Maths is a bugbear subject for thousands of students and many turn to grinds to get them through the Junior and Leaving Cert exams. Cork-born TJ Hegarty is a whizz at maths and first started giving grinds to make money when he left school and went to study agricultural science at UCD. A farmer’s son who is “good at making things happen”, he was working with the Kerry Group when the idea for Breakthrough Maths began taking shape in his head.
This was back in 2020. Then the pandemic arrived and put the kibosh on Hegarty’s well-laid plans. Undeterred, he regrouped and decided that moving to a fully online model would actually work better by broadening his potential customer base exponentially and ultimately allow him to tweak the course design to suit students in other countries.
Most grinds are an hour once a week. Those signing up to Breakthrough Maths attend four classes a week. The classes happen around teatime and cover the curriculum from primary school to Leaving Cert. The monthly cost per student is €149 and two topics are covered each week with homework to back up the learning. The biggest demand so far has been for students in second year but Hegarty says the age profile of participants is constantly going down to include younger children.
“What makes us different to what’s already out there is that the technology behind the platform tracks students’ grades in class,” Hegarty explains. “This means we can build up a profile picture of every child’s maths abilities and are able to pinpoint exactly what parts of Maths a student is struggling with. We get quantifiable results and will know more about a child’s maths ability than any school will ever know and can feed that back to the parents. I sometimes describe it as being like Peloton for maths. Maths is a skill. In schools, there’s too much lecturing and not enough active practice. We fix that with a live tutor who uses testing throughout the class to make sure students are following.”
Breakthrough Maths is heading towards a roll call of 3,000 students but has the capacity to bring that to 40,000.
Investment is close to €200,000 between Hegarty’s own funds and support from South Cork local enterprise board and InterTrade Ireland, which provided salary grants and linked Hegarty up with academics in Queen’s University Belfast to further develop the back end of the platform. The company has 16 full-time and five part-time employees including course designers, teachers, admin, sales and technical staff.
“I never heard of Zoom before Covid but it’s surprising how quick you adapt when you have to,” says Hegarty who does a slot on TikTok four days a week to drive student engagement with the Breakthrough Maths platform. He now has 130,000 followers between Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
“The grinds market is very competitive but there is only so much that sticks with a weekly grind or a crash course during the holidays,” Hegarty says. “We are with our students four days a week and teach through multiple choice testing so we know exactly how they are getting on. The students know the questions are coming so that keeps them on their toes for the duration of the class.”
Next stop for Breakthrough Maths is the UK, where the company has already recruited boots on the ground to oversee the launch of its GCSE maths grinds. “We have put a lot of investment into developing professional presentations with high production values so this transfers, as does the teaching model. The foundations are in place and the principles are the same,” Hegarty says.
Hegarty’s ambition is to make Breakthrough Maths “the best maths class in the world” as he points out that maths is a global language and that algebra is algebra whether you’re in Dublin or Dubai.
