9th December 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We’re often asked about the demographics of our students. It seems to be one of the first things people want to know: how old they are, what they’re studying, and which subjects are the most popular. It’s probably strange that until now we have always said what we genuinely believed to be true, but that was without actually looking at the statistics, and just judging popularity from our feeling of working within Blue Tutors.
In terms of levels of study, A-level and the International Baccalaureate is the most popular, with 34.4% of students studying those qualifications. GCSE isn’t far behind, and 28.7% of our students are studying at that level. This means that 63% of our students are between the ages of 16 and 18 (or least studying qualifications that are traditionally taken at those ages). This is actually proportionally fewer students than we expected; we initially felt that the figure was more like 75-80%.
17.6% of our students are studying for an undergraduate degree or a masters degree. This may appear to be quite high, and is probably much higher than for many other tuition agencies, but this can be explained because we have the reputation of a very academic organisation, with many tutors from Oxford and Cambridge.
Only 14% of our students are younger than GCSE age. 8% are studying at KS3, 5% at KS2 and 1% at KS1. This is as we expected, and as a company we’re very cautious about providing tuition for young students, which we explain throughout our website. Of course, we do still tutor young students, but it’s something which we ask their parents to think very carefully about.
Lastly, just over 5% of our students are studying at levels which don’t fall under the standard UK curriculum. Generally these students will be learning instruments, or will have requested tuition in language conversation, or something similar. There’s no age trend for the students at these levels. In fact they’re often adults who are learning languages for reasons other than academic ones.