30th November 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We recently had a parent call us to request GCSE Biology and Chemistry tuition for her daughter, but with a twist. She wasn’t so concerned with a tutor to teach the syllabus and improve her daughter’s grade at GCSE; she is already doing well and expected to get good grades. The student has ambitions to study medicine at university, and the tuition is so that she can understand biology and chemistry more deeply and learn outside of the standard GCSE syllabus.
Maybe we shouldn’t describe this sort of tuition has learning for learning’s sake, because the end goal is still to improve the student’s university and career prospects, but it’s certainly different from 95% of the requests we receive which are specifically for imminent exams. However, while this slightly different type of tuition is most commonly requested for students looking to learn more about a chosen university subject, we would argue that it might be a better tactic to employ at a much younger age.
The main reason students begin to struggle at school is because they never fully understood the basics of a subject when they were younger. For a conscientious student, it can be ‘easy’ to score full marks on a test without fully understanding the underlying ideas. A good analogy might be driving a car; you don’t have to understand all the inner workings of car to drive from A to B. Once a student gets to a stage where a shallow understanding of these ideas is no longer enough, it might be too late to learn them properly.
Tuition which goes beyond, or rather much more deeply, than a syllabus can be so useful in a student’s formative years. Labouring over the simplest concept until it’s perfectly understood means that future learning is built on solid foundations.
We don’t encourage as much tuition for students at KS1 and KS2 as we are happy with for older students, but when it does happen we think it’s great to go beyond ‘what is required’. A student leaving primary school with an incredible understanding of the basics but a comparatively poor knowledge of the syllabus is in a much better position than vice versa.