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BY JENNIFER 01 Jun 2010 04:06
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Hiring a tutor used to be an admission of failure, now it's a status symbol, says Helen Kirwan-Taylor...
My sister-in-law advised me never to give out the contact details of my builder. I didn't listen and published his name in a book. What I won't hand out for love or money (or even a date with George Clooney) is how to get hold of my children's tutors. These numbers aren't gold dust: they're gold bars. And if you are a headmaster or Oxford don reading this and think your students got their place on merit, think again. One parent I know hired a university IT professor to coach his child on taking the computerised Eton test. Tutors have also been known to write personal statements for clients' Oxford applications.
Some years ago, a mother at my son's school boasted about how her offspring had managed to get into Westminster Under School without any coaching. 'That's funny,' I said, 'because your son has been seen the past six Saturdays in tutorials along with the 20 other children in his class.' Back then, coaching was something you hid (the insinuation being your kid was thick). Today, not only is tutoring budgeted into your year's outgoings (taking at least one tutor on holiday is standard in some neighbourhoods) but you boast about it. When Madonna's children's French tutor came to see us, she interviewed me, not the other way round.
'When I first set up my business, tutoring was something people were ashamed to admit,' says William Stadlen, co-founder of Holland Park Tuition. 'There has since been a sea change. Now people brag about it. There's brazen competition for the best tutors.' When Stadlen says 'brazen', he's being modest. To secure London's best tutor, Oxford- and RADA-educated James Bonas (now a successful opera director, so don't even think of calling him), I virtually had to offer my body. He only agreed to help my son prepare for Common Entrance at the last moment when I burst into tears and begged. I was competing with not only the richest but also the most influential members of London society, though fortunately, Bonas (and most of the top tutors) only really cares about the children. When my son passed, we called James first. We have remained friends ever since.
Tutors have gone from being hustled in the back door with a sack over their heads to being picked up by drivers. The shift says Charles Bonas of Bonas MacFarlane, provider of some of the most sought-after tutors worldwide (James is Charles's cousin), is because of the funnel-shaped school system where too many children fight for too few places (this applies to both state and private schools). Bonas MacFarlane trains tutors and also advises on choices of schools from nursery to university. Though some schools threaten students with expulsion if they are caught with tutors, most now work closely with agencies. 'We're returning to the days of Jane Eyre,' says Bonas. One of his tutors is living in a hotel five minutes from his charge's elite boarding school: 'His parents want him to get the grades.'
In the US and Hong Kong, the celebrity tutor is already a phenomenon. 'You see the faces of the top Chinese tutors on buses,' says Bonas. 'In New York you get bidding wars. It hasn't happened here yet because the tutors are not mercenary enough.' The parents, though, are mercenary, so when one of London's top tutors was booked up a year in advance, a mother offered to triple his fees (tutors are paid between £30 and £60 an hour). Bonas increasingly finds himself having to turn clients away. 'I know I'm going to be sued one day for not getting a child into the school of his choice,' he says. So far he has a perfect batting average, as does Stadlen.
Tutoring can be a glamorous job. Stadlen, also an Oxford graduate, is sending a slew of tutors to Moscow this summer to work for an oligarch family, and to Dubai. Parents in Dubai, he says, often have the tutors work in their private planes as they move from Nice to London and back again. Stadlen employs hundreds of tutors, though he admits it's getting ridiculous. 'I went to see a family in Hampstead [land of the tutors]. The child was two years old. The parents nervously asked me, "Did we leave it too late?"'
As for the tutors, let me paint you a profile. When Hugo Chittenden arrived to help my son with his French, James Blunt (a pal from Harrow) called him on his mobile. After his session, Hugo played me his new documentary The Volunteer (the official screening is on 2 June – it will be a Who's Who of London as he has invited all his pupils and their parents). The film is about volunteering to build a primary school in Uganda. His various documentaries include appearances by Blunt, Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Jeremy Hunt (all family friends). 'Our tutors are so grand these days that we're thinking of having the parents sign a disclaimer about the tutors not the other way round,' says Bonas.
