Opinions Please!

[avsbavs]

I am 15 and doing GCSE Business Studies.
I am trying to research the demand for private tutors.
What is your view?
What do you think of paying £400 a term for suppliment tutoring to a state education insted of £4000 a term for private education?
Please help! Thank you.

I would expect with private education to not need to pay for tutoring as I would expect the teachers to be running classes for revision, and extra help.

That said, I would expect the same of state school. There should be no need for tutoring if the subjects are being taught correctly. I was always happy to take time in break and lunch to help students who hadn't quite grasped something; and I ran after school revision groups for my GCSE students from after October half term up to the date of the exam, so we could concentrate on exam technique on a one to one, or go over topics they wanted to revise.

I would not expect to have to pay either: if I had £400 to spare, I would spend them on enrichment activities and books for dcs. tbh if I had a child who was not very academic (as I possibly do, time will show), I would not want them aggressively tutored: imo there is no advantage in getting into a more academic form of higher education than you are actually fit to do.

Thank you for your views.
how about if it was a question of getting into a good secondary school? would extra tutoring then be an option to help your child get into their first choice of school?

Depends on what you expect from the tutor.

If a child just needs to brush up on some skills to fill in the gaps (not learnt or understood or even taught at school) then a tutor to help cover these would be fine.

But if a child is struggling generally on "normal" subjects taught in school, the pressure will be greater at a good secondary school, and consideration would need to be taken into account as to whether the child would cope.

You would have to look at what the school offered, and how would they help the child and whether the child would benefit from private tutoring.

Some kids do respond better with one to one tutoring - they find the classroom scenario too much.

I am sceptical about paying for tutors, we did for a term because DC was bored at school and had lost motivation, the tutoring switched her back on, but the tutoring was promoted as a one-one but the teachers actually had four kids to work with at the same time.

We use online tutoring programmes and online education sites/schools and play games to learn about all sorts of stuff and this works well for my DC

There is a lot of demand for private tutors, and it seems to be from parents that feel the school isnt doing enough for their kids. A lot of kids do seem to drift through school and are not stretched to see what they are actually capable of.

Even on this forum there have been lots of requests and questions about tutors.

I am currently paying £53 a week for tutoring in 2 subjects for my daughter ... she is in a state secondary but has had poor/changing/missing teachers in 2 subjects I would prefer not to pay but I know that schools can have staffing problems

Wouldn't want mine to get into a grammar or selective school unless I was convinced they could take the pace.

Not an issue in my county anyway as we don't have grammar schools here. So unless you can pay for private (which I can't) there would be no need for tutoring to get into a school.

If you?re talking about tutoring to get into a grammar school, most DCs will almost certainly need some ?familiarisation? with the specific type of exam. Some DCs (and their parents) will be happy doing this together at home, but others may respond better to an outside tutor. In the area where I live, nearly everyone does a bit of tutoring, they just don?t talk about it

Also the 11+ varies from area to area, but in some parts of the country it includes maths questions of a type which aren?t covered by the National Curriculum (or at least not until later in Y6, ie after the 11+), so DCs will not understand these if they?ve never seen them before

Again, thank you so much for the responses.
I have to write a report on the private tutoring market this week and your comments will be hugely helpful!

I am a private tutor and I seem to have no shortage of students. Parents usually get a tutor because they are concerned about some issue but this can be across all ability levels.
It might be about helping a student prepare for an entrance exam but can also be about helping a student who has lost confidence in his/her abilities for some reason. Particularly with maths I see students who have got behind because they have not spent quite enough time to grasp the basics. As later work builds on these they then fail to grasp this work too.
I see some students who turn out to be dyslexic but have not been picked up at school because they are still performing within the average range(sometimes these are quite bright children who are really frustrated because they recognise that they are not progressing as they would like).
I have also supported GCSE students where the school has had a lot of teacher changes or supply teachers and this has affected the amount of the syllabus taught.
I have also worked with students who have had special needs (autism, memory problems after head injury). Of course ideally the school should provide appropriately for these students but very often they either can't or don't or don't do it quickly enough.

My aim when tutoring is always to build confidence and help the student feel good about themselves and their abilities. Children can get "stuck" for a variety of reasons and it is really fantastic to see them begin to relax and realise that they can "do it" and then start to make progress again.

So far I have not found the recession affecting the amount of work I get. I'm beginning to wonder if increased competition for jobs doesn't make parents even more concerned and more likely to get a tutor to help their children do the best they can academically.

Having said all of this, tutoring is not a way to earn a fortune. I love what I do and do it for that reason. If I was not blessed to own my own home and not have to pay a mortgage, I would not be able to work the way I do as it would not be financially viable.
I am in Greater Manchester by the way, in case area has any bearing on your investigations.

I have friends who are supplementing secondary education in some subjects with tutoring.

Languages and maths seem to be popular.

Music seems to be almost completely undertaken through extra-school tuition. Which I think is a bit sad.

It's a bit depressing.

thank you.

could i possibly ask how many hours a week you work sarahfreck?

At present I have 11 students I am teaching, but I usually work round about 32 hours per week when you add in preparation time, travel time and time discussing issues with parents.

I thought about tutoring to support my son's literacy but in the end spent the money on a ed psyc report to find out why he was seriously struggling in one subject area only. He is severely dyslexic and dyspraxic.

So, now I spend the money I thought I would spend on a tutor on music lessons (one of his strengths), drama lessons (another strength), audiobooks and voice recgonition software. I have targetted the spend and extra-curricular opportunities on areas which help build up his self esteem and help him 'read' books of his intelligence level rather than his reading level.

thank you sarahfreck. would you mind if include these figures in my report?

kez100 that's such a good way of dealing with the issue. tutoriing is definately not the answer to everything.