25th March 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The most common request that tutoring agencies receive is for GCSE level tuition in the most popular subjects, including English. GCSE tutors have a very specific job to do in preparing students for exams. Students have a strict set of assessment objectives, and set texts which they must study in preparation for exams. Therevision process is extremely methodical, for both student and tutor. So why do we run into so many problems at this stage?
For tutors it is extremely daunting to find increasingly that students lack the basic English skills required to write to a GCSE standard. Many of the skills that inform students' work later on should be developed in their early years at primary school. This is the point at which they learn how to construct setences, how to use the apostrophe, metaphors and similies etc. When teaching a GCSE programme we are required to fit a lot into a short space of time, a task which is extremely difficult if the student lacks the basic skills necessary to build on.
Today many students reach secondary school lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills. This is an extremely worrying trend which is too great a task for home tutors to fix. To be most effective, tutors need to work in tandem with effective school programmes and teaching, something which many students simply don't get.