7th December 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Our general guideline for allowing a tutor to teach something is that they should have studied a subject at a level above that at which they want to teach it. This system works well in most cases and it is also based on the tutor getting the top grade in that subject, which virtually all of our tutors did. This isn’t a hard fast rule, however, but for good reasons.
For a start, our tutors from Oxford and Cambridge can tutor their degree subjects to degree level. This is because the courses at Oxbridge are renowned as the hardest in the country and the most intensive which is the reason all graduates receive an MA 3 years after they graduate. Obviously when we have a student wanting degree level tuition, we always try to find a tutor with a masters or a PhD in the subject, but we’ve found that our tutors have been so helpful for students needing undergraduate help, even when the tutor only has a BA themselves.
Maybe more interestingly, when a student requests A Level history tuition, we are happy to send an English graduate who has an A Level in history. Again, obviously we prefer to send a history graduate, but the skills the tutor developed in their degree are so applicable to the skills needed to study history that it’s still normally a great fit.
In a similar way, we will happily send a tutor with an A Level in physics and a GCSE in maths to tutor a GCSE maths student. Our goal is always to find the best tutor for a student, and that doesn’t necessarily mean finding a tutor who has studied the subject matter to a ridiculously high level. Our tutors are all amazing academics and many had a choice of subjects to study at degree level. It makes sense to choose tutors for students who knew the subject inside out when studying it, rather than someone who struggled at the same level as the student, but showed an interest in the subject and studied it away from Oxford or Cambridge.