26th July 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The summer is a far quieter time for tuition than during the academic year. Many students do still want lessons, but there isn’t the pressure of looming GCSE or A Level exams, and even if students have being seeing their tutor before the summer and intend to continue when school starts again in September, many parents think that a few weeks away from study altogether can be a good thing over summer.
Conversely, the number of tutors available in July and August is higher than ever. Many tutors have recently finished with all of the students who have taken their final exams, but we also have many tutors who join us hoping to do some tutoring between university years or before they begin a postgraduate degree. This is a perennial problem; some of the best tutors are those who are studying alongside wanting to tutor, but for years this has presented a logistical problem if the tutor can’t have a lesson every week throughout the academic year.
The solution might be for parents to consider a combination of face to face and online tuition, rather than settling for their second or third choice. Online tuition has become much more popular over the last few years as we all become more familiar with communicating in that way. However, the majority of tutors and students alike still feel that online tuition will never be a perfect substitute for seeing their tutor face to face.
A positive step might be to consider a combination of the two types of tuition. This has the advantage that a tutor and student can get to know each other in a face to face setting and build a relationship in that way. This is one of the biggest complaints of tutoring online because it is difficult to build the same rapport and completely understand the way a student learns when not in the same room.
This combination of two types of tuition is something we really encourage students to consider, even if a tutor is only away for a few weeks in a year. It’s so much better to be taught by your perfect tutor online every so often, than to settle for someone worse because they can tutor face to face 100% of the time.