Courses or tuition for A* at GCSE

[Dreamgirl1000]

I would be very grateful for any advise and comment on tuition centres or GCSE courses in or near London.
My Dd will be taking hers next year and needs to achieve as many A* as possible.
I have studied abroad and am not very familiar with the system and exams here. Your help will be appreciated.

MaisyPops I'm very much of the opinion that bright children succeed far better without being hot-housed by pushy parents and are far better equipped to deal with university too.

Our kids have tutors because they asked for them and they go to a good state school but there are at least 30 kids in each class so individual attention is minimal and their confidence in Maths suffers. My best mate is a Maths tutor - kids love her and she recommended their language tutor, I'm very happy to support where needed. Try you local parent's Facebook page for good recommendations.

Dreamgirl1000 dont know about tuition centres in your area, but my tutor is fantastic!! My daughter has done great with my tutor for her maths. x

Is this the same dreamgirls who was asking about Harvard and Oxford for Law or History on previous threads? Just wondering ! The pressure for DD to succeeed sounds the same.

OP you are not going to get the answer you want here as MN is generally very anti tutoring.

What is her school like?

mammmamia
Is it really?
So many threads are on tutoring and tutoring for exams/entry to private prep&secondary etc.

MN will give a range of views, including the idea that tutoring a child to death isn't going to make them smarter, better or happier.
And if a child is so exceptionally bright (zillion of MN users claim they tutor because their child is so bright blah bkah) then they'll get where they need to be without hot housing. So you'd be better off picking a tutor for their weakest subject or so and that's it. Not across a range of gcses.
Like I've said, by all means get a tutor but know what you're signing up to (e.g. current y10. Nobody has grade boundaries etc. Caution over tutors claiming "their pass rates", which aren't theirs really on 1 hour a week)

Maisypops I agreed completely with your posts on this thread and I think most of these types of thread are met with a similar response which is why I said MN anti tutoring. I don't believe in it myself for the reasons the OP wants it for and I'm always a bit by threads like these.
My DC go to very competitive private schools in north London where some of the parents are batshit crazy into tutoring. I am pretty forthright in my opinions on it. I think it should only be used where the child is struggling with a particular subject and that is not able to be addressed in their current school environment.

some of the parents are batshit crazy into tutoring.

I live in a grammar free zone, where it's mostly selection by mortgage and we don't have a very big mortgage. I couldn't believe it when I first tripped over some London (Richmond) kids on a holiday and had my first "Noooo! You're a cliche! You're NOT supposed to be real!" experience. They were fundamentally fine as children and good temporary company for DD, but they were also very competitive about everything and had home-lives stuffed full Mandarin tuition etc. These were apparently the mild ones in their world and they gleefully told quite scary stories of much worse cases.

We do get quite a bit of tutoring amongst the (national) top few percent end at Middling Comp, but it's all very hush-hush rather then in your face. It has been interesting, a learning experience. Y9 DD is up at that top end and except for normal homework and modest revision for tests, she has never done any significant extra school-stuff at home until a couple of weeks ago. This is really counter-intuitive, but she nearly always comes out top by a reasonable margin in the tests/exams regardless of other quite bright children's tutors, very helpful parents or in a couple of cases home-lives where TV etc. is verboten and they just work and work on school-stuff.

I can just about understand that for maths because there aren't so many concepts compared to other subjects and a lot depends on the 'problem solving ability' that I don't believe is entirely vulnerable to teaching/training. But I don't get it for something like objective science with the many concepts, facts and specific vocabuluary.

I obviously agree with the premise that above a certain level at least, a bright child doesn't need hot-housing. But I can't understand why children not that far below DD on the curve who are being pushed, haven't just romped past her in most subjects. I thought we'd get sucked into a bit of an arms race because of what others were doing, but perhaps our version of relaxing is what keeps her ahead somehow? This really isn't stealth-boasting, I'm simply puzzled/fascinated by this scenario because similar-ish ability plus extra training should win the day surely?

What is it about tutoring that gets so many people so hot under the collar.
My dcs asked me for a Maths tutor - they are not high flyers but they are summer born hard workers and they make good progress, they know where they need extra help and I am the facilitator. I also suggested a French tutor to help with conversation and listening because I believe it to be an essential skill in learning a language and tricky to practice alone. I don't think about them in a race with other kids, I think about them getting the most from their education. While we didn't wish to go private, state schools are often lacking in some areas and we have the resources to plug that gap if needed. There's no shame in being average ability and hardworking rather than bright and fairly lazy. The tutors my dcs have are given the instruction to encourage confidence and enjoyment in the subject, not push them to A*. Using a tutor is not cheating - the dcs still have to do the work and in our case some good quality one to one works wonders.

