3rd June 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We’re flyering for tutors in Cambridge today, and will be doing the same in Oxford on Wednesday. As I said before, it’s something I really enjoying doing, even though I should probably be paying someone else to do it by now. It’s also ridiculously effective; I recently checked, and in the two months following our flyering last year, we had 2,000 responses from interested tutors, which is about a 10% success rate. I’ve already set up a few days of assessing in Oxford and Cambridge later this month, so I’m excited at the prospect of those filling up over the next couple of weeks.
I found out something interesting about DBS Checks (the new name for CRB Disclosures) last week, which is that they are now offering a service whereby one can apply to have a place online which a new employer can check. Brilliant! I thought; finally a system which seems to do what every reasonable person has been crying out for for ages. However, I then discovered that a tutor will have to pay £13 a year for the service. Where’s the justification for that? Presumably it will cost the DBS virtually nothing, and, even if it does, why should that service expire after a year? It seems to me that they’ve become aware that many people (tutors and many other others) get one check, and then show it to other employers (because obviously the information would be the same if they applied for a new check), and the DBS are just looking for another way to eek more money out of tutors, rather than providing the service at cost. I think it’s really unethical.