Would you consider a private tutor?

[SonNotMum]

Hi, basically I am a son not a mum so answering the sign up question of am i pregnant was quite easy!

Anyway i am a student at University and am doing a module where we have to create a fictitious business. Mine was around home tutoring services for children done by high achieving graduates opposed to old retired teachers which you often see now a days.

I am not sure on the policy of mumsnet so hopefully i am not contravening them , but if i post a couple of questions I would really love to hear your thoughts on this. It would help me no end, it really would. I can prove I am not some random spammer or what not so please dont just delete on a whim.

Thanks for reading. If you dont want to fill the answers in to the questionnaire and reply in here then i have put my questionnaire on www.surveymonkey.com/s/R5NDLHG - its up to you how you want to do it tho

1. Do you have children currently in Primary/ Secondary education and if so which?

2. Have you ever considered using a home tutor for additional help for your children outside of school?

3. If yes to Q.2, what were the things you were looking for in a tutor, and what was it that either made you take the tutor or not?

4. If I were to start a tutor service provided by high achieving university graduates would you be interested?

5. What would you consider to be the most important selling points to attract you?

6. It is possible for us to provide tutoring on topics children are finding hard throughout the year, as well as preparing them for their whole exam which would therefore involve a greater amount of lessons. Which of these services would you be most likely to use?

7. Would guaranteeing that all Graduates were CRB checked make any difference to you seeing as currently there is no law to stipulate self-employed tutors need to be CRB checked?

8. What is the most you would be willing to pay for an hour of tutoring?

9. How many hours a week would you want a tutor for?

10. Would you expect a tutor to travel to you?

11. If no to question 10 how far would you be willing to travel?

12. Hopefully the idea of having a graduate ran tutoring service appeals to you. If there is anything I might find of interest that hasn?t been asked above then please feel free to leave your feedback and thoughts below.

It seems you have made your mind up already about "high achieving graduates" being better than "old retired teachers".

well kind of :p its just that i had a tutor for maths when i did gcse (in 26 now and returning as a mature student to education) so i can kind of see the pros and cons to each

plus the lecturer said we need competitive advantage so i wanted to tailor this to that. In some cases teachers with years of experience are better but then it breaks my model!

You are doomed then!

I used an A' level student to assist my son with his GCSE maths and it seemed to work well. Cost for me was the main issue and the fact he was flexible with dates and times.

I don't think you are yet terribly well informed about the sector, as there are plenty of students and fresh young graduates working as tutors already, and several agencies which supply tutors of varying profiles, many of whom are graduates.

I have children of both primary and secondary age. I have never used a tutor and am not remotely attracted to the idea of using one. So I cannot give useful answers to most of your questions.

One thought, that isn't exactly covered by your questions, but which might be useful to you, is that for primary and younger secondary children it is important to have someone who knows how to teach. Not all subject experts can do this. The key thing in a tutor is the ability to impart both skills and knowledge. I would take some persuading that someone with no teaching experience would do this effectively. (BTW: in this context, I do see "teaching experience" in a broader sense than a formal teaching qualification, but familiarity with the required end result - be that a target exam or knowledge of NC levels and how they are currently assessed - does also matter).

Oh, and I would expect a young graduate with no teaching experience to be very cheap (rates vary regionally). Experienced tutors (whose names are passed around playground cliques in hushed tones as a major favour) are the ones who command the highest fees.

thanks very much for taking the time out to give me feedback. Looks like it wasn't such a great idea after all but will persist anyway.

Like i said, i really appreciate this so thanks.

Good luck

The Home Tutors Directory will give you a reasonable overview of what there already is out there.

Even in well-supplied sectors, there's always space!

do you want any more feedback?

yes please the more the better

This press article might be helpful, and you might like to look at the website for Oxford Exclusif.

