9th September 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I finally got around to doing some more tutor assessments in Cambridge last week. We haven’t actually got an assessor resident in Cambridge at the moment, but since my sister has recently moved there, I didn’t feel the need to train another assessor because I thought I’d be there regularly. However, my sister recently gave birth to my niece, and, as a result, when I’m in Cambridge I don’t want to do anything else but look after her. To be honest, there’s not a huge demand for assessments in Oxford and Cambridge outside of term time, so it wasn’t urgent, and I had done a load of assessments at the end of June. The tutors were pretty good, but there’s still the problem with goal-setting; I really have to spell that out more clearly in our teaching ideas.
Otherwise things are still very busy with the new September intake of students. I’m about to start work on a trial we’re helping with to test the effectiveness of private tuition. The idea is to send some students a maths or English test before they begin tuition, and send them a second test after 5 lessons with the hope that, on average, there will be a significant improvement on the second test. I’m pretty confident that we’ll find an improvement after someone’s been tutored 5 times, I just wonder whether parents will be keen to help out. We’ll see.