21st October 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
One of the decisions that Blue Tutors have to make on a daily basis is what subjects, and at what levels, we should allow particular tutors to tutor. It might sound like a non-discussion at first, but it does create a considerable amount of disagreement among us, our tutors and our students.
Now, you’re probably reading this, and thinking ‘I bet tutors always think they can teach to a higher level than they actually can’. Funnily enough, this isn’t always the case. Many tutors simply adhere to our guidelines, and ask to teach subjects at a level below that at which they’ve studied a subject, and some are a little over-ambitious, and think they can tutor to a level higher than we think they should. However, lots also say that they don’t want to tutor at a particular level, even though we think that they would be capable of doing so; in general tutors are an ethical and honourable bunch.
Of course, our goal is to make sure that our students are happy with our decisions about what a tutor can teach. Generally this isn’t a problem, we have a reputation for having incredibly high academic standards, and our students know this, and trust us. However, it’s important for us to be able to justify our decision, which we can do by having our general guidelines mentioned above.
The funny thing is that sometimes students express concern about their tutor’s academic ability when we think that the tutor is one of the best qualified people to teach them. For example, a student recently questioned their tutor’s ability to teach A-level music, because that tutor had only completed two years of a music degree. Whereas had the student questioned the tutor based on experience, it may have been a reasonable concern, the tutor was in her third year of a music degree at Cambridge University, and had a near perfect academic record. In terms of a current and in-depth knowledge of the syllabus, we would have been pressed to find someone better. Sometimes this is just a difficult thing to communicate to the student.
Despite the fact that we’re happy with the way our ‘ok-ing’ of what a tutor can teach at the moment (it is done manually), we’re working on something better, and rather than a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to decide whether a tutor can teach something, we’re going to develop a system which is more greyscale. This means that we’ll be much more able to select a tutor who fits a student perfectly.