25th January 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
If you’re a tutor then you’ll know that when students make a request through us, they are given the option of entering any additional requirements that they may have. This is a very important option to give students because it’s so frustrating when we think we’ve found the perfect tutor, and later discover a very specific requirement that means we have to start our search all over again. However, the most common, and, to be honest, the most frustrating request is when someone asks for a tutor who is a current schoolteacher.
One of the reasons that make the schoolteacher request frustrating is that it’s rare to find a schoolteacher among our tutors who has time to take on another student. These tutors are in such demand that they become booked up very quickly, and so holding out for one can lead to that particular student simply not being tutored for a long time. Another problem is that, since most of our schoolteachers begin as a tier 1 tutor (because it’s rare for Oxbridge tutors to become teachers), they quickly find that their profession commands a higher tuition rate than available through us, and they subsequently stop accepting Blue Tutors students. Of course, this is something which we could change, but we’re uncomfortable with doing so, which will be explained below.
Of course, all of this is just highlighting the problem with private tuition: it is an unregulated industry. The lack of regulation means that parents don’t know how to determine the sort of tutor they want. There’s nothing that ‘qualifies’ someone to be a tutor. In fact, we often find parents asking for a tutor who is qualified, and when we ask what they mean, they don’t know.
It easy to understand why, in their confusion about how to select a good tutor, parents ask for a schoolteacher. The first attribute a parent wants to be sure about is that the tutor knows the syllabus inside out, and who better knows the syllabus than someone for whom it is their full-time job.
Unfortunately there is a general misunderstanding about the skills required to be a good tutor, and many parents think that teachers tutor when they’re at school. We’ve actually found that some teachers find it incredibly difficult to switch between teaching a class, and teaching individuals, just as tutors suddenly feel lost when teaching a group where the tutor isn’t getting that constant response to confirm understanding.
The answer? Well until there is a tutoring qualification which gives parents confidence about the standard of their tutor, then we’re likely to continue to experience the same problem. As is so often the case nowadays, it is the label that is used to determine value, rather than the function.