1st May 2019 1:00
By Blue Tutors
Parents are beginning to employ tutors to teach them their child’s syllabus. Reported on the Daily Mail’s website, some parents have chosen to pay up to £40 an hour to familiarise themselves with their child’s GCSE subjects. The claim is that schools are not communicating adequately with parents, leaving them concerned that students are not prepared for their exams.
A tutoring agency called Tutor House has begun offering ‘parent tutoring’ and say that 20% of the parents contacted have taken up the service. A survey of 2500 parents found that two thirds don’t understand their child’s homework, and believe that they are hindering students by offering help. However, the tutors are not tutoring the parents so that they can explain subjects to their children, but are going through the syllabus to ensure that parents have an overview of what the syllabus contains.
Tutor House claims that in classes of 30 students, teachers do not have time to cover the whole course and therefore it is impossible for the school to communicate properly with parents.
The master of Magdalene School in Oxford, Helen Pike, expressed her disappointment with this new wave of private tuition. She thinks that it is feeding on the anxiety of parents unnecessarily; one parent will worry that unless they receive tutoring like another parent then they will not be helping their children sufficiently. She pointed out that all schools hold regular talks for parents, and that this kind of private tuition is totally pointless.