduling and invoicing features she did not need, and neither of which had a manager view that showed all active students at once. She tried a CRM. "It was built for sales pipelines, not for a parent who wants to know what her daughter worked on in last Tuesday's Maths session."

A colleague running after-school STEM sessions in Hackney had mentioned Bitir. Sophie's initial reaction was scepticism — she assumed it was a group coaching tool, not something designed for a multi-tutor agency. What changed her mind was the manager view: the ability to sit at the top of 70 or 80 active groups and see, in a single dashboard, which ones had recent activity and which were quiet.

She ran a pilot with three tutors and nine students in January 2025.

How the pilot worked

The structure Sophie settled on in the pilot has since become the template for every student at Brightfield:

1. One Bitir group per student. Sophie is manager. The assigned tutor is a full member. The parent joins as a member; older students (Year 10 and above) join alongside their parent.
2. Student goals. Two goals per student: a target grade and a current-performance grade for their main exam subject. The tutor updates current performance after every fourth session. Parents can see both.
3. Session summary assignment. After every session, the tutor posts a session note as a completed assignment — what was covered, what homework was set, one observation about the student's progress. This replaces the shared Google Doc entirely. Parents see the note in their Bitir group the same evening.
4. Weekly check-in poll. Sophie sends a three-question poll to parents each Sunday evening: overall satisfaction this week (1–5), whether homework was attempted, and one open text field for anything the parent wants Sophie to know. This poll goes to parents, not tutors.
5. Private tutor notes. Tutors can post private notes visible only to Sophie — for safeguarding concerns, difficult parent situations, or requests for guidance. Parents never see these.

In the nine-student pilot, all three tutors submitted session notes after every session for the full four weeks. That had never happened with the Google Doc system. Sophie's interpretation: the action was in the same app where they read their student's goal and checked their schedule — no context-switching, no remembering a separate URL.

What changed when she rolled it out fully

By March 2025, all 20 tutors and 74 active students were on Bitir. The spreadsheet still exists — Sophie uses it for invoicing, which Bitir does not handle — but the Friday chase routine is gone.

The parent check-in poll has had the most visible effect on her relationship with families. Before Bitir, Sophie heard from parents in two situations: when something was going well (rare) and when something had gone wrong (frequent). The weekly three-question poll surfaced lower-level dissatisfaction before it became a complaint. In the first month alone, she identified four families whose satisfaction scores had dropped two weeks in a row. In three of those cases, a phone call from Sophie — before the parent had contacted her — resolved the issue before it became a lost student.

Results after eight weeks

The session note figure is the one Sophie mentions most readily, because it directly affects what parents pay for. A parent enrolling their child with Brightfield is paying for expert-matched tutoring and professional tracking of their child's progress. The 40% of sessions previously not logged were, in a sense, invisible to parents — they had happened but left no record.

"The goal visible to the parent and the session note submitted that same evening — together, that's the product," she says. "The rest is just coordination."

What about tutor onboarding?

New tutors now join through a 45-minute onboarding session that is entirely about the Bitir workflow: how to find their active students, how to post a session note as a completed assignment, how to use private posts for guidance requests, and what the parent can and cannot see. The Notion database still holds the formal student record, but tutors rarely need to open it — everything operationally relevant to their next session is in Bitir.

The three-week informal onboarding process condensed to four days because there is now one place to point new tutors rather than four.

What Sophie does in Bitir

• Manager dashboard — monitors all 70+ active student groups from a single view, filtering by last-activity date to spot quiet groups quickly.
• Per-student goals — target grade and current-performance grade, updated by tutors after every fourth session and visible to parents.
• Session summary assignments — required after every session; completion status is visible in the dashboard without Sophie needing to chase.
• Weekly parent check-in poll — three questions, sent Sunday evening, responses reviewed Monday morning as part of her weekly check-in routine.
• Private tutor posts — safeguarding notes, parent flags, and guidance requests that parents never see.
• Milestone celebrations — when a student's current-performance grade reaches their target grade, Sophie posts a celebration in the student's group, visible to tutor and parent. It takes 30 seconds and consistently generates more parent messages than anything else she does.

Related reading: how often to run check-ins and what makes them get answered, and a manager's guide to member privacy modes in Bitir.