Hi everyone!
I'm the director at Delta Specialist English Tuition and wanted to respectfully take the opportunity to respond to this review. I'm thankful for this opportunity to respond as Delta is very comfortable maintaining full transparency in our workings with the student community.
Has Delta ever 'denied' tutorial requests or 'ignored' submitted scripts for marking?
Absolutely not, ever. If such an occurrence were to happen outside the bounds of a rare genuine error, the academic in question would be thoroughly investigated and most likely have their employment with us terminated. This has never happened in the history of Delta's operation; especially given the extensive oversight we have towards our staff members' ongoing correspondence with students and more importantly - the fact that we interview and select the most conscientious and dedicated staff members to work for us.
Some people are disgruntled because they misinterpret what 'Unlimited' Essay Marking and Tutorials mean. It doesn't mean students can send us their work at the very last minute or demand lessons with tutors with short notice, narrow flexibilities and no evidence of work or improvement from previous lessons. 'Unlimited' means that for students who are hard working, engaged and start working on their essays well in advance, we will mark your work and see you as many times as required to get you the furthest we can. If you're not willing to make such a commitment, Delta is not for you.
We present Delta as a highly boutique and premium service (where all academics have a NSW State Rank in English) and we simply would not make it through a single day in business if we were to simply ignore our students' requests. This should - respectfully - be consistent with common sense. In addition from 2019, Delta commenced a refund policy where any student can choose to end their enrolment at any stage and receive a full refund of any remaining weeks in the term.
I also note that the reviewing account was freshly created shortly before the review was posted with a single post history. There is a possibility of a rival tuition firm or other disgruntled party seeking to simply slander and defame our reputation. This is common in the tuition industry - but Delta is more than comfortable with letting our underlying tuition do the talking.
Why is Delta so expensive?
There is no doubt that Delta is a significant investment for many families. However, the key point to consider is that price and value are different concepts. Below are a few points to help the reader understand the reasons underlying Delta's tuition fees.
Reason 1: Extensive Inclusions. All students at Delta have access to (1) weekly classes, (2) full sets of text-specific course material, direct and ongoing access to a tutor who provides them with all the support they require in the form of unlimited ('unlimited' to the extent that the student improves upon previously marked work) (3) Individual Lessons, (4) Essay Marking Submissions and (5) general support wherever required.
Our staff members work extremely hard and take great pride in their responding to every students' enquiry (both in terms of promptness and thoroughness), an example from just a few hours ago is below:
The amount of academic contact Delta provides to each student is comfortably multiples of what they'd receive from tuition elsewhere for other subjects. This is because English is a ridiculously difficult subject and necessitates a tuition structure concomitant with the rather complex trajectory of improvement it tends to demand. This is especially true for the vast majority of our students from high performing selective schools who tend to excel at Maths and Science, but struggle to intuitively understand rubric outcomes for English due to factors such as a poor history of reading and underinvestment in studying time during the early years of high school.
Reason 2: Text-Specificity. This is a factor non-existent in tuition for all other subjects and astronomically increases our costs. All Year 12 classes at Delta have different sets of course material written for every single text that we teach. The vast majority of our course material is written by those with postgraduate qualifications in English and each course is very thorough. I have thus far spent in excess of $100k in re-writing our course material for the new syllabus and the many new texts and textual combinations involved. Finding high-quality writers and editors is difficult and extremely expensive especially given the time pressures involved where material needs to be ready for our students well in advance.
I really, really miss my days of tutoring STEM subjects where there's a single set of material for an entire cohort - that really was the dream.
Our aim is to provide our students with tertiary-grade analysis to make the collation of key information relevant to syllabus outcomes as easy and painless as possible.
This makes writing your essay so much easier. For example, a Module A course at Delta lasts for 8 weeks. As an example, here's a link to the first lesson of our The Tempest/Hag-Seed course material, just one lesson module out of 8:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VZXI6pXk8ndPYvqbnj0a0QkJPjbfjOS4/view.
Reason 3: Staff Qualifications. This is perhaps the most significant point in increasing our costs. All academic staff members at Delta hold compulsorily, a NSW State Rank in English. In addition, we can only hire the most personable and dedicated in the interests of our students' progress and company reputation. The huge problem here is that it massively reduces the number of candidates that are available (only a minority of English state rankers are interviewed as many move interstate and overseas and of this minority, most are not hired due to poor communication skills or misaligned objectives in terms of student interests).
What the above means is that our staff members are very difficult to replace, are in enormously high demand and thus, Delta needs to pay them very lucratively (
multiples of an equivalently qualified person teaching Maths or Science elsewhere) to keep them working for us and prevent them from working privately or elsewhere (or more likely, simply decide that they're making enough money from their four scholarships that they don't really need a job).
There are so, so few such tutors available of the caliber we require at Delta it's not even funny (compare this to the comparatively huge number of people who are excellent at teaching Maths and Science). Every one of my colleagues at Delta is incredible, amazing and deserving of every dollar of pay; but the fact remains that a huge portion of your tuition fees acts as insurance in keeping the very best people in the state teaching you. This not only applies to your class teachers at Delta but also your tutors who're paid a very lucrative salary (again, for the reasons mentioned) to help you with your work.
Indeed,
we stopped the intake of Year 12 enrolments in March this year (at a massive cost to our financial performance) simply because there aren't enough tutors available with the qualifications and willingness of dedication towards student progress we require. Sure, we could relax our standards (even slightly) and take on hundreds more students; but then we'd turn into your regular mediocre tutoring company which is not what I want for Delta.
I really am very sorry that Delta is unaffordable for some families (we currently charge $1950 and $2450 per term for Years 11 and 12 respectively) but the fact remains that even with the mentioned prices, our profit margins are much lower than most other tuition companies simply because of our astronomical expenses. I should also mention that the majority of the parents I speak to consider our prices cheap from a value perspective after adjusting for the thoroughness, structure and rarity of the service they're given access to.
You can do very well in English without coming to Delta but the fact remains that we make things much easier for you, especially for English where private tutors are a huge hit and miss. If you have any concerns please feel free to get in touch with us via our website (not allowed to link here as it violates BoS advertising rules) and we'd be delighted to help.
All the very best guys! (And I miss being part of this community - almost 10 years ago now!)
