21st October 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Sometimes it feels as though a week is dominated by one seemingly small problem, and this week it was one badly behaved tutor who seemed to think the best form of defence was to criticise us. Of course, dealing with this didn’t take very long, but it’s one of the things Harriet and I have to laugh at. What happened was that this tutor had been tutoring maths to a student for the whole the last academic year, and the student had kept us up to date with what had happened. However, by the time the lessons stopped, the tutor had only declared 3 lessons. When we asked him about the inaccurate record the tutor declared 3 more lessons, which obviously wasn’t correct. At this point we entered lessons according to the student’s record, as all our tutors agree we can do. Once the tutor realised that we were aware he had lied, he claimed that we were unethical for adding something like 5 more lessons than were actually taught (essentially admitting that he hadn’t declared 20 lessons), and demanded that we add no charges for the time we had taken in sorting the issue out. I’ve said it before, but from a business point of view we would be so much better off recruiting honest people ahead of good tutors. Obviously the goal is for a tutor to be both honest and a great teacher, but the first quality is the one which costs us most.