13th April 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Students all over the country are currently working harder than they ever have before. Whether it’s for their GCSEs or their A Levels, the Easter holiday period, and time thereafter until the end of the summer exams, is obviously incredibly busy for young people keen to get the best GCSE and A Level results that they can. This is reflected by the amount of private tuition taking place at the same time, but that really shouldn’t be the case.
We’ve said before that, many students and parents use tuition as a last minute panic option, to try and bump grades up in the last two months before exams. The truth is that this kind of ‘cram’ tuition is so much less effective than a steady long term tuition plan. Of course, hiring a tutor when only a few weeks from an exam can still make a difference, it’s just that it’s not nearly the same as when someone decides that they would like a tutor well in advance of final exams, and when a long-term tuition plan can be put into practice.
Now, many people will read the paragraph above and think ‘Yes, but you just want the student to have more lessons’, but we find that ‘last minute’ students actually have more tuition time than longer term students. This is because people beginning their lessons now often want 2-3 lessons a week, and for 2-3 hours at a time. Over 2 months this can mean as many as 90 hours of lessons; compare that to a 1 hour lesson every week for 30 weeks (which is common for longer term students).
A common complaint from students at this time of year is that their school is still asking them to attend classes, and prescribing what the students cover in those classes. For conscientious students who have planned their revision carefully, this is absolutely useless, because their tailored revision plan would be much more effective. This is why we find it a little strange that so much tuition takes place while students are revising. Ideally, by April, students should understand all the concepts in a subject, and should just need to practise papers and memorise some content. Tutors are often still wanted for when a student identifies something which they don’t understand, but hopefully that will be quite rare at this time of year.
Of course, there isn’t really a solution to this problem. We would love students to come to us as early as possible, and it is something which we actively encourage, even though it’s probably worse than when the student begins lessons later. However, as long as our system sticks to end of course exams, rather than continuous assessment, then the situation is unlikely to change. We’re only human, and that sometimes means only worrying about a problem at the last minute.