20th October 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
One of the challenges we face every year is trying to recruit enough tutors to supply the demand from our students, and, maybe more importantly, trying to ensure that we have the right balance of subjects taught by our tutors; there’s no point having 50% Maths tutors and 50% English tutors, when 80% of our students will want maths tuition.
Generally this is something which we can manage fairly well. We do take on a lot of English tutors, probably because a lot of popular jobs for arts students (acting, journalism) lend themselves to also tutoring while working at that career. Obviously lots of jobs attracting science students tend to be very time consuming, and difficult to tutor alongside. Indeed, we find that we have fewer science tutors who each take on many students, and more arts tutors who each take on few students.
There is a less manageable problem that’s affecting whether we can meet student demand, and that’s simply not having tutors to teach some students. This probably sounds a little crazy, and as if we don’t know what we’re doing, but the problem is a little more complicated than that. We’re actually finding that the change in patterns of subjects that students are taking is considerably different to the patterns of subjects taken by our tutors.
One example of a mismatch of tutors and students is for IT. Twenty years ago you would have been hard pressed to find someone with a qualification in anything related to computers. Even ten years ago it wasn’t the norm. However, computers are so important to our society today that many schools make IT a compulsory GCSE, with some students taking a double GCSE in the subject. The number of computer students at A Level has also increased. This sounds great for anyone who can tutor IT, but alas life’s not that simple, and we find that, because technology is changing so quickly, many tutors who think they can tutor A Level computing, find that the content has changed dramatically in only a few years.
For different reasons to IT, we’re also finding that we don’t have enough tutors to cover the demand for finance related subjects. This is probably because a career in finance has become so much more popular in the last twenty years, and even though the graduate numbers in finance, economics, business studies or management have saturated the employment market, students are still keen to study those subjects because of the potential reward. Our problem is that so few of our tutors have degrees in finance related subjects. You may think it’s archaic, but at Oxford and Cambridge there is still a focus on academic subjects, and although we recruit many economics grads, they often find that their job quickly takes of their time.
We are working hard to ensure we can supply all of our students with whichever tutor they want, but for some subjects there just aren’t enough qualified graduates out there.