How much would you expect from a private tutor

[Whattimedoyoucallthisthenhey]

Who gives your child a lesson one hour per week…50 minutes, give or take, actual work time.
Child is very poor at the subject, class teacher gives extra help, child has extra support from an assistant at school. Childs marks not improving much.
Would you lay the blame on the school, tutor or both/neither?
Would you expect them to achieve results with 50 minutes homework help once per week?

I would expect results from the work the child puts in and their natural aptitude for the subject. So I wouldn't "lay the blame" as the first course of action. I would first aim to figure out why the child is struggling to perform with three separate lots of help. What's the actual feedback from the tutor/teacher?

I would put ‘blame’ nowhere based on the info you have given. There are many more variables you haven’t mentioned - child’s age, the subject itself, the child’s feelings around the subject, whether the child is receptive to their teacher/assistant/tutor, potential learning disabilities.

I was never good at maths - I had a tutor 2 hours a week, she was nice but it never helped much. Once I was alone I could never understand my homework, what the questions meant, how to start working out a fraction or long division etc. I muddled through until I finished school, there was no ‘blame’ to be placed anywhere.

We stopped our private tutor because we realised that DS needed more than the 45 minutes per week she had with him. Absolutely not a failing on her part, more the time limitations of her lesson. Same with school - they are great and provide extra help but we took it upon ourselves to work with DS almost every night to embed school learnings and handwriting etc. This seems to have helped matters through the repetitive nature of what we can do at home.

Some children are not capable of improving much no matter how much adult time is used.

Others improve a lot.

The fact that three lots of help are being given suggests that your child is really struggling and it may be worth further investigation to work out if there are any deeper underlying problems.

I worked with students with SEN for twenty years, and some students don't improve much at all.

How long have you had the tutor?

Maybe they would be even worse without the tutor? How much effort is the child putting in? Do they have any additional needs?

It's difficult to say really. Some tutors aren't very good, so it could be that you are paying for something that's not really worth it. On the other hand, some tutors are good, but will not be able to make a difference to the results because your DC is really struggling at a fundamental level, and needs more help than this.

To be clear here, i’m not blaming the tutor, I don’t think this is enough time to make an impact and can see she is great. Dh thinks it’s too expensive to do more lessons and it should be making more of a difference. I believe it would help to have more time.

I would try at home supporting the child myself daily with 10 minutes bursts to up their confidence, first and foremost.

The child is improving so something is working.

You say tutoring but also say homework help. They’re two different things. I wouldn’t really expect much improvement just from home work help. What kind of work is the tutor doing? Maths and English? How long for?

For a child to have 1:1 support in a state school then they must have significant needs.

I found an hour of 1:1 teaching made a huge difference to my DD but that was coupled with ongoing support at home. The tutor was a specialist in supporting learning difficulties and helping identify learning styles.

I would ask the tutor to either set homework, that you can then support the child with, or ask for recommendations for homework aids (books, websites, ideas for you to take up yourselves).

It's all age relevant though. If it's an 8 year old, you can obviously lead this homework. If it's for support for GCSEs this year, it might be too specialised for you, and then after you've had suggestions for what the child can do (an additional 2 extra sessions a week with you supervising) you could pay the tutor extra to mark the work and give feedback.

"Would you lay the blame on the school, tutor or both/neither?"

Is laying the blame on the parents not an option?

I think you should be recapping and reviewing things with your child every day in between the tutor lessons. Ask the tutor for some additional exercises or look online for quizzes or workbooks on the topic to consolidate the learning.

Consider things this way. If you were to learn something new and had one lesson a week, would you think you need to practice in between lessons or would 1 lesson a week be enough?

How old is the child and what is the subject and what timescales are we talking about? Because all of these affect the amount of improvement you can hope to get.

Also relevant is what SEN investigation has been done and what their behaviour for learning is like. If the underlying issue is ADHD, for example, any progress is going to be very hard won.