5th June 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Private tuition is on the rise in the UK, with parents and schools paying an average of £30 an hour to tuition in core subjects such as English and Maths. Many families now view using a home tutor as an essential means to ensure that their children do well in exams, and schools are increasingly using their pupil premium payments to fund private tuition. However, the cost, which can vary from around £20 to £100 per hour for 11+ specialists, is prohibitively expensive for many schools and parents. This is where the latest innovation in private tuition – online tutoring – can offer an affordable alternative.
Over the last couple of years, tuition agencies have broadened their services to include online tuition, and many agencies have emerged which solely offer online services. Online tuition can take several forms, and covers marking and commenting on essays via email, in addition to live conversations over Skype or instant messaging. There are now interactive programmes which tutor and student can access remotely. This is particularly useful in terms of expanding the pool of experienced, available tutors, as tutors can now work remotely from anywhere in the country. The fees for online tuition are much lower than face to face tuition, coming in at about £15 or £20 per hour. This means that far more parents and schools can afford private tuition, and schools in particular are jumping on the online tuition trend in order to help struggling students, as well as to stretch the brightest pupils.
Although there are limited studies of the efficacy of online tuition, schools claim that they have observed remarkable progress of struggling students, whose online tuition has helped to identify and tackle key deficits in their skill-set. Schools are keen to point out that online tuition does not replace the value that comes from having a teacher in the classroom, but can help in identifying problems with individual students which a teacher in a large class might miss. Concern remains that schools will use the service to focus only on attempting to improve their positions in the league tables, but many institutions have said that online tuition is the best way they can use their extra money to help students.