About us
Who We Are
The Study Buddy was the brainchild of Nathan McGurl. He came up with the idea while trying to help his own child revise for his GCSEs.
As exams got closer, it was clear that Jake wasn’t motivated to study. That might have been over-confidence in his ability, perhaps a bravado that if he ‘didn’t try he wouldn’t really fail’ or maybe that he would eventually do something. The issue was that as the deadline loomed, Jake was becoming more and more entrenched in doing nothing and it was creating a tense atmosphere. Because while he wasn’t prepared to put in the effort, he had big dreams and an even bigger sense of pride. Neither would be served well by him not reaching his potential.
As a family, they had tried a number of standard approaches from leaving him to it, to drawing up timetables for him. But nothing had any lasting impact and doing nothing was not going to yield the outcome Jake wanted.


Applying corporate management to GCSE studies
To help him sort out his revision – and to help him keep his cool – Nathan worked up an agile project-based approach. He started with two questions:
- How much have you got to do, to be ready?
- Is there enough time to do it all?
To answer these, Nathan set about breaking down the courses into topics and subtopics. The idea being that this would give an approximate size of the task. In Jake’s case, it worked out to be around 250 units. A very crude calculation showed that it would be a stretch, but possible to cover each topic in the time available.
But it wasn’t enough to simply know that. Continuing with the principles of project management – the kind that Nathan used in his employment, managing multi-million pound website redevelopments – he went about creating a set of cards that detailed this master to-do list. Now Jake – and everyone else – knew exactly what need to be done.
Developing a repeatable process
That left ‘When’. In the past scheduling had either been fairly inflexible – Maths at 5 pm every Monday – or completely without structure – Maths whenever you like. An alternative was needed. Something that wasn’t done to Jake, but also gave a bit of rigour to the process. The idea of ‘sprints’ came about – allocating work from the backlog – or ‘to do’ pile.
But first, the week ahead needed a sense of perspective. So before anything else, the commitments and obligations were marked out: school, rugby matches or family lunch out all etc. Next came the things that Jake wanted to do: mammoth lie-in on Sunday, someone’s party on Friday night, Fifa marathon on Saturday afternoon. It all was marked out. Then. whatever was left blank was fair game for study.
The point here was to show balance. It’s not all about study and Jake had [an element of] control in what happened. This was a eureka moment. The more in charge Jake felt, the more open he was to doing it.
And The Study Buddy was born!

Helping every teen fulfil their potential

Mission & Promise
Our Mission is to help every teen reach their potential in the exams. We’re not about reaching A*s or 9s – great grades will come as a result of improved attention and direction. And that will last well beyond the next set of exams.
Our Promise is to support you in whatever way we can. It’s not just the products but help, advice and sometimes a shoulder to cry on!