And coaching for the American SATs is a booming business as parents pay extra for SATs tutoring. Top US tutors make several hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. The lean economic years were great for business; in boom years, these Oxford graduates would have gone into the City. Now many are using tutoring the rich as a way to supplement their state-school teaching incomes.
It's not just kids fighting over cerebral flesh. Holland Park Tuition increasingly sends tutors to work with grown-ups. 'We sent a tutor to Ibiza for a whole summer because the client [a wealthy Russian] wanted to discuss politics with an Oxford graduate,' says Stadlen.
But I have Hugo's mobile number and I'm not handing it out to anyone.
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BY JENNIFER 12 Apr 2010 03:04
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With exam season only weeks away, last-minute nerves are setting in for schoolchildren and, often, concerned parents. This makes it boom time for private tutors, a sought-after group who charge anything from £15 to £80-plus an hour.
Tutors are not only helping the elite. A survey by research company Ipsos MORI indicates that 43 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds in London state schools have received tuition. Nationwide it is 22 per cent.
Education experts say that parents should — but often don’t — go to their child’s school with concerns before hiring a tutor, as schools may offer free help. But they add that one-to-one tutoring out of the classroom can be a fast-track way to iron out difficulties and boost confidence.
Sue Fieldman, of The Good Schools Guide, says: “All too often, the school is defensive and feels you are being critical, or it is a teacher who is the problem and your child needs support to overcome deficiencies of school provision.”
She says that word of mouth is generally the preferred way to find a tutor. This cuts agency fees, which can double a tutor’s rate, and she adds: “The best tutors don’t work for an agency. They don’t need to.”
While recommendations are ideal, parents can also browse tutors’ ads in local papers and websites, such as Schoolstrader.com. Then the onus is on parents to make thorough reference checks.
Madeleine Cardozo used Schoolstrader to find a science tutor for her son Jack, who is sitting his GCSEs this summer. She says: “We found a fantastic tutor in their listings. He is a fun guy who can really relate to a 16-year-old and engage him. He has a background as a research scientist in biology.
“Overall, he has been a godsend and Jack may well decide to take biology on to A level.”
Mrs Cardozo and her husband Damian, of Mere, Wiltshire, have six children. The couple have also asked Jack’s tutor to give occasional help to their daughter Lali, 14. They say that they pay £20 to £30 an hour, which is “enough”.
Established agencies tend to charge £40 to £60, but can offer added peace of mind in an unregulated industry.
Charles Bonas, of Bonas MacFarlane, says that his London-based company vets and trains its tutors, most of whom have Oxbridge firsts, using methods developed over 17 years, while some competitors are run by “kids with a parent’s address book”.
He adds that most of his clients (who pay £50 an hour) are keen to get their children into top prep and public schools.
“The idea is you get into the right school at 7, 11 or 13 and you’re OK — you shouldn’t need help at GCSE or A level. When it comes to it, some students do need help later, because universities want all As and A*s. One B in an arts GCSE can spoil an Oxbridge application for a BSc course.”
He says that a good tutor can achieve a lot even in the brief window between Easter and exam season, with a close focus on the exam syllabus. He adds: “If lessons are not based on a knowledge of what will be asked, you can have a great learning experience, but it won’t help to boost grades. In many cases the student only needs help on one or two difficult points.”
Malachy Guinness, founder of Bright Young Things Tuition, agrees that sometimes a few lessons are enough to make a significant difference. He says: “If things are properly explained once, students actually understand them rather than cramming material that they will inevitably forget.”
Most of Mr Guinness’s tutors are Oxbridge graduates in their twenties. He believes some agencies take themselves too seriously and parents want “bright young tutors their children will really like” to make lessons interesting and enjoyable.
One of his clients, who agrees, hired a tutor to stay with her family for two weeks at Easter before her son’s GCSEs. She says: “The cost was much the same as for an Easter revision course at a college, but for a much more personal service.
“He was a delightful Oxford graduate and the children idolised him. Our son was predicted Cs and Ds, but got that up to As and Bs. Having someone listen and take a real interest in his ideas has made him enthusiastic about work for the first time.”
Bright Young Things offers Easter revision ski trips and online tutorials. The lattter cost £40 an hour, as opposed to £45 an hour for face to face.
