The primary objective was to provide students with increased access to quality tutoring free of charge. To tackle the aforementioned needs, and to increase equal social and educational opportunities, the focus of this project was on the professionalization of volunteer tutors: There is not only a need for people who volunteer as tutors, but they need to get trained as well to provide professional and effective support. Many people would like to get involved, but often feel unprepared or do not know what volunteer tutoring actually means and might look like. Also, there is a need for minimum standards of tutoring skills for volunteers. Moreover, the project wanted to make volunteer tutoring more attractive to individuals and to provide a low-threshold and hands-on short training course.
Especially due to the Covid-19 crisis, homeschooling has greatly increased the need for tutoring. However, many families with socio-economic disadvantages are not able to afford the tutoring costs even though they are more often affected by learning deficits. This even increases already existing educational inequalities. Skills gaps continue to widen which impacts the socio-economic equilibrium and the life path of children. On the other hand, there are not enough qualified volunteer tutors available who want to provide tutoring for free for those who cannot afford fee-based tutoring. Before the BEAT project has started, no digital and free short training for volunteer tutors could be found. However, tutors need to get important skills and knowledge in a low-threshold and fun way. This increases not only the quality of tutoring but also makes the job more attractive. A third motivation for this project was to attract more people for volunteer tutoring. For both partner organisations it is challenging to find tutors for their tutoring projects. Therefore, the need for the promotion of this job was necessary in order to fulfill the provision of volunteer tutoring for school students.