7th April 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Over the last few years a number of schools have begun to employ tutors, or use existing teachers to offer one-to-one tuition to their students. Some parents are asking why this is necessary. Is it a damning verdict on the teaching in a school when they decide that students need help beyond standard classroom lessons?
The view of tutoring being an admission of failure, a solution to the problem of bad teaching, is outdated, and not a view shared by the majority of students and tutors currently involved in the education system. It’s maybe not a surprising view though, when you consider that private tuition was very rare even 20 years ago, and many parents have the opinion of ‘if I didn’t need a tutor, why does my child?’
It might be in Blue Tutors’ interests to promote the idea that UK schools are failing, and more parents need to think about hiring a private tutor. However, this really isn’t the case, and our experience is that it’s simply not true that an increase in tuition is indicative of a decrease in teaching standards. The increase in tuition, and tuition hours in schools is probably a result of a better understanding about the differences between classroom teaching and tutoring, and a move towards a way of teaching which is often better for students.
We hope that parents have begun to appreciate the difference between a lesson tailored towards their child, and the generic teaching that has to be given in a classroom, and we regularly receive feedback from students expressing surprise at just how much more effective private tuition can be. However, initially many parents request a tutor who is currently a classroom teacher, which is strange because it seems to nullify the advantage of one-to-one tuition – one would ideally want a tutor specialised in what they do, rather than a specialised classroom teacher turning their hand to tutoring. Of course, many parents ask for a current teacher because teaching is their job, and it ensures a degree of certainty about the tutor’s knowledge of the syllabus.
The important thing to realise is that tutoring is different from classroom teaching, and schools aren’t failing because their students need extra, one-to-one help. There is a huge amount of pressure on many teachers in the UK due to class sizes, and it’s simply not possible to give the standard of teaching to 30 students as you would give to 1, and it was never so. Tutoring should be seen as an extra service; an improvement to the education system which is becoming more widespread as we realise its extraordinary benefits.