18th May 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
One of my friends told me that he’s taken to reading my blog to find out what I’ve been doing – I’ve been so busy that I haven’t been keeping in touch as well as I should.
My trip up north went really well last week. I met with the company that does search engine optimisation for us, and the news was generally very good; we’ve massively increased our Google ranking for tutor-related keywords in the last few weeks, and there is still much we can do to increase it further.
I also trained two tutors to assess for us, one in Birmingham, and one in Nottingham. The problem when doing this is that I need to watch the assessors conduct real assessments for applicants who want to be tutors, but we need to find the applicants, and before we have an assessor in a certain place we can’t advertise effectively for tutors, so it leaves us with few applicants to practise with. It’s all a bit chicken and egg. On the plus side, both tutors picked up the assessment ideas really well (hopefully I’m starting to teach it a bit better!), and I couldn’t have asked for much more from them. The tutor I trained in Nottingham only did one practise assessment, but did it perfectly, so I’ve the headache of deciding what to do next. Ideally I’d oversee them do at least one more assessment, but logistically that’s tough, I’ll have to get my thinking cap on.