12th November 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The number of private tutors working in London has increased dramatically over the last few years, in part because during recession parents who might have sent their children to private schools are opting for state schools, and hiring tutors to consolidate their children’s education. The industry is booming and more and more graduates are choosing to top up their incomes with tutoring.
Because most tutors are self-employed, it’s difficult to obtain concrete stats on how much work they do, and their levels of job satisfaction. However, increasingly tutoring companies are surveying tutors in order to establish their experiences of tutoring in order to improve the service they offer. These surveys have found that tutors have a very high level of job satisfaction, with most reporting that over 90% of tutors surveyed felt they and their students both benefited greatly from one to one teaching. As well as providing an extra income, tutoring allows graduates to develop their communication skills in a specialised one to one environment, providing them with invaluable experience which then translates to their day jobs.
Further, many tutors who work with families on a long term basis find that they become family friends, with one tutor reporting that she felt like one of the family. She was able to implement long term education strategies for students which they may not receive at school where they regularly changed teachers. Whilst many tutors take up the extra work because they are earning less during the recession, it seems they have found a niche which provides a higher level of job satisfaction than they can find elsewhere, and tutoring will continue to be a popular enterprise for graduates.