21st February 2020 15:10
By Blue Tutors
Probably the most common single quality people ask for in a tutor is experience. Parents realise that it’s important to get the right tutor, and having someone who has helped students excel before feels like a way to guarantee success.
It’s interesting that other qualities are so rarely asked for. Occasionally someone asks us about how good their tutor is at actually tutoring, or how do we know the ability of our tutors, but it’s far less common than it should be. It’s worrying that the focus can be on a tutor who has a lot of hours under their belt, regardless of how effective those hours have been, rather than a tutor just starting out who might be very good.
From an experienced tutor’s point of view, those hours and hours of learning and getting better feel very important. The knowledge and development of skills are invaluable for all of the truly amazing tutors who have been helping students for years. However, ask those tutors if they think, in their first ever lesson, that they helped students, if they think they had an aptitude at the start, and most will say yes; they wouldn’t have continued tutoring otherwise.
Our message to parents is to value all the skills they would like in a tutor, and focus less on experience, but when you meet your tutor, trial them, be critical and make sure they are the right tutor for you. You might be getting an incredibly experienced tutor who really can’t help, or you might get an absolute novice who is at the beginning of becoming one of the best tutors in the country.