18th August 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The news stories we’ve reported on this week have raised questions about the way that schools try to ensure their students reach the level required by the government. The points raised were regarding classes containing students with mixed abilities, and the dichotomy between teaching to help the weakest students, or to push the strongest.
Ultimately this debate boils down to what, as a society we’re looking to do, and what role we see schools as playing. Is the goal of a school to ensure that every pupil leaves with an acceptable ability across a range of subjects? Or should a school try to push every student as far as possible? Obviously the first option is likely to be better for weaker students, where teachers dedicate most of their time to pushing these students up to the required level, at the expense of stronger students who don’t receive a proportionate amount of attention from teachers. The second option is a ‘fairer’ distribution of teachers’ time, and will lead to some exceptional students who perform beyond expectations, but it would also lead to weaker students not achieving the minimum grade expected of them.
From a tutoring point of view, this is thankfully a debate that we don’t need to involve ourselves in. Every one-to-one lesson proceeds at the pace of the individual student. The ideas that a student might be bored because of a slow pace, or confused because of a fast pace, are complete non-issues. Private tuition might not be the most efficient use of a tutor’s time (because he/she could be teaching a whole classroom), but it is certainly the most efficient use of a student’s time.
So, the solution is simple, right? We just need to provide every student in the country with a private tutor in each subject they’re studying. All this needs is an increase of around 2000% in the teaching population, and another £100 billion for the education budget. Easy.
Ok, so maybe it’s easier to highlight the problem than suggest a solution, but it does seem as though the government are just perpetuating this problem by sticking to SAT tests, or similar exams, that reward teachers and schools for helping students to reach a minimum level, rather than pushing them to excel. With a plentiful supply of talented tutors in the UK, plus the proven success of numerous peer tutoring schemes around the world, it’s a shame that so many state school students still find themselves either bored or confused in lessons, and rarely reasonably challenged.