8th March 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Private tuition used to be considered a luxury for the middle classes. A state school student having a tutor was almost unheard of 30 years ago, but all that has changed, and the way tutors are used has almost come full circle. Whereas fee paying students were seen as being from families who could afford extra help after school, today parents are making a decision between whether to send their children to a private school, or whether to opt for a state school supplemented by regular tuition after school and at weekends.
This has probably changed with advent of an increasing tuition sector where it’s reported that more than half of students will have a tutor at some point during their school education. Parents spend time thinking about the route to give their children the biggest advantage possible, but the majority of us are constrained by a budget.
Private schools in the UK now cost around £17,000 a year on average which pushes many families to the limit. Compare this to a student who attends a state school, but receives, say, 5 hours of private tuition a week at £35 an hour. This works out to be around £8,000 a year, less than half that of a private school.
Parents are very savvy about the comparison between the two approaches, and while a private school tends to offer more skilled and highly qualified teachers and more contact time, it’s still beyond any school’s reach to give students as much one to one contact time as they receive from seeing a tutor regularly.