3rd January 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Happy new year to all of our tutors and students! I’m in a particularly good mood at the moment because I’ve been on holiday for nearly a week now, and am pretty relaxed. You might ask why, if I’m on holiday, am I writing a blog. Well, partly due to my OCD (I write one every week, and would feel incomplete if I didn’t), but also taking 15 minutes to write this doesn’t really feel like ‘work’, it’s almost a holiday from my holiday.
I’m in Australia at the moment, where the private tuition market is probably slightly behind the UK, but growing all the time. One of the barriers to growth, however, is the distances between tutors and students; people are much more spread out over here, and it’s not always easy for someone’s next-door neighbour to travel to them, let alone finding a close suitable tutor. There is a strong call from a company called the Australian Tutoring Association to create better links between the government, schools and tutors. This is something which I’m a big fan of; there’s seems to be a reluctance from schools and the government to acknowledge the prevalence of private tuition in the UK, and, in my opinion, we should accept that it’s here to stay, and begin to work to better incorporate it into students’ formal education.