Online tutoring is a new and fast-growing area. Tutors can speak to children remotely, using a Skype headset, and work together on a virtual “whiteboard”. The technology is popular with families living in remote areas or overseas. Providers include several mainstream agencies, as well as specialists, such as Home Tutoring Online, which charges £15 an hour for tuition from current university students and £25 an hour for a professional tutor.
One advantage of online tutoring is that it makes shorter sessions viable. Home Tutoring Online offers 15-minute slots for only £3.75 or £6.25.
The Good Schools Guide praises Bonas MacFarlane as “the Savile Row” of agencies, but does not cover Bright Young Things. Ms Fieldman explains: “We don’t actually recommend tutors until they have a long enough track record, but the company may well feature in the future.”
Meanwhile, for good nationwide coverage, the guide recommends Fleet Tutors, an organisation with 5,000 tutors across the UK, most of them qualified teachers. The agency’s average fee is £30 an hour.
No matter how a tutor is found, Sue Fieldman says that parents should treat the first couple of sessions as trials and not feel under pressure to sign a contract. Tutors may offer a cheaper rate for signing up for a “package”, but they should be happy to work on a session-by-session basis.
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BY JENNIFER 24 Mar 2010 03:03
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Two Bonas MacFarlane tutors are currently experiencing the most valuable tutoring job of their lives! For the past month they have been tutoring two boys in Kazakhstan full time; ages 5 and 10 and still have an enjoyable 5 months left. During their first month they have travelled to such exotic destinations as Dubai, have learnt all about the culture of Kazakhstan, have spent knowledgeable time with a Kazakhstan family whilst also having the free time to explore the amazing country itself.
Each week the tutors prepare reports on the boys' progression; which is useful to both the parents and Bonas MacFarlane. These reports not only reassure the parents that the tutors are doing the job well; but they also help the tutors keep record of progress and help with future learning plans, etc. The weekly reports that our Kazakhstan tutors prepare include the following:
- Monitoring exactly how the children spend their free time
- Daily Mark Scheme (marks out of 10) on the following criteria
- Table Manners- Punctuality, Amount of food eaten, Conversation, Method of eating
- Maths Lesson- Concentration, Recall, Attitude
- English Lesson- Concentration, Attitude, Vocabulary, Spelling test
- General behaviour- Treatment of Siblings, Greetings
- Manners
- Use of free time
- Interview preparation
- Presentation skills
- One timed comprehension test every week
So here at Bonas MacFarlane we say well done to our Kazakhstan tutors!
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BY JENNIFER 11 Mar 2010 02:03
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…..No one knows how many people work as home tutors: the business is unregulated and many work for cash in hand. But more youngsters are getting education on the side than before. A recent survey by the Sutton Trust, an education charity, found that 22% of parents with 11-16-year-olds in state schools had paid for tutoring at some point. Four years ago, 18% had. Tutoring also starts earlier now than it used to. The standardised tests pupils take at age seven mean that parents whose children are falling behind find out earlier than previously—and today’s cash-rich, time-poor working mothers may well decide their only option is to pay for the homework help their own mothers would have seen as part of their job description. Even parents who already pay for schooling no longer seem to think that tutoring is unnecessary: Charles Bonas, the managing director of a London-based tutoring agency, Bonas MacFarlane, says most of its clients are privately educated…..Underlying this demand is increasing competition to get into the most prestigious universities. Even in the era of university top-up fees it is the taxpayer, not the student, who pays most of the cost of a degree. To limit its liability the government caps student numbers. But school-leaving cohorts have been getting bigger for some years now, and a larger share of school-leavers are going on to further study. The battle for places is particularly acute this autumn because of the shortage of entry-level jobs.
