About Fennby

Fennby started with a single, ordinary frustration: a parent, checking in on a child's tutoring, being told "it's going well" and having no way to actually see that for themselves. No score history, no session notes, no record of what was covered — just a weekly invoice and a feeling of hoping for the best.

The 11+ tutoring industry in the UK is enormous and largely informal — a patchwork of independent tutors, small agencies, and franchise centres, most of them doing honest work, almost none of them giving families real visibility into it. Vetting varies wildly. Safeguarding is often a signature on a form rather than something enforced day to day. And a child's progress usually lives in one person's head, not in a record anyone else can check.

We built Fennby to close that gap — not with more marketing promises, but with architecture. Every tutor completes identity verification, an enhanced DBS check, and a signed conduct agreement before ever meeting a child, enforced at the database level, not by someone remembering to check a spreadsheet. Every message between a tutor and a child is visible to a parent, always, with no private thread that excludes them. Every mock exam, every session note, every score is recorded the moment it happens, not summarised into a vague update weeks later.

Fennby is a whole-child ecosystem, not just an 11+ crammer. Alongside mock exams and tutoring, we run a vocational and craft track — bag making, shoemaking, sewing — because we think a child's confidence shouldn't rest entirely on a single exam score. And accessibility isn't an add-on: extra time, read-aloud, dyslexia-friendly fonts, and other accommodations are available to every family from day one, never gated behind proof of a diagnosis.

We're still early. But everything we build starts from the same question: if a parent, a school, or a safeguarding lead looked closely at this feature right now, would they see exactly what's really happening? If the honest answer is no, we haven't finished building it yet.