8th November 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I added an extra section to our new students list this week, and that was voluntary tuition. If you’re a tutor then you’ll be able to log in and see the new section, and read about what this is about (although it’s probably quite self-explanatory). I did this because we were approached by a charity asking if any of our tutors might be keen to do some voluntary tutoring. We have done this sort of thing before, but this is the first time I’ve thought to set up some kind of structure to deal with it. I’m not really sure how keen our tutors will be to offer their services, and we understand that many tutors tutor for us to support themselves, and don’t have a huge amount of free time, but I’m hoping that lots of them will see the value of schemes like this, and help out. The great thing is that this charity only need tutors to commit to 6-8 weeks of one lesson a week. It’s a much more daunting prospect to give up an hour of one’s time for the whole academic year.
I also heard back from Jacari last week: the charity tutoring scheme in Oxford who had asked us to help them create a better website to record the lessons their tutors teach. Unfortunately their trustees aren’t comfortable to have their clients logging in to our website, because we’re a commercial agency. Obviously this makes sense, and I was concerned about this issue right from the start. The trouble is that it would take a lot more work for me to set them up with their own website, and they would need me to maintain it as well, and I just don’t have time at the moment.