Counter-intuitively, perhaps, rampant grade inflation is adding to the competitive pressure. Students cannot rest on their laurels in the firm expectation of a sheaf of A-grades but take even more care to get them. An eighth of all those taking A-levels now get at least three As. So universities also look at GCSE results when deciding whom to admit—and approach admissions as an exercise in finding reasons to say no. A youngster who slacks or slips up will quickly find that there is no way to redeem himself. So many parents, including those paying for private schools, see home tutoring as a near-compulsory insurance policy. One side-effect is a generation of young people who think that making sure they learn is someone else’s job entirely. “Lazy rich kids who had been mucking around, and coming up to exam time realised they needed help”, is how one tutor describes his pupils. “A lot of it is just checking to see they are doing what they’ve been assigned,” says another. She describes the role of a tutor as “somewhere between hand-holding and prison-guarding”. Another, equally undesirable, is that the league tables of exam results that are used to compare schools are worth a good deal less than meets the eye. A good showing proves little more than that a school is patronised by parents who will do whatever it takes to get good results for their children, not that it does much in the way of quality teaching itself.
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BY JENNIFER 11 Mar 2010 02:03
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Former champion skier and “glamorous international property broker” Dina Karpova saw a gap in the market - and promptly filled it. Her latest venture? She helps fellow super-rich Russians fast-track their children into England’s most prestigious public schools.
Sally Ashby’s blink-and-you’ve-missed it programme, part of Channel 4’s First Cut new talent documentaries strand, attempts to give an insight into the world of Dina and her clients - but at only 23 minutes long, it feels a bit like an extended trailer or an infomercial. Surely it would be worth bumping it up to an hour and giving it a better time slot at some point? After all, I can think of several hour-long Channel 4 shows that could have been cut in its favour.
Instead, the programme seems like a missed opportunity - although there are several eye-opening moments, mostly provided by English toffs. For example, Dina has teamed up with educational consultant Charles Bonas - who looks a bit like Ant McPartlin in a hall of mirrors.
Charles helps run English Mentors - a company that offers residential courses in country houses where well-heeled Russian kids can learn the life skills and confidence necessary to acquire a public school education. Sample activities? Polo, clay pigeon shooting, etiquette lessons and a trip to the Houses of Parliament. It’s endorsed by the Duchess of York - so it must be good.
The programme raises plenty of questions. How much does Dina charge for her “fixing” services? What’s her success rate? How do the Russian kids fare at public school? But sadly, there doesn’t seem to be time to answer them or to introduce someone with an opposing viewpoint - so we have to make do with a frustrating glimpse at a clearly fascinating subject. Go on, Channel 4, commission a full-length version!
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BY JENNIFER 11 Mar 2010 02:03
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With live in tutors back in vogue Susan Robinson explores this modern twist on a very old school profession...
Although I’ve always admired the work of Mary Poppins and truly believe that no can solve a problem like Maria, (‘what do you mean, nothing to wear? I can knit all seven of you out with one pair of curtains.’) I think it might require more than a spoonful of sugar to stop a new trend getting stuck in my craw. Governesses, or “live-in tutors” as they and the families involved prefer to call them, are experiencing a revival among the affluent.
Parents concerned about the academic achievement of their children can go to tutoring agencies such as Bonas MacFarlane (who have 40 such live-in tutors on their books) and hire graduates from top universities to provide one-to-one learning. This intense education will typically be during the school holidays and in a secluded retreat such as the family’s summer house. Company director Charles Bonas claims: “Our tutors go to places in London, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall. A lot of people have holiday homes on the Continent as well, and it’s quite normal for the tutor to fly out along with them. One family took a tutor to the Olympics over the summer.”
These tutors are not merely expected to be educators but members of their host families: “As a mentor, you are seen as a sort of sisterly figure to study with them, encourage and advise them.” This sort of education is clearly an advantage when it comes to bagging those A’s for admittance into Cambridge but what happens after the entrance exams? The ability to learn independently is essential to university, as for the workplace…no boss is going to hold your hand, make sure you’re completely comfortable and hope you’re having FUN because your parents won’t be paying their wages. Or maybe they will, if they, like one client on Tutors International’s books can afford to: “employ two tutors and pay them £108,000 a year each, while giving them their own apartment and car and travelling with the family on their private jet”. Company boss Adam Caller adds, “For that post we are putting forward someone who has graduated from Oxford and Harvard and who currently works at Yale.”