Should have said if they got an A* that would be great of course but it's not the primary aim. And I would not be disappointed by their absence.

sheepskinshrug
Nothing against tutors as long as they're used well and tutors don't expect me to do their work for them as a class teacher (Eg I've had tutors ask for my planning, resources, schemes of work, material for all their sessions, me to mark work from their sessions etc!). I also don't like it when I've taught things in class and then some know it all tells my students I've taught it wrong when I haven't. I don't like tutors claiming they have a pass rate of X%. They don't. They haven't been the main teacher. They can't claim off 1 hour a week that they were the massive swing factor. I hate having parents call me up saying 'you said X but child's tutor said Y and X is wring' and then I spend my time explaining that both X and Y can gain marks but we were doing a lesson on X. X IS CATEGORICALLY NOT WRONG. That's then time spent dealing with a mess because somebody wanted to show off to the kids.

Use them for confidence, a bit of 1-1, to explore ideas more etc. Ask teachers for which areas are best worked at with a tutor (best set up I find is when I give parents key areas and they let the tutor know).

I have friends who are tutors and they are very clear with what they do. I have zero time for the antics of some tutors.

I don't agree with hothousing kids and death by tutoring that goes on on some MN threads.

My dc's maths tutor is known to their teacher. Teacher has suggested at parent's evening that tutor emails her for teaching plan and goes over stuff in advance....so she seems perfectly happy with set up. I could tutor my kids in Maths but we'd fall out, I'd get too involved. And the French tutor is a native speaker, she comes around to our house for a chat....in French, my dcs really enjoy it, the conversation is very loosely scripted around what is going on in our lives. Hot housing it most definitely is not!

I agree with you Maisypops about pass rates - I didn't ask....I know whether my docs are finding it useful/enjoying it...rightly or wrongly that's my measure of success for tutors and music teachers (dcs don't do music grades, they just do music that they love)

why you think this can't be achieved with support from school?

Maybe it can't be achieved with support from that particular school. The support may not be adequate.

It depends on the school, and the potential ability of the OP's DD. At lots schools very high grades are less likely than at an academic school with high expectations taken for granted by the staff and pupils alike. There also needs to be an atmosphere where there is a lot of concentration in the classes, plenty of homework is set and marked, and an atmosphere where the peer group support each other to work hard. There needs to be very good teaching in all the subjects with a low staff turnover too.

Perhaps her school is like that.

People can only do their best though. She would need to have the potential to get high grades too.

then they'll get where they need to be without hot housing.

No bright children do not always get the grades they have the potential for. It depends what their school is like.

Adequate teaching for a subject and support do not always mean 'hot housing' or
'pushy parents'.

I think there is nothing wrong with a tutor if the kid needs it, why not. Some kids need some extra help to achieve the grades they wish. I do see something wrong with pressurising a kid to get as many a stars as possible, unless that's what they personally wish. The pressure would be detrimental, and I say that as someone with a straight a / star daughter all the way through a level. She had no extra tutoring, although she was privately educated, and I would be concerned about ability to succeed st uni if she had been hot housed.

I would be worried about having to get a tutor for a privately educated dc - you are paying for smaller classes and more involvement but for a state educated dc in a class of over 30? I don't think tutoring it's all that surprising.

dcs don't do music grades, they just do music that they love

Your prerogative of course, but I changed my mind about that.

In Y9 DD's case music was only supposed to be 'good for her soul' so I was against grades, and lost that vote. Now that she's getting close to the end of them for piano there is clearly a lot of technique in place to help make more music she loves more accessible. She has also acquired a taste for some music I doubt she'd have touched with a barge-pole. DD wouldn't have got here if she didn't enjoy the overall process, but she also wouldn't have got here without some less loveable bits along the way.

No bright children do not always get the grades they have the potential for. It depends what their school is like.

Ignoring extremes, I think it depends more on what their character is like. Comp attending DD is definitely still at a disadvantage next to similar children in shiny selective schools, but her character means some of your pre-requisites are not quite so critical.

British home tutors agency provides tutors who are teachers at top private schools in London. Their tuition is far from cheap but they are really the best teachers, used them for my DS who is taking GCSEs this year. Good luck!

Pique, I agree character makes a lot of difference and so does what is going on at home.

Pickaboo Imo they have enough exam focussed subjects and if they only want to learn pop songs then so be it. One likes to play musical theatre and the other likes folk and classical.....and if they wanted to do grades then I'd support that decision too - it's their education and I have made them responsible for it. IME over the years, school music lessons have done their best to suck the joy out of music, they were desperate for my dcs to do grades. If your dc enjoys doing grades then doing grades is what she should do, mine will hopefully continue to enjoy listening to a wide range of music and play for pleasure, grades or not.

You've essentially stolen some of my lines e.g. it's something of DD's not the pesky schools, she's the one with control etc.

I think it's that personal reponsibility part that speaks to this thread. One premise floating around is that the children who get the shiny grades are more likely to be leading themselves, as opposed to being led. Those GCSE 9s are quite a rare percentage and caveats aside (including a huge dollop of pure luck), I suspect they'll be selecting for bright children who are self-sufficient. Not exclusively, but much more for the latter quality than lower down the results curve.