29th March 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
It’s incredible how quickly some people spot one of the most basic problems with our system at Blue Tutors. Some students do pay us directly for their lessons, and we pass the tutors’ fees onto them. However, in many cases tutors collect lesson fees from their students, and almost every outsider wants to know how we ensure that tutors declare all of their lessons honestly.
Obviously we operate to a large extent on trust, and think that the best way to work is to assume that everyone is acting honestly and ethically until there is a reason to suspect that they are not. The funny thing seems to be that tutors and outsiders alike seem to think that it’s an incredibly difficult thing to spot, and an easy thing for tutors to do.
We have a lot of contact with each of our students, and send them regular reports on their recent lesson details. Even if a student feels closer to their tutor than to Blue Tutors, it’s very rare for a student to lie for their tutor. In that sense, because we provide the service we do to our students, and want explicit feedback to confirm that the lessons are going well, students really have to lie or completely ignore us to allow their tutor to under-declare lessons.
The next question is always ‘Ah, but what if the tutor agrees with the student not to declare lessons?’ Once this happens it’s quite difficult for us to identify unethical behaviour. However, it’s often overlooked how difficult a task this is for the tutor. It requires the tutor to discuss their actions with the student, and the result is often that the student completely loses confidence in their tutor. When parents are so specific about the qualities that they want their tutor to have, they don’t react well to the knowledge that he/she is unethical. Would you want such a tutor spending time with your children?
Even if tutor and student discuss the situation, and agree to deceive us, they then have to come up with a convincing story, and what most tutors do is simply stop declaring lessons. From our point of view, we just need to look at patterns of lessons taught by genuine tutors, and it’s not difficult to identify potential problems. There’s quite a clear correlation between morality and intelligence, and those tutors who decide that it’s ok to lie to us, are often the same tutors who aren’t smart enough to realise that their lesson record looks suspicious.