Explore Learning Head Office - Guildford

ALVEENA ?.

A complete waste of money, teachers are unprofessional, and so is the manager.
It has been 2 months and not even a single day teacher arrived on time. She is always 10 to 15 min late but in rush to leave.
I have been asking management to increase the level of my child but they are just not bothered enough to pay attention.
Its a good platform to fool parents.
Not only this ,
The online website for phonics has never worked dont know why they charge for service they cannot provide.

M ?. A.

The contact number provided in commnent and on website is not valid anymore and when we fill up form that goes to branch, while we need to disscuss and resolve issue with the headoffice if we cannot do so with the branch. I wonder headoffice email address is also not available.

Nasra M.

My son has been a member at explore learning for 4 years. He joined explore when he was just 4 at the white city/Westfield Shepherd's Bush centre. I was happy with everyone at the centre and impressed with the service. But that all change during the pandemic up until now. When management change I felt I was no longer a valued member. The price stayed the same although the hours changed and are now less. I first joined because I liked the flexibility but now it's a fixed time which is impossible for me due to my work schedule. I chose to settle for the online thinking it would be easier but was told he cannot make up session he had missed. Some months he might have just 1 session although I'm still paying for the full service. Emails I've sent have been ignored countless times or they would get back to me weeks later. I've even had a tutor forget the session. (I mean, come on!)

I'm a home educator and used to recommend explore learning to anyone homeschooling and many joined due to my recommendation. I believe that the high standard in which I was used had disappeared.

I've now left explore and looking for other tuition options but it's safe to say I'm very disappointed and so is my son.

Dariusz M.

My daughters age 5 and 10 love Explorer Learning. They are always happy to attend lessons and i have noticed a big difference since we started using this organisation to support our children. I highly recommend the service. Staff are always very helpful and they are very passionate about what they do. It clearly shows every time we visit. To get a real time feedback and regular one to one meetings with the management on our children progress is a very valuable and useful feature of this service. Thank you for your consistently high level of engagement with my children Basingstoke Team!

Dee V.

My Daughter has attended Explore learning for over a year now at Long Bridge Center. Everything was fine until their new Payment system "policy" changed. I pay for a Percentage of the fee through my Bank account, and then rest is covered by a Grant while I am at university.

I realised that the payments out of my account were incorrect, so I raised my concerns with Rebecca at the Long bridge Center. They admitted that they took the payments out of my account because the payments that has came through the grant were "late". I questioned as to how they could have been late when I approved them before the Required date.

Even though I explained this to them so many times, they persisted on keeping my money and the money from the grant, so essentially they have been paid twice. they have also taken money out of my account with out any authorisation for September, so in essence they have stolen £214 within just two months of this new "policy Change" .

I tried to get this sorted before resulting in retracting my daughter from their center, but they gladly told me they were happy to terminate her membership than changing the payment method to avoid over payments being taken from my account.

they've just lost over £3000 of guaranteed business and a life time member due to their lack of customer service. The Long bridge center was so much better when Mary was running it as she was more professional.

Padmesh

Very disappointing experience overall!! My daughter (currently in year 5) has been going to Explore Learning centre at Hounslow for nearly 2 years doing English, Maths, Creative Writing and 11+ syllabus. Every parents teacher meeting, we enquired about her progress and we were assured that our daughter was doing very well. We thought starting early with 11+ preparation (started when she was in year 4) would give her a better chance at preparing and passing through the upcoming 11+ CEM / grammar school tests. After the last 4 months of parents-teacher meetings where we started questioning her progress, we didn't get any satisfactory answers from 3 different senior teachers (centre head included!). All we see in these classes is a fun sort of environment where children can enjoy themselves with little bit of studying. There is no focus on getting children fully prepared for the 11+ exams. My daughter has been in the top of her school class althroughout and is studious as well as keen to learn, but she did not benefit from Explore Learning at all (for the objective we were aiming at - 11+). So, after having done 20 months of 11+ classes, we decided to test her on some mock papers (slightly easier ones) and the result was horribly low at 35% correct answers on 2-3 papers. This rung alarm bells for us and we decided to take alternate approach of private tuitions where we are now paying 30 pounds per hour each for Maths and English. The monthly cost of tuitions for April month alone was 650 pounds but atleast now we are seeing some good progress on solving problems. I was very surprised to see that none of the topics were really explained properly to our daughter during the 2 years that she went to Explore Learning. We landed up spending more than 6500 pounds during her 2 year tuitions at Explore Learning and got back next to nothing on improvement of her skills in Maths or English, despite doing all the available courses. And to top it all, when we went to the centre to collect her study workbooks and 11+ practice test papers (which our daughter should have done last year and this year) and something that we had been given approval for 2 weeks ago when requested to a senior tutor from the centre. Today at the centre, all we got were 2 practice paper print outs (no workbooks, no 11+ mock papers, nothing!!!). This is after the fact that we have paid more than 6500 pounds to the centre and received no benefit.
This has been the worst experience for us and one we would have avoided at any cost had we consulted other parents prior to sending our daughter to this centre. I would suggest to all parents exploring tuition centres to please read these reviews and then consult other parents with children who have passed 11+ exams, and then select the centre they would send their children to. We were surprised when we asked the centre head at Explore Learning what their success rate of children getting through grammar school is and we were told they don't measure it. Given the experience we have had with our daughter, I wouldn't be surprised if their success rate was in single digits and hence not being reported or mentioned!! Good luck to the children and parents who are still continuing with Explore Learning.

Shaun G.

Explore Learning clearly lacks the experience and facilities required to deal with sensitive and confidential matters in a way that ensures minimal impact to a childs development. Internal complaints raised by parents are not seen through to completion, communication by senior management is incredibly poor and lacks follow through. I'll be following up my complaint with Ofsted because of this. As a parent, it would be in the best interest of anyone's child to move to another provider who is more adequately equipped to handle care and development in a more professional capacity.

Siobhan O.

I Will contact head office and give them 24 hrs to resolve the problems we have encountered with this organisation if this is not resolved then all the facts will be documented