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About us

Two teachers, three cups of tea, and a market most outsiders never get into.

Triple Tea Academy is made by Mark and Alice. We also run YouTalk, an online school that connects Chinese parents with independent English teachers. The academy is where we teach other teachers to do the same on their own.

We live outside mainland China, and so do our teachers. Our students and their parents are inside. Everything we write about comes from that daily bridge.

Teach
Travel
Thrive

How we got here

  1. July 2021

    The market disappears

    China adopts the Double Reduction policy. Large EdTech platforms lose their licences, tens of thousands of foreign teachers lose their jobs overnight. Parents lose prepaid lesson packages.

  2. 2021 – 2022

    Going solo

    Demand did not vanish, it moved to RedNote and WeChat. We started finding parents ourselves, teaching our own students and taking payment through WeChat Pay and Alipay.

  3. The ceiling

    Out of hours

    Our schedules filled up. The only way to grow was more hours in a day, and there are no more hours in a day.

  4. Handing over

    The school appears

    We passed our own students to teachers we trust. That is how YouTalk became a school, and why our teachers are partners, not staff.

  5. Today

    Triple Tea Academy

    We are pouring five years of practice into the Teach Solo guide, the Spill the Tea blog, and free tools for independent teachers.

How we take our tea

Teachers keep what they earn

Platforms take up to half of a teacher's rate. We grew out of handing our own students over, so we do not charge solo teachers anything.

Proof over promises

Screenshots in our guide are real conversations, shared with the consent of the teachers we helped. No invented case studies.

Adapt to the parent

WeChat, not email. ClassIn, not Zoom. Yuan, not dollars. The teacher who fits into the family's world wins.

22,500+lessons recorded in our school
13–15active independent teachers
4–14typical age of our students

Get the first cup

Teach Solo is almost ready. Leave your email and we will send it to you first, plus one cup of insider tea a week: a short, practical note from the Chinese market. No spam.