23rd September 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
At Blue Tutors this year we’re expanding the areas in which we can effectively offer tuition to UK students. A major problem in recent years has been the difficulty in matching tutors and students in areas where we had only a handful of either. London, and the south east in general, has always been by far the best place in terms of number of lessons tutored; many of our tutors are either recruited whilst living in London, or move there once they’ve graduated, and it’s obviously a place where the number of students wanting extra help is huge. However, elsewhere in the UK we’ve faced a situation where the probability of us having a tutor who matches a student’s requirements is quite small, often due to a tutor’s distance from a student, subjects that the tutor can teach.
Our new assessment system has given us a resolution to all of these problems. We now have assessors based throughout the UK, and have begun to recruit many more tutors in major cities where we’ll find lots of students wanting a private tutor.
Birmingham was the most obvious place to start. Being easily the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham is likely to be a great place for us to develop our reputation. In fact, even before we’ve been able to more effectively find tutors and students in Birmingham, we’ve had many success stories in the area.
The next place that we looked at was Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital. Edinburgh is a city with so much culture and history, and attracts lots of young people who are keen to be tutors. We also had an experienced tutor there who hadn’t been able to do much work for us since she joined Blue Tutors, and is now set up in Edinburgh as an assessor.
Other cities where we have trained assessors include Cardiff, Brighton, Leeds and Manchester, and we’re looking to train even more. Hopefully this will mean that we’ll soon have many tutors all over the UK, and then even more students outside of the south east. It’s always been disappointing when a student desperately needs our help, but we’re unable to find a brilliant tutor for them. Hopefully that situation will be a thing of the past by the end of 2010.