23rd November 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Most tutors begin tutoring thinking ‘this will be great, such a flexible part time job’. This is kind of true in way; students tend to want lessons at the same time each week, but rearranging occasionally is fine. Also, with any ‘job’ like tutoring, where one works only a few hours each week, notice periods seem relatively short; in any full time job a month’s notice might be reasonable, but that often amounts to only 4 lessons for a tutor.
We do ask tutors to commit to an end date when accepting the offer to tutor someone, but the only consequence of stopping suddenly is asking that tutor to cover the costs associated with discontinuing lessons. In most cases, tutors who have to stop before the end of a student’s lessons give us plenty of notice and we can seamlessly find another tutor who can start immediately.
There is an underlying non-flexibility to this apparently flexible job, however. Just ask any tutor who has told a student they’re away for a week or two. The response, possibly melodramatic, can be like as if the student has lost all form of academic support forever. This can be true at a relatively quiet time during the academic year, so imagine what it’s like anywhere near an exam period. When you consider that a tutor can have 10+ students at any given time, and those exams aren’t always at the same time, it doesn’t leave much room for flexibility.
Tutors feel this. Many don’t expect how invested they become in their students’ results, and they suddenly realise that they don’t want to take holidays. The thought of not being around the week before a student’s exam is totally anti to the attraction of becoming a tutor in the first place.