Learners coached
From age six to seventy-one. Roughly two-thirds working adults, the rest students and retirees.
The atelier
A small school built around honest English.
Skyforma started in 2018 as a single tutor and twelve Malaysian learners. We're now a team of thirty-seven mentors and a pedagogical lead, but the rhythm hasn't changed — one student, one mentor, one written plan.
Story
Why an atelier rather than an academy.
Our founder, Eleanor Spence, taught for nine years inside large Manchester language schools before moving to Malaysia in 2017. She enjoyed the work but was unhappy with the scale. Lessons were syndicated PowerPoints, students cycled through three teachers a week, and progress reports were generated by software.
Skyforma was the response. We deliberately stayed small enough that a mentor can recognise every student's voice on a recording and remember the joke they made in lesson four.
Today we run from a small studio above the bakery in Wisma Akademik, with mentors logging in from Manchester, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland and Edinburgh. Around 2,400 Malaysian learners have finished a programme with us since opening.
Eight years, measured carefully.
We avoid vanity metrics. These are the four numbers we actually report to our mentor board each quarter.
Finish their plan
Eight out of ten learners complete the full 12-week plan their mentor wrote with them at the start.
CEFR steps gained
Average measured improvement across the 12-week assessment, regardless of starting level.
Mentors on the team
We hire slowly. We added six mentors last year; we received 412 applications for the role.
Five things we are stubborn about.
A mentor reads these every August and signs them again. New mentors during induction. Students get a copy on enrolment so they can hold us to them.
01
No shaming pronunciation
Manglish and Malaysian English are valid. We coach for the version of English the student needs, not against the one they have.
02
A real plan, not a template
No two of our students get the same syllabus. Mentors write a new plan after every twelfth lesson.
03
Slow, kind feedback
Each utterance is corrected once, gently, then revisited a fortnight later. We don't drown lessons in red ink.
04
No long contracts
Our packs run in twelves. You can stop after the first twelve with a clean refund of the rest.
Pedagogy
The shape of a Skyforma lesson.
A typical 50-minute session has five movements. We borrowed the architecture from communicative language teaching but kept it short enough to plan in 20 minutes.
- Open warm. Three minutes of low-stakes conversation, often built from the student's homework audio.
- Notice. Twelve minutes on a language pattern the mentor heard last lesson — usually a chunk, not a textbook rule.
- Use it. A 20-minute task the student would actually meet at work, school or socially.
- Repair. Ten minutes of fixing the rough edges with the mentor.
- Plan. Five minutes agreeing the homework and the focus of the next lesson.
The mentor sends a written recap and an audio prompt within four hours of the lesson ending.
Take a walk through a real lesson — for free.
Pick the mentor whose accent and approach suit you, book a 25-minute trial, and keep the written CEFR assessment.