A tutoring platform that is willing to say no.
Pedagoggyy matches IB Diploma students with subject specialists. The matching is the product. Everything else here exists to make a profile mean something before a family has met the person behind it.
The problem with a tutor directory
Most tutoring marketplaces verify that a person is who they say they are and stop there. That is a check on identity, not on teaching, which is why a profile on most platforms tells you almost nothing you could act on. What is left is a photograph, a self-written paragraph, and a star rating averaged over other people’s children.
The International Baccalaureate makes that worse, not better. A Diploma subject at Higher Level is specific — a specific guide, specific assessment objectives, a specific way papers are marked. A tutor who is excellent at A-level Physics may have never read the IB Physics guide, and nothing on a general directory would tell you that.
So the check here is a subject check. Before a profile goes live, a tutor sits a written paper at the level they want to teach, marked against the same assessment objectives a Diploma examiner uses. It does not prove they can teach — nothing written can. It proves the subject knowledge is there. Whether they can teach it is what the free first session is for.
The rules with a price on them
Four things we hold to, each of which costs us something.
We do not show a low score
A tutor who has not published a diagnostic result is shown without one. Not with a warning, not greyed out, and not lower in the results. Making the absence costly would make the choice fictional.
Costs us: an obvious ranking signal.
We do not rank by who pays
There is no promoted placement and no way to buy a position. Search order comes from subject fit, availability and delivered sessions.
Costs us: the easiest revenue line in a marketplace.
We do not let a model talk to a student
Generation drafts practice and assessments for a tutor to approve. There is no free-form chat between a model and a child, and there is no path to add one quickly.
Costs us: the feature every competitor demos.
We do not put a legal name on a profile
Identity is checked and then kept private. The only screen that can see it is the one an administrator uses to approve it, and that is enforced in the contracts rather than in a component.
Costs us: a cheap-looking trust signal.
Four things the code enforces
Not a manifesto — each of these is a test that fails when it is broken.
- 01
A report is allowed to be bad news
A progress estimate that only ever rises is not measuring anything. Ours can fall, because a number you cannot act on is decoration.
- 02
The absence of evidence is not evidence
A new tutor is new, not worse. A student with no data on a topic gets 'no evidence', not a zero — those are different claims and only one of them is true.
- 03
Nothing is a state that is only a colour
Every band, status and flag carries its word. Remove the colour and the screen still says what it says.
- 04
The seam is the schema
One set of schemas defines the domain and validates every boundary. A contract change is one edit, and the two sides cannot drift apart quietly.
Early, and saying so
We cover three subjects — Physics, Biology and English A: Language and Literature — at Higher and Standard Level. That is on purpose, not a launch plan we are behind on: each subject has to be grounded against its real guide before we will list a tutor in it, and we would rather do three properly than twenty on a guess.
Lessons are online. It is what lets a student in one city work with the right specialist in another, which for a Higher Level subject is often the difference between a good tutor and the nearest one.
Payments, video and the wider curriculum are on the way, and the journal is where we write down what changed and why.