9th August 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
As the tuition industry has grown, the market has expanded in many ways to accommodate it. We no longer just have your basic after school English or Maths tutors. Now we have Maths specialists, 11+ experts, online tutors, and a growing new phenomenon, ‘super tutors’. This is a rather ill-defined term, and hiring a super tutor doesn’t necessarily mean that parents are getting the best possible tuition for their children. Pupils can receive top notch tuition from excellent, experienced tutors for around £30 per hour. Yet super tutors charge up to £1000 an hour, leading one to think that the defining feature of super tutors is the cost.
For parents for whom money is no object, paying large sums of money can seem like the best way to guarantee that their child receives the best tuition out there. Paying tutors a great deal of money seems like the best way to ensure that the tutor is committed and available, and often means that tutors are prepared to travel with the family, and make themselves available at whatever times they are required. Some tutors travel abroad with their pupils’ families for months at a time, and receive large salaries in addition to accommodation and expenses. Other families have been known to put tutors on retainer, meaning that they are being paid to be available only to that family, even if they are not working many of the hours that they are paid for. Somewhere in amongst this high stakes world of money and travel, tutors’ qualifications, experience and talent can be lost in the equation.
Super tutors often have Oxbridge degrees and tutor full time for the families who can afford their rates. Yet this does not necessarily mean that they offer the best tuition out there for the pupils they work with. Just because a tutor received the best education possible, it does not mean that their success will automatically transfer to their students, as parents hope. Successful tutoring means being able to understand each student’s individual needs, and being able to relate to them in a way that enables the tutor to find the best way to help them flourish in a subject. This skill is far more rare than an Oxbridge degree, and the tutors who do have it do not all charge hundreds an hour. Rather than focusing on the tutors who charge the most per hour, parents looking for the best possible tuition should focus on finding tutors who are experienced, sensitive, and they think would work well with their child.