Just how qualified do you have to be? Just how intelligent are these children? I’m reminded of a documentary I saw a few years ago about a woman who was inseminated with the donated sperm of an anonymous astrophysicist-maestro-conductor-Olympic-athlete-Pulitzer-prize-winning-author-and-multilinguist. She breastfed the resulting child until the age of five, nurtured his talent and, unsurprisingly, he turned out to be highly gifted. An all-rounder as well, that is, an all round arrogant and ill-adapted individual. My point is, you can take these things too far. Education and intelligence are important but what about being a well rounded individual?
Isolation from other children may fast-track the learning process but a child who is used to being the sole focus is going to struggle when it comes to tolerating others. Concerns were raised by Dr Carol Craig (executive of Scotland’s centre for confidence and well-being) last week that schools are breeding a generation of narcissists by over-praising pupils and developing an “it’s all about me” mentality. If this is a concern in schools, then a child who resists learning in the presence of peers and requires the attentions of a governess to achieve anything will probably develop an ego more inflated than Richard Branson filled with helium.
There is also the question of individual merit, such dedicated tuition renders exam results less a confirmation of intellectual ability but more like a statement of the parental bank balance. Last week, newly appointed rector of St. Andrews, Louise Richardson, told The Guardian her perspective on admissions: "If someone comes from a background where there are no books in the house and they achieve a degree of academic excellence comparable to my children, who grew up with professional parents, surrounded by books, then the potential of that person to succeed academically might be even greater. You have to look at the context in which the academic success was achieved." As a former Harvard academic and the first in her family to go to university, Richardson is living proof that success and Oxbridge or Ivy League approved tutors are not synonymous.
Being the sympathetic soul that I am, I also have concerns for the families involved. If parents are able to choose tutors based upon their degrees and are inviting them into their homes, I wonder what other criteria the selection might involve: “Darling I prefer the blonde Swedish tutor, she looks like she could give Toby a much firmer grasp of A-level biology and she could improve his Swedish oral at the same time.” The Times described the phenomenon as ‘Jane Eyre Joins the Jet Set’ and mentions how in the novel she falls in love her employer, Mr Rochester, without making this apparent link with tutor-parent incest. However, provided that the tutor more resembles Sister Immaculata than Mrs Robinson, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Despite reservations, if I was offered a six week paid holiday in Tuscany, the only proviso being that I had to teach young Tobias the finer points of Shakespeare’s history plays (and despite my almost non-existent knowledge of said plays), would I take it? You can bet your chintz-patterned socks I would.
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BY JENNIFER 11 Mar 2010 02:03
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An anonymous quote reads: 'Most people are quite happy to suffer in silence, if they are sure everybody knows they are doing it.' How true. Yesterday I received an email from a friend who had checked into the notorious Mayr Clinic in Austria. This is where captains of industry and ladies who lunch on nothing come to spend a week strapped to a lavatory breathing in disinfectant and surviving on rations of stale bread, for several thousands of pounds a week. Three years ago, the same group, busily atoning after a self- indulgent Christmas, would have sent a postcard from an Aman spa or even Champneys (where wine is permitted).
But that was before hardship became the new buzzword and spas became sadistic boot camps. The more suffering we can prove we have endured, the happier we are.
Hedonic hardship (meaning you suffer for your own pleasure) is more than a trend; these days, it's a mandatory competitive requirement. Take The Ashram in California, to which LA's well- heeled all flock. Here you pay $4,250 a week (flights are not included) to share a room with a complete stranger; breakfast is a glass of orange juice and dinner a bowl of soup. Eighteenmile hikes in burning sunshine with most of the clients in tears are all part of the fun.
Still, even Christmas was sold out this year. Ian Flooks, who designed the very popular Yogahikes in Italy as a less gruelling alternative to The Ashram, says it's the hardship that ultimately makes you happy. 'You realise that you don't need that much,' he says. 'We all think that hardship is about our creature comforts being taken away, but here you get a perspective on what you can get through. The hardship makes you feel stronger.' The enjoyment comes because of the pain.
