31st August 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The UK tutoring industry is strange over the summer. We have so many keen young tutors who want to work between June and October because it’s a fun job and much preferable for a young intelligent Oxbridge student than working in a restaurant or pub. The theory’s great: provide high quality private tuition for students over the summer holidays. Maybe in preparation for 11 Plus and Common Entrance exams later in the year, or maybe for students who struggled in their first year of GCSEs or A Levels and want to catch up, or maybe because parents see the summer as too long a period without learning and want their children to continue to work hard and excel at school.
As often happens, the theory is very different from the practice. We find that we still receive many request for tutoring in June and July, but parents and students are far less committal compared to during the academic year. That might be because of an over optimistic parent who quickly realises that their son/daughter has ‘turned off’ for the holidays and receives less value from the lessons, or sometimes the whole family is away for a much larger proportion of the summer than they anticipated and actually can/t find a time to arrange lessons. Whatever the reason, tutoring alongside school tends to happen more consistently in our experience.
When you think about it, tuition in conjunction with school work makes far more sense; we always say that a tutor’s role is to help students understand something with which they’re having trouble, and not to just lecture a syllabus. If a student hasn’t read something required or attempted some questions, then there’s little point in paying a tutor to sit there while the student does the work which they would have otherwise done at school or as homework.
So, summer tuition isn’t bad, or less helpful than between September and June, but it’s important that students commit to a series of lessons. Also, there is an onus on the tutor and student to ensure that a reasonable amount of preliminary work is done before each lesson so that the tutor can add as much value as possible to the student’s understanding during the lesson.