14th September 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A recent article in the Times Educational Supplement tells how an Arts tutor in London sees the industry after spending a few years tutoring after leaving university. Frances Hallett (a pseudonym), graduated from a top university, and chose to tutor students privately in London, largely because she found it difficult to get an alternative job.
Hallett’s first port of call was to apply to an agency, and one of her first tasks was to attend a training day. Expecting some form of advice on actually tutoring, having very little experience, Frances was surprised to discover that the day focussed on etiquette, rather than teaching pedagogy. The advice she received was directed towards being polite and gaining the admiration of students’ parents, as oppose to how best to help whomever she was teaching. The day ended with the agency informing each aspiring tutor to pay a fee to obtain a CRB Disclosure, something which Frances deliberated over for some time, before being contact by the agency who had apparently forgotten that she hadn’t received her disclosure.
The article also tells of one of Hallett’s friends, Tim Digby-Bell, and how his induction to tutoring was even less preparatory. He was given work by an agency based solely on a telephone call which established that he had attended the exclusive Radlett College. Tim had asked to teach English, but within 24 hours was asked to travel to a student to teach GCSE maths. So there he found himself, in a wealthy family’s toilet, Googling ‘how to solve simultaneous equations’, not a day after beginning a tentative application to tutor English.
Frances does believe that there are good tutors and good agencies, but she’s spoken to many people, including parents and teachers, who are sceptical about the tutoring craze which appears to be sweeping the nation. Nearly half of all students in London receive some form of private tuition at some point during their education, and overall in the UK, that figure is around 22%.