A teacher charges £30/hr to tutor some of his own pupils, is it ok?

[rightvswrong]

A teacher at my ds' primary school has been tutoring 3 children in his class for a while now. Few of us, parents at the school, think it is tottaly wrong. What do you think?

Yes, I have nothing against school renting out space, but dustinthewind, the OP is complaining about tutor having conversations with parents about other children 'in their homes'. Hence my question.

dust- If you have anything against this thread don't look at it, don't take part or express but to ask me to go elsewhere is a bit undemocratic don't you think?

express it

I would say it was all right if he tutored them in a different subject or for an exam that the school had no responsibility to prepare for. But to give parents the idea that you need to pay the school extra for their child to be tutored for the SATS (which are expressly designed to test the teaching quality of the school!) is very shocking: I'd report this to Ofsted.

cory- Sadly there are some parents who don't know that :(

There might be a conflict of interest involved somewhere in this situation. I suppose it depends on the particulars and whether or not the teacher is aware of and willing to explain any reasonable alternatives and whether or not the paying parents are willing to explore alternatives. Maybe all concerned have done everything they should have done and the parents want to pay thirty pounds an hour to this teacher. If so, it's a free country. Let them get on with it.

I dont think there may be a conflict of interest I think there is a damn great one both for the teacher and the head.

At primary school parents are quite new to the game and so may believe that tutoring is normal especially if it is being promoted by the school.

In no way should a school be offering private tutoring by its own staff on its own premises simply to improve SATS performance. For a school to do that stinks of sharp practice.

I am genuinely amazed at how much the OP seems to know about what goes on in the classroom throughout the day and the NC levels at which all the children in the class are working. Are you hiding in the bushes outside the classroom with binoculars and breaking into the school at night to check out the paperwork? If so, I'd say there are bigger problems here than some private tuition.

I don't think theres anything wrong with the teacher tutoring but think it is a bit unethical. How can they prove there is no favouritism in the classroom and although the teacher is not doing anything wrong I think children from other classes/ schools would be better. Also separate premises because the parents unable to afford private tutoring will feel hard done by and always have a permanent reminder

The fact that it's all happening on school premises is very weird. The school is making money out of parental dissatisfaction with its own teaching. Odd.

Issue re tutoring - not sure what i think... can see potential for conflict of interest, go to the head with specific concerns. If they don't have a policy on tutoring then maybe they need one. Surely there is national guidance on this somewhere?

But:
"a few of us think... we all think... one mum started a petition... we were all horrified... he is ignoring all of them... they spend all day doing nothing... he chooses to waste time... "
it's hard not to think this is a bit of a whispering campaign?

(Question to teachers: are schools usually aware of these school-gate campaigns? are they a common thing? do they tend to indicate a genuinely bad teacher? are they sometimes helpful in drawing attention to a teacher's underperformance? or will the school already know about underperformance?)

I have read this thread from start till end and some of the posts make me really

Teachers- you must know that we have some bad teachers in this profession yet you keep picking on OP for speaking up! Shall we shut everyone who speaks up and pretend that all is well when it isn't? Obviously she knows that there are some excellent teachers in the same place and she is not out there blaming all of them. She is raising some issues that I saw and still see but no one cares.

Dames- Children are aged 10/11 yrs old, they report a lot of what is going on. If the majority repeats the same thing then there is some truth in it. Parents go and help and say the same thing. I don't have to hide in the bush when I go to pick up I turn up about 25 mns early and I can see what is happening in the class and guess what the same thing that everyone says.
One more thing I talk to this teacher and he says it all..... There isn't much I can say to convince the ones who don't believe, actually you have to see it to believe it!
I wonder everyday how did he end up teaching children??

thank you pastoral :)

You still don't really know what's going on though and each of your responses details an even worse accusation about the teacher. It seems unlikely that you'd start a thread about tutoring outside of school when your main concern was that the teacher leaves the class alone/doesn't teach them anything/spreads gossip about other children and families.

You might want to find something better to do than to turn up 25 minutes early to pick your kids up for school too. Surely anything is better than standing around in the playground for half an hour waiting.

