20th September 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Yet another online tutoring resource has been launched to help UK school students. BrightSpark Education, who are based in London, have developed an online learning facility, and employ 100 tutors in the Punjab to tutor maths 24 hours a day. The tutors have been busy learning the UK maths syllabuses, so that they can give adequate help.
The cost to the students is £12 per lesson, and the tutors are paid £7 an hour for the tuition they offer (the minimum wage in Punjab is £2.52). This compares very favourably to the average price of private tuition in the UK, which is at least £25 an hour. However, so far only one school has signed up to the scheme, Ashmount Primary School in Islington, who use the service to provide supplementary maths tuition for one hour a week to 30 of it’s pupils.
There is concern about the precedent that may be set if this tuition scheme becomes popular among more schools. It’s claimed that this is another example of a UK company choosing to employ workers from overseas because of the price, and not the quality. It’s currently difficult enough to encourage young people to study science degrees, and even more difficult to convince them to go into education when they graduate. Also, the quality of the tuition is unclear, and untested. What cost is the loss of human interaction between tutor and student? And could this lead to the extreme case of all school lessons being conducted online?