22nd June 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Ideally every parent would ask us simply to find the best tutor for their son or daughter that we can, but obviously everyone has an idea of the person who will work best for them, and so we often receive requests asking for a specific gender or age. This has always been a bit of an ethical dilemma; on the face of it these requests seem like discrimination, but there may be some foundation to the preference for a certain type of tutor.
Anyone who has tutored more than a handful of students will tell you how they get on better with some than others. It’s probably unusual for a tutor to say that this is because of gender or age, but obviously, like in every other part of our lives, compatibility can affect how well we work with another person. Some people happily say I get on better with women rather than men, or I find it difficult to speak with someone much older than me, so why shouldn’t that be ok when requesting a tutor?
What we try to do is get parents to elucidate their reasons for requesting a certain type of tutor. Often they assume a male tutor will be more authoritative, and a female tutor more friendly, which are bad stereotypes, but it gives us an insight into what they’re looking for. This might allow us to convince them to begin lessons with a tutor who doesn’t meet their original requirement, but actually is exactly the sort of person they had in mind.
Ultimately, we don’t want to perpetuate any kind of discrimination, so if someone appears to be choosing a type of tutor for unethical reasons then we’ll simply say no. It’s obviously a great shame, because while we respect that a parent knows their child well, we hope the parent would respect our experience of what makes a tutor student relationship work.