Dames- I would love to see what will you do if it's your ds we are talking about. I guess life is a great teacher...

I would love to see more parents checking on what is going in your dcs classrooms. I wish my students parents care to be involved and take notice of what's going on in DCs lives.
If there is nothing wrong then there is nothing to hide. Bring on CCTV and let's weed the bad apples out.

If there was CCTV in some of the class rooms I've been in, the teachers would probably have been given counselling and the children removed to wait for places to comeup in the ebd unit.

But anyway, sorry op, I'm still faintly baffled.

Is this tutoring taking place in the school building? Or in private homes?

Please explain the £10 fee.

What sort of school is it? The ht sounds interesting. Are you indeed praying for the teacher concerned?

Tutoring your own pupils is obviously so likely to lead to conflicts of interest that it is highly unethical. Every school I've worked in has a clear policy-teachers may tutor but must not tutor children they are involved in teaching in other ways. Most teachers I've worked with have implicitly understood this to mean that tutoring nay child from the school needs clearing with the Head.

The other accusations, though, just get wilder and wilder. And tutoring isn't an admission of failure to teach well. At worst, it's an admission that parental expectations for their child are not going to be met without extra focused help. In which case, perhaps the problem is less the quality of the classroom teaching than the expectations and desire to buy competitive advantage.

Sorry, have just read the thread. One particular gem stands out about how the teacher is spending time with those on 'level 4s and 5s' not those 'in need'.

In a SATS year this is indeed a very odd priority to give, assuming that the children on level 3 have any hope of getting level four (will they have made their two levels anyway?). But it's also a totally admirable one-all children need help to progress to the limits of their own abilities.

Low attaining children aren't more in need, ffs, even if they are your children.

Haven't read the whole thread, sorry, but it's not unheard of for good teachers to be doing 1:1 tuition with pupils in the school - this was a big project called Making Good Progress, where children who were quiet/lacking confidence/underachieving were given 10 sessions of 1:1 to give them a boost. However this was provided free of charge, it wasn't private tuition. It had fantastic results, the kids generally loved it, and many schools are still doing it. Could this be what the teacher is doing?

Cleek it is not the parents who are being judged here but the teacher. Good teachers should be helping within or after school time as part of their job, not charging parents for more of it.

As a consultant, if I couldn't do the job I was paid to do in the time I said I could do it in, I rarely got paid more for doing it: I just had to work in my own free time. Likewise the teachers at your DD's school should work on his maths in their own time or find specialist support for her if necessary, not charge you for their time.

If the teacher is being paid to teach them in school then he should not be paid by anyone to tutor them after school. Seeing the children during lunch or after school for extra help for free is a different matter.

But charging for tutoring? There is a massive conflict of interest here. What incentive does a teacher have to give his all in the classroom if he can make a tidy sum every week from the students he ignores in class time?

And yes, it really is possible to tell when a teacher is not pulling his or her weight. It is not rocket science. The children talk, you can see their work, you can see inconsistent marking or intermittent picking up of homework and you can see frustration in your child when he or she doesn't get the homework that is assigned, or a lackadaisical attitude -- 'Oh, Mrs Suchandsuch never collects homework'; 'we were going to do X or Y or Z today but Mrs Featherhead forgot again'. Or you hear something like 'Jimmy was swinging from the chandeliers while Mr X was out of the room and he fell and broke his leg'/ 'Jack and Will were fighting in the corner today and Jack got a broken nose' and it turns out Teacher wasn't there...

DD1 had a science teacher who spent a lot of her time looking up airfare to Ireland on the computer and doing admin for her Irish Dancing school when they should have been taught science. She had them read through the book themselves instead of teaching. DD2 had a different science teacher who turned out to be a crackhead. Some very weird experiences reported from that classroom. (Including remarks that she didn't really focus too well)

cookieTin Where did you get the idea that OP said he is spending time with level4 and 5??? OP said he is ignoring them all, wasting time and looking after his customers. amazing what you managed to find in this thread!!!!!?????