29th April 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The amount of private tuition is increasing. As GCSEs and A-levels become ever more important in deciding the destination of someone’s professional life, the competition, and willingness to pay to win that competition, have led to more frequent, longer, and more intense lessons outside of school for many 14-16 year olds in the UK. However, it’s not a service which is reserved exclusively for those aged 14 and over, and the competition means that students are starting with a tutor earlier than ever before. We want to know whether this is a good or a bad thing.
How many people reading this will have had a tutor before the age of 8? Obviously after this time it becomes much more common; pupils moving from primary to secondary school often get a tutor to help with an 11+ or Common Entrance exam, and from then on the desire to do well, and hence need for a tutor, becomes greater. Would you believe though that at Blue Tutors we regularly receive requests to tutor pupils younger than 8, sometimes as young as 3 or 4?
So, can ‘tutoring’ a 3 year old genuinely benefit them, or does it do more harm than good? Well, yes it can help, but this could be a misleading thing to say, and certainly doesn’t reflect our opinion on tuition for a child who is so young. Tuition doesn’t have to mean a stranger coming to your house once a week, and being paid to spend an hour with your son or daughter, teaching Maths or English. We really want to encourage parents to consider themselves as tutors for their children, and give parents the confidence to feel that they can do as good a job as anyone else.
It’s understandable why lots of parents are against helping their children; it’s a regular comment for a parent to want a tutor in the first place because of their own insecurities with, say, Maths, and a worry that they are going to ‘pass on’ this insecurity to their child. The truth is that until a student reaches secondary school, and even afterwards, it’s likely that every parent can help their child, and this doesn’t mean spending a formal hour teaching them as a tutor would. Instead you can ask them to write out a shopping list before going shopping, and then asking them to add up what you’ve bought.
What we really want is for parents to turn off the Playstation, unplug the TV, and simply ask their children to do any of the wonderful things from which they’ll learn. Children really are like sponges, and will learn from almost anything they do. Most board games on the market will help your children, but so will the activities you can do with them, like following a recipe.
So, before deciding to find a tutor, just think about how much you can help your children yourself. If you’d like advice on how to do that then just let us know.