19th July 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
One of the problems for tutors who are trying to support themselves through private tuition is the relatively quiet period over the summer. Obviously as soon as the A Level and GCSE exams finish in June, tutors can find their weekly hours falling dramatically in a short space of time. There are generally two solutions to this: either consider the tuition year to be only 10 months long, or try to find students who want lessons all year round.
The first solution, for a tutor to decide to work only from September until June, can often work well, because those months tend to fit in with the many tutors’ lives. Whether it’s a post-graduate course, or undergraduate degree, the two parts of a tutor’s life coinciding can provide a structure helping the tutor to organise him/herself. However, the problem is that unless the tutor desperately wants to be on holiday for two months, it can be frustrating to have worked so hard for ten months, rather than spread one’s work more evenly.
The difficulty with trying to find students who want tuition over the summer, as well as during the school year is that they’re not nearly as easy to come by. As a new tutor, you will inundated with requests from GCSE and A Level students, and the majority of the time those students will have their final exams in June. An option is to focus on tutoring for common entrance and 11+ students, but that creates the same problem, because entrance exams tend to be clustered around the end of the calendar year.
A tutor could look to find a balance between 16-18 year old students and students taking school entrance exams, and that would, to some extent, minimise the drop-off after exams. Alternatively, a tutor could try to find families who consider tuition to be supplemental to school, not just in preparation for exams, but generally, for most of the student’s school life.
In short, there are lots of ways for a tutor to try and minimise the time spent with very few students to teach, but the most important barrier to lots of summer tuition is that many people believe that students deserve and need a break from schoolwork over the summer. This isn’t true in some countries with a more developed private tuition culture than the UK, but a large number of people feel that we’ve got the work-play balance right in this country.