31st May 2019 9:00
By Blue Tutors
We recently saw a report on a tutoring agency which was contacting parents of their students to encourage those parents to hire a tutor for themselves! The idea was to make sure parents knew what their children were learning so that they offer help when their usual tutor wasn’t there. This is a new phenomenon, certainly something we’ve never come across before. The agency in question claimed that a large proportion of parents had taken up their offer, which raises the question: would any parent have considered this before it had been suggested?
The argument is that the tuition industry has created its own demand. If your neighbour didn’t have someone helping their kids then you wouldn’t feel like you were doing too little; you wouldn’t feel competitive. Of course it’s true that parents worry about how they bring their children up and want to do their best, and this is true with so many aspects of life, not just education.
This does ask the question we’ve discussed many times before: is education a competition or an opportunity for us to create more intelligent, more capable people? We think the answer has to be the latter, but it also means that, in a world where there is an opportunity to blur the lines of what is helpful and what is selling a product someone doesn’t need, it’s important to have a tuition industry with ethical individuals.
We know of parents who appear unconcerned by cost when talking to us and just want the absolute best tutor for their son or daughter. The opportunity to “upsell’ other services would be easy, charging more for lesson reports, consultations and personalised plans. These are things which aren’t fair and do take advantage of someone’s concerns for their child. Charging an hourly rate to develop a student’s understanding, for us, certainly doesn’t fall into the same category. Maybe a parents would never hire tutors without competitive exams, but that’s a little like saying we would never practice sport if we didn’t want to win.