Five years of building, one stubborn focus.
Two brothers, one frustration
Our story begins with two brothers who'd just walked out of high school with high ATARs, DUX awards, and a question they couldn't shake: why did the path to those marks feel so unnecessarily hard? The system was full of moments where a single different conversation, a clearer worksheet, or a smaller class could have changed everything. So they did what the years below them kept asking them to do: they started privately tutoring.
Two years of private tutoring later, the two of us realised we shared the same dream. We wanted to do this seriously. Not as a side hustle, but as something built from the ground up to give every student the version of help we wished we'd had.
Stepping Stones is born
After months of planning, in 2021 we joined forces and launched Educatta's predecessor: Stepping Stones Tutoring. The whole design was a careful balance, how do we make tutoring as simple as possible for our tutors so they can focus entirely on the student, while keeping every family genuinely cared for? We problem-solved through every angle, and eventually found a sweet spot. Stepping Stones gave us a foundation we could grow on.
The learning years
For two and a half years, we ran Stepping Stones with one rule: learn from everything. We learned what mattered most to our tutors, what genuinely helped our students, and what families valued in the relationship with us. We refined every process. We collected every piece of data we could. We listened to feedback constantly and turned it into changes.
By mid-2024 we'd become experts in WA's senior-secondary education space. Our processes were tight, our tutors were strong, our families trusted us. But behind the scenes, we'd been quietly working on something bigger. For six months, the team had been building Project Educatta: a complete reimagining of what we wanted to be.
A commitment to perfection
The hard truth we'd come to was simple: you can't be excellent at everything. The clearest way to give every student the absolute best experience was to commit fully to one thing. So we made a deliberate decision, we'd narrow our entire focus to ATAR.
In July 2024, Stepping Stones became Educatta. Jude joined Adam and Tarek as a third co-founder right at the rebrand, bringing fresh expertise across student experience and operations. Together, the three of us retired every other service we offered and committed completely to ATAR tutoring. The rebrand wasn't a fresh start, it was the opposite: it was three years of learning compressed into a sharper, more focused promise. One mission. One subject area. The highest possible level of support.
Educatta launched, and our tutors, students and families immediately felt the difference. Educational content built specifically for ATAR. A team of six working on curriculum that mirrors the WACE exam. A tutor team grown to over 30. The feedback told us we'd made the right call.
A year of difficulty
Educatta's first full year tested every part of the new model. We began Term 1 on 27 January 2025 with a major decision behind us: we'd already retired our private one-on-one tutoring department to commit fully to small-group ATAR classes. The energy at the start was exciting, but the difficulty followed quickly.
By the time Term 2 opened on 27 April, we were holding together a centre that had lost a meaningful number of students through the transition. Our job became nurturing every student we still had, and surviving on thinner margins than we'd ever run before. The bright spots were unmistakable though. Our content was excelling, our tutor team had been rebuilt and was teaching brilliantly, and the families who stayed were telling us we were getting right the things that mattered most.
Retiring private tutoring also meant deliberately scaling back our tutor team. Where Stepping Stones had needed 30+ tutors to cover every age and every subject, Educatta needed something different: a smaller, sharper team where every tutor could be properly trained, properly supported, and held to a much higher standard. Quality over quantity became the rule.
From the end of April onwards, the founding team also threw themselves into the long work. We mapped every system in the business, rebuilt our content from the ground up, started building a proper website, and put real student-by-student nurturing structures in place through individual student profiles. Then in August 2025, we made another sharpening decision: we retired our Year 9 and 10 product entirely. ATAR wasn't just our focus anymore. It was the only thing we did.
The result
Everything we'd built through 2025 hit the road in January 2026, and the biggest unlock came right at the start of the year when Zac joined as our first full-time employee. Zac brought five years of experience building high-quality ATAR resources and databases, and tutoring at an exceptional level. With him on board, the bar for what we could build moved significantly.
He took the lead on much of our resource and curriculum development from day one. The entire second edition of our content, with every workbook elevated to a new standard, was largely shaped by his work. But Zac was only one piece of what arrived in January. Behind him sat the biggest single round of changes in Educatta's history, every one of them ready to ship at once.
Our entire curriculum moved five weeks earlier so students now start the semester ahead of school instead of catching up. We restructured how we paid our tutors, moving the whole team from contractors to proper employees. Every teacher began going through extensive in-person training before stepping into a classroom, and we built active monitoring into every class so we always know exactly what's happening in each room. Each student also got a dedicated learning advisor tracking their progress and reaching out the moment they need support.
The classroom itself was reimagined. iPads went into every room, in-person classes became in-person only, and we ran dedicated online-only classes alongside them. PowerPoints were replaced with a detailed individual class plan for every single lesson. Our second centre opened in Canning Vale alongside our original Bentley centre. Adam also shifted to part-time at the hospital so he could go effectively full-time on Educatta.
The best is yet to come.
What you've just read is the first chapter. We have a roadmap for 2026 and beyond that's bigger and more ambitious than anything we've built so far. New content. Deeper student support. Bolder ideas. A few things we're not quite ready to share yet. Every dollar that comes through the door right now goes straight back into building it, which is why Educatta isn't profitable, and won't be for a while. That's by design. The only thing this business is built to optimise for is the students it serves, and the best is genuinely yet to come.
