18th March 2016 1:00
By Blue Tutors
A very common question tuition agencies receive from parents is ‘is the tutor qualified’. Whenever I hear this I have to ask parents what they mean, because there is currently no consensus on what being qualified as a tutor entails. What’s interesting is that many parents don’t really know what they are asking either – the just assume that there is a university tutoring qualification like a PGCE that all tutors will have. There isn’t, but to complicate matters further, not all school teachers have a PGCE either, making the question of ‘is a tutor qualified’ far more complicated than it appears.
When parents ask for a qualified tutor, they often mean that they want a school teacher, assuming that they, at least, will have a teaching qualification of some kind. This actually isn’t the case at all – with the proliferation of free schools, there has been a sharp rise in the number of unqualified teachers working in schools, and parents are often not aware that their child’s school teacher may have received very little training. With regards to tutoring qualifications, again it is not necessary to have one to work with many agencies, and many tutors do not undergo any training or assessment at all. All this being the case, how can parents ensure that the tutor they hire will be able to do the job?
The fact is that there is no clear way to ensure that a tutor is qualified, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t easy to find a good tutor. Feedback and recommendations are crucial in the world of private tutoring, and parents who are concerned can be very reassured if they hire a tutor who has received consistently positive feedback from previous students. Parents should also ensure that they meet with potential tutors to discuss their child’s needs; just because a tutor has a PGCE or tutoring qualification it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will work well with a particular student. Tutoring agencies can help by recording feedback, and allowing tutors to advertise the qualifications and experience that they do have in order for parents to make an informed decision.