29th September 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Being involved with a tuition agency gives you an idea about the popularity of subjects currently taken by school students, whether it’s at GCSE or A Level, and it appears as though all the sounds coming from the government about increasing the popularity of sciences are actually true.
Right now we have lots of requests from students, and also lots of tutors keen to begin tutoring. The result is that we can easily see which subjects we’re slightly oversubscribed for (too many tutors per student), and for which subjects we need more tutors. Every English student in central London currently has 20+ tutors to choose from, all of whom would do a fantastic job. However, for maths and the sciences there are significantly fewer available tutors for each student.
One argument to explain why there are so few science tutors is that if there are relatively few science graduates, they are more demanded by employers, and therefore easily find alternative work, and don’t need to tutor. This may be true to some extent, but when you consider that many of our tutors only teach in the evenings or at weekends, and so do alongside a full-time job, we would expect there to be more available science and maths tutors, even if they all accept students on the condition of tutoring outside of work hours.
The expectation is that if we genuinely are encouraging more students to study sciences at GCSE and A Level then we should see a short fall in available tutors right now, because there will have been relatively fewer science graduates over the last few years, and therefore fewer science tutors. Of course, as the current crop of science students go on to graduate, if the same proportion become tutors as do now, then there should be an end to the disparity.
We have definitely found that many more students are requesting science tuition right now than at the same time in past years. One would expect this at the moment, because our new students at this time of year tend to be those between GCSE years or A Level years who want a tutor to help with retakes. However, even after accounting for this, there appears to be an absolute high number of science students, so hopefully the government push is working.