Why tutoring is not just for posh kids

Action Tutors at St Gabriel’s in Lambeth. Photograph: Action Tutors

Over the past year, I have worked almost full-time as a private tutor. I’ve travelled to Norwood, Leyton, Putney, Haringey and quickly had the illusion punctured that tuition remains the sole preserve of the achingly wealthy.

According to social mobility think-tank The Sutton Trust, 24 per cent of young Londoners have received private tuition in the last year alone.

But the cost prohibits a great deal of London’s population from participating since – stories abound of private clients who will happily pay upwards of £60 per hour to the right tutor in this new educational paradigm.

Against this backdrop, it is heartening to observe the success of charities like Action Tutoring.

After launching in 2011 at two London schools, including Hackney’s own Petchey Academy, the charity now operates in cities across the UK, providing support to over a thousand students a year who would otherwise be unable to afford it.

Founder and CEO Susannah Hardyman observes: “Over the last five years there have been a lot of people getting interested in the potential for making the benefits of tutoring more widely available. The goal of any charity has to be a world where we are not needed, but we are quite clearly not there yet. The edge that the private tutoring industry gives to children means that there is an ever more pressing need for the kind of service we are offering.

Agencies complacent

Whilst it would be unfair to suggest that the private agencies do not engage in any school projects of their own, such partnerships – usually proposed as an innovative way for schools to spend their Pupil Premium subsidy – often involve sending under-trained tutors to work as substitute teachers, with little in the way of training,
or oversight.

Such an approach seems indicative of a creeping complacency amongst the major London agencies born of being routinely able to charge what amounts to an exorbitant “finder’s fee” for putting a family about whom they know a little in touch with a young graduate about whom they know
even less.

Most agencies conduct only cursory interviews, and more than once I arrived at a new agency expecting an interview, only to be asked for a few personal details and sent on my way within a few minutes.

Susannah, though, sees unique elements in her approach which marks out Action Tutoring, as well as other successful organisations such as the Access Project, against the private agencies: “One of the things that distinguishes us from private tutoring companies is that we do have that close relationship with schools, and we are constantly trying to liaise between teachers and volunteers.”

Unsurprisingly, when tuition steps out of the private sector and the welfare of the pupil replaces the profit motive, the process as a whole becomes more valuable for those who need it.

The continued growth of volunteer tuition is both testament to the vital role that one-to-one tuition has to play in support of time spent in the classroom environment, and an encouraging sign that access to this support is widening.

New approach

Tomato Tutors, a North London-based agency established this year, hopes to introduce a student-oriented approach back into the private sector.

“There is something missing”, founder Laura Alvarado says, analysing the approach of some of the larger agencies. “I feel like families are so caught up in getting the right grades, and getting to the ‘right place’, that they learn none of the skills to cope with adversity”.

Alvarado recalls students who fought consistently with “low self-esteem, and low self-worth”, and it is these experiences