Answered on secondary education

Basically high achieving graduates do not always make the best teachers as although they may have good subject knowledge they cannot always clearly explain or have empathy with students who are struggling.
Newly retired teachers often have years of experience or working with and motivating students and a realistic idea of what students need to do to improve their grades.
I would expect anyone giving my child one-to-one tuition to be CRB checked and would not employ anybody without this as a tutor.

i have employed two tutors in the past to help my ds with his gcses - both were known to me one was a friend who is a teacher at that level and the other was a husband of a friend who teaches at sixth form college.they were both very local to me which was really easy for ds to walk there after his school day and they were both very flexible re booking lessons which was great.
i put word out on facebook i was looking for someone and did receive an offer of an a level student (2 years older than my ds) who was the child of another friend who would have been cheaper but i felt my ds would respond better to an older tutor.i think we paid about £15 per hour.
i think both of his subject grades improved by a clear grade so i think it was very worthwhile as we started the tutoring for a few weeks once a week before gcses.
i would have happily paid up to about £20 per hour,it was important to me to have a tutor failry local although we could have travelled a few miles and tbh the crb didn't bother me as i was using friends so had no concerns.
hope this helps.

And a retired teacher can't be a high achieving graduate?

If I was looking for a tutor I would want them to be able to teach / tutor, being good at something doesn't mean you can teach it, so what training are your graduates undertaking?

Whatever subject is being tutored the tutor should be able to use standard English and know when to use a question mark rather than a comma - so at Q3 I would go look elsewhere, if the company cannot use the correct punctuation then can the tutor?

The problem with high-achieving graduates (I am one myself, as is my husband - both Oxbridge, both banking/consultancy careers), is that we don't need the money and we tend to work long hours anyway. Squeezing in a bit of tutoring on the side would, to be perfectly honest, not be something in which I'd be interested.

My gut feeling is that to attract tutors, you'd have to offer much more money than any parent would be willing to pay. DH bills several hundred pounds an hour.......

The other issue is the one already raised - I don't think a stellar academic/professional career makes you a very good teacher. I am used to working with other intelligent, highly educated adults, and I think I would lack the patience to explain basic concepts to other people's children. Teachers are trained in this and have been doing it all their working lives, and likely to be much better at it than those of us who are not pedagogues.

As a parent, I plan to tutor my own children, and also get my mother (Oxbridge mathematician) to help them. But if the children have any deficiencies we can't cover in the family, I'd probably hire a retired teacher to tutor them.

Just thinking about it, there is one niche I suspect you could target for staff, and that's professional women on maternity leave. I have a lot of friends with science/economics/linguistics PhDs who are at home with young children, and they might consider a bit of part-time work just to entertain themselves.

They would still expect to be paid a lot of money, though

Already answered on the other thread but just for a laugh

1. Do you have children currently in Primary/ Secondary education and if so which?

No - but for the purposes of this I have a 12 year old at a middle school

2. Have you ever considered using a home tutor for additional help for your children outside of school?

Outside of school? Well I'm not going to send a tutor into school am I?

3. If yes to Q.2, what were the things you were looking for in a tutor, and what was it that either made you take the tutor or not?

The ability to put a ? after a question not a comma would be a start.

4. If I were to start a tutor service provided by high achieving university graduates would you be interested?

Iterested in what? Cooking? Yoga? Would I use the service, actually no, because it seems a bit slapdash

5. What would you consider to be the most important selling points to attract you?

6. It is possible for us to provide tutoring on topics children are finding hard throughout the year, as well as preparing them for their whole exam which would therefore involve a greater amount of lessons. Which of these services would you be most likely to use?

Well my imagiary child will be taking more than one exam, I value education so I might emply a tutor to expand the knowlege of a subject not covered in school because my imaginary child is particualrly gifted, she has A Level maths already but I think she'd like to enter a few maths competitions, my maths is not up to that level.

7. Would guaranteeing that all Graduates were CRB checked make any difference to you seeing as currently there is no law to stipulate self-employed tutors need to be CRB checked?

I really think you need to rephrase that, get rid of 'seeing that'.

8. What is the most you would be willing to pay for an hour of tutoring?

It depends on the experience and skills of the tutor.

9. How many hours a week would you want a tutor for?

As many as necessary.

10. Would you expect a tutor to travel to you?

As long as they do not want me to pay their travel expenses.

11. If no to question 10 how far would you be willing to travel?

Well I expect my imaginary child to make their own way there.

12. Hopefully the idea of having a graduate ran tutoring service appeals to you. If there is anything I might find of interest that hasn?t been asked above then please feel free to leave your feedback and thoughts below.

Well I think you mean graduate run, and you really do need to learn how to use commas.

Are the graduates going to tutor their own subject or others? I woud hope an engineering graduate would have enough maths to tutor GCSE but not to tutor A Level psychology.