But David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Canada and an observer of the new trend, says it's less about solving poverty and more about appreciating what you have. If everyone you know drives a BMW, it's hard to feel lucky, but after paying Pounds 3,000 to observe people who live without running water, we feel deeply appreciative of the Evian in the fridge. Suffering is even a good way to get ahead in the job and education market. Charles Bonas of Bonas MacFarlane, London's leading educational agency providing tutors for wealthy families, recounts how one father sent his 18-year-old son (on BA business class) to India and checked him into a five-star hotel so he could meet children dying in a nearby orphanage. Everyone now has the same perfect exam results, he explains, so the best way to beat competition is to show just how much pain you have endured. 'Parents spend all their money pampering their children and then, to show them suffering, they send them to work in an orphanage,' he says.
After the Mayr Clinic email, I received another from a friend whose teenage daughter is raising money for charity by climbing Mount Everest. I remember when teenage girls just hung out in their parents' house, downing spirits when no one was looking. Now you have to pay a great deal of money to send your child to Nepal to raise money for people they will never meet, for a cause they know nothing about. All this so they write up the experience on a university application form, and laud it over their less stoic friends.
Suffering is what most of the world endures on a daily basis. Hedonic hardship involves experiencing it in small doses and then exploiting it to the maximum. Any tragedy is an opportunity for advantage. One American student I know of wrote about the effects on his psyche when his father was sent to prison after being convicted for insider trading. He got into an Ivy League college.
Trauma - that thing that used to scar us for life and which we did everything to avoid - now leads to what psychologists call 'posttraumatic growth', a tsunami or an earthquake is an opportunity. 'The hardship industry is an attempt to make children interesting enough to compete with a whole generation of foreign first-generation kids who are really hungry and driven,' says Bonas. His advice is to hand a young graduate a tenner and tell them 'see you in a year', but arranging for them to see suffering first hand is the flavour of the day.
Suffering makes us appreciate what we have. When it's over, we feel alive, humble, grateful and hyper-aware. So what if we only experience it once a year and spend the rest of the time pampering ourselves and ignoring the poor on our doorstep? Like most things, it's all about gaining an advantage.
One celebrity scrapped a magazine shoot because she felt she didn't look hard done by enough.
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BY JENNIFER 01 Mar 2010 01:03
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A team of brave young Russian explorers is to go on an expedition to the North Pole, raising money for charity.
The crew, consisting of mostly teenagers plus a couple of parents, hopes to attract funds to help Russian children from poor backgrounds realise their extraordinary talents. For example, one potential benefactor is a young ballet dancer:
"Hopefully he'll become a famous dancer, and use his talent to give back to others, and then help sick kids or orphans. The main idea is a talented child could help many more people around him," Dina Karpova, Director of Bonas MacFarlane, one of the companies sponsoring the trip.
The participants themselves have to raise £100,000 for the charity. If they don't reach it, the expedition will be cancelled. They are pitching their fund-raising idea to businessmen in Moscow. It's been tough finding donations so far, but some attempts were successful.
"The idea is very close to my heart, because it's optimistic and healthy. It implies helping young and brilliant people, and enables them to achieve a new level of success. It's not an attempt to support the poor of poor, it's about aiding future benefactors", said Beslan Agrba, Director of Mistral company.
But for the financial challenge, the team, of course, will have a very hard physical one. Being on top of the world is not always a good feeling, especially when it is below -30 degrees Celcius outside and crazy winds blow you off your feet. In addition, each of the 7 participants will be dragging 40kg loads for 7 days.
The crew is training really hard, balancing on beams 10 meters off the ground, using stoves to cook their meals, melting snow for water and sheltering in tents.
Still, the boys are looking forward to the expedition.
"I'm very excited about it; I think it's going to be a lot of fun. But I know it's going to be very difficult at the same time, so I'm a bit nervous about it," said team member Ivan Karpov.
The inexperienced team is in the capable hands of Matvey Sparo. One of the only two men to reach the North Pole in the depths of winter, he is no stranger to the challenges ahead.
"It doesn't matter how long your trip to the North Pole is, 90 days or 7 days, you'll face the same challenges- drifting ice, open water, polar bears, crazy winds, and temperatures 35 degrees below zero. And no matter what, every morning you have to leave this warm comfortable tent and keep going to make your 18 kilometers," Matvey Sparo.
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BY JENNIFER 21 Feb 2010 04:02
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I have been providing tuition for seventeen years. But I still ask myself and parents who call me up "is the tuition 'arms race' really getting out of hand? How necessary is the tuition and will it be effective?"
