11th January 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
In Blue Tutors’ 14 year history, we probably haven’t been accused of elitism very much. In fact, we’re probably more paranoid about it than anyone else has been. However, we do sometimes have difficult conversations with people who ask if they can be a tutor for us, because it’s never easy to tell someone that, based on their academic record, we wouldn’t consider them.
One of the reasons we combined Cambridge Tutors UK and Oxford Tutors UK into Blue Tutors was so that we would retain our background but also be able to accept tutors from other universities. We were never comfortable with telling someone who we knew was a brilliant tutor that they couldn’t tutor for us because they didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge University. It felt like the right thing to do to look at the individual and assess their ability to tutor at the standard we expect.
Obviously our clients expect a certain standard of tutor, and the way in which we advertise ourselves means that if we were to begin to accept many more non-Oxbridge tutors then it might seem misleading. As it stands we feel justified in explaining to someone, when their tutor isn’t from Oxbridge, that the tutor still has an outstanding academic record and has proved to us that they are exceptional at tutoring. This isn’t the whole story, though, and the main reason for our recruitment policy has nothing to do with perception.
The bottom line is that a great tutor needs to know their subject inside out, and an Oxbridge graduate has been scrutinised for years through GCSEs, A Levels and then their degree, and been found to be one of the best academics in the country. Yes, tutoring skill is incredibly important to us, but being an expert in one’s subject is the perfect base to build the perfect tutor.
Our ethos is that we want to recruit tutors based on equality of opportunity, but that opportunity starts as soon as someone starts school, not as soon as they submit their tutoring application or sit down at an interview with us. We think that we accomplish this very well. Is there elitism when we recruit tutors? Absolutely! But this is borne from a desire to provide the best tutors possible for our clients, not because the label of Oxbridge is something we can sell.