7th March 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
At interview, our tutors often ask about the most popular subjects because they’re interested to see how many students they can expect, and whether they’ll be able to tutor the subjects they love the most. There’s a misconception the the most popular tuition subjects will be the ‘hardest’ subjects; the subjects which students don’t get much help with at school; where a specialist tutor might be required.
For young students, English and maths are obviously the most popular subjects to be tutored. This might be under the guise of verbal and non-verbal reasoning for the 11 plus exam, or for common entrance exams, but it is these fundamental skills which parents rightly focus on at an early age. Science tuition is also very popular at GCSE, but up until 16 it tends to be the case that if a student is struggling with, say, history, then they are probably also struggling with English and will seek an English Tutor. The only caveat is that languages like French and Spanish are often requested because they are so different from most other subjects.
At A Level what is popular to be studied is also popular to be requested to be tutored so history, economics, the individual sciences (biology, chemistry and physics), psychology and many others become more popular. This makes sense because after GCSE the skills needed to do well in a particular subject are more distinct so being better at English or maths won’t make you respectively better at history or physics.
Of course, we do receive some different requests for younger students. Once a parent asked if we could supply a Classical Greek tutor for her 5 year old which was a bit of a shock. We do always try to help anyone who genuinely wants to learn, but it’s important not to overload young students with too much academia before they have a grasp of the fundamentals.