My tutors do not always get it right. Recently, I was helping a boy prepare for a university application. He had become interested by his Persian heritage, and we had been waiting keenly for hours for one of my rather glamorous tutors who is a Cambridge Politics graduate of Iranian emigre descent to show up and help us both out (yes, even tutors now hire tutors...). It was to be her first tutorial and she was very nervous. Instead of coming to us at 'X' Park Road, she knocked on the door of an imposing house in 'Y' Park Road, was shown into a dining room by a maid, who then summoned a nine year old boy. Both seemed as inured with the arrival through the door of a tutor as with junk mail being dropped through the letter box. After twenty minutes of a lecturing the little boy on Iranian politics, starting in 1954, my tutor realised she had the wrong house, and made her excuses and left. For the boy, it had been homework as usual.
This made me really think about the excessiveness of tutoring ˆ should it be so commonplace? There are some children who are only used to doing school work at home if there is a tutor or parent sitting over them. This cannot be a good thing?
Whatever my cynicism, there is a massive benefit of one to one tuition at home, that many schools have come to accept. Head teachers who actively discourage tutoring must realise that school is just one part of a wider process of education that includes parental involvement and tuition. After all, tutors have been around for much longer than schools. Victorian boys would lodge near schools with their tutors ˆ that was an origin of boarding houses. The pivotal role of the private tutor goes right back to Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great, and was possibly the most influential educator in history.
There's a real functional need for mothers ˆ and it is the mums who drive this - to prepare their children not to become conquerors of the known world (that can wait), but for the more immediate and Machiavellian challenge of beating their class mates to a place at the best London day schools in 8, 11 and 13 Plus tests. It all becomes charmingly cloak and dagger when Prep school heads threaten to tell senior schools about children who are being tutored, so mothers keep tutors under a veil of secrecy to stop rival mothers of competing students 'shopping' them in, even though they are all having outside help, sometimes from the same tutor. However, I find that the senior schools themselves often advise parents of talented, but disadvantaged children to seek tuition. For older students success to any top university requires top grades across the board (only twenty years ago, a number of my Oxford contemporaries lacked a Maths 'O' Level). Everyone now needs good A Levels, and tuition can only help. More worryingly, though, I find that children are far less able to study on their own, lacking the discipline, skills and initiative, than they were a generation ago, so are in more need of guidance.
So the need for tuition is there, but the concern is two fold: tutoring children through even the most basic homework tasks because everyone else is doing it and, secondly, hiring student tutors who are totally untrained in tutoring methods and curricula but are just living off their academic wits. This can be enough. An engaging postgraduate medical student who has the initiative to research the curriculum and is a born teacher can be the catalyst to inspire a child to study science. Tutoring agencies, however vilified by schools, do feed back into the education system the energy and raw brain power of thousands of young postgraduate students, actors, freelance writers, journalists, and more recently, bankers and aspiring slum landlords. So this is generally positive. Sure, it costs parents money, but good education can only be valued, not priced.
Nevertheless, I can understand why teachers are irritated when their students are retaught the same material at home by a tutor. Most schools raise eyebrows when tutors are not trained teachers, but many fabulous teachers do not make inspiring tutors because tutoring just does not appeal to them. A child who will not respond to a brilliant class room teacher may respond to a reasonable private tutor, and this owes more to attention difficulties than teaching standards. For this reason, my tutors do try to work with schools, for teaching and tutoring must complement each other despite being different processes. It is not necessary for tutors to be trained teachers, but they must be trained tutors. Since there is no such official tutor certification, more than any agency, we invest in our own training, that combines the core aspects of teacher training with tutoring methods and strict procedures, and is specific to each tutor we contract.
Most importantly, we expect tutors to become victims of their own success. Each of our tutorials is an exercise in mastering the basics and study skills, designed to do away with the need for a tutor for routine work. But even when a child has mastered the art of learning and preparing for exams, the benefits of a really inspiring tutors who can push intellectual boundaries and provide mentorship, all tailor made to the individual learner, should not be overlooked.
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Learning, Tutoring