27th October 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Last year we had a situation where a student submitted a request for a tutor, and stated that they wanted a female tutor, and this was something which every tutor (male or female) was able to view. It is a fairly rare occurrence for a student to make a request like this, but it does happen, and, when it does, we remove the comment, so that our tutors can’t see it. However, on the occasion above, a tutor did see the specific gender request, and complained.
It is strange when students make a request, which, on the face of it, should have no bearing on the ability of the tutor we send them, and even though Blue Tutors couldn’t be accused of creating any kind of discrimination, we also don’t want to perpetuate discriminatory behaviour, if that’s what the student is doing.
Our difficulty is that we can never be sure whether someone is discriminating or not. There are certain requests that we would never be comfortable with (requests about the race or religion of the tutor), but sometimes requests concerning a tutor’s gender or age could be justified.
Discrimination would be when a person is not considered for a role in which they could perform as well as someone else. Of course, we would not argue that one gender, or a particular age necessarily makes someone better at tutoring, but some parents have told us that unless we send someone of a certain gender, or a certain age then their child will not react well. This is actually a common situation in counselling and social work, where an expert may be chosen from a certain gender or age category, because it will produce the most effective results in the person they are helping.
We do want our students to be blind to gender, age, and anything which doesn’t really matter, because then we can actually find the best tutor for them. However, we accept that not all students are like this, and we try to ensure that, when someone makes a potentially discriminatory request, we only work with that student if we’re sure that the request is justified. If you’re a tutor, reading this and feeling slightly annoyed that you may not be considered for some students (even though they are in the extreme minority), you should be aware that those of us within Blue Tutors also find it strange to see a request that one of us would be perfect for, and yet the student seems happier to have a worse tutor, but of a certain gender.