2nd October 2015 1:00
By Blue Tutors
Some figures have recently been released which suggest that ethnic minority students are more than twice as likely to have a private tutor. The tutoring industry as a whole has expanded greatly over the past few years, with children most ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds likely to have a tutor at some point or another. According to Newcastle university 22% of all children in England have a private tutor. In London, the figure rises to a third, with GCSE students being the most likely to have a tutor. But what do the latest figures about ethnic minority students and private tuition tell us about the way the industry has developed?
According to figures compiled by educational researchers at Newcastle, 47% of black children and 48% of Chinese children have private tutors in England compared with 20% of white children. This suggests that parents from ethnic-minorities have widespread concerns that their children need help to survive the completion for school and university places. The implications of this are alarming. In many cases, parents quite justifiably feel that their children will not get the help that they require at school and feel the need to ensure by using outside help that their children are not left behind. The sad consequence of this is often that children from ethnic minority backgrounds run the risk of missing out on broader education due to the focus on tutoring for core subjects.
We have a competitive school and university system in this country which demands that students achieve uniformly good results across the board in an increasingly narrow curriculum. This means that students whose parents feel the need for long term tutoring for their children will be focussed on achieving these results to the detriment of other subjects and forms of education such as music, art and the most crucial aspect of children’s development – playtime. The result of this is that in their efforts to boost their children’s chances at school by hiring long term tutors, parents from ethnic-minority backgrounds may be forced to deprive their children of other, equally important forms of education. This isn’t a choice that any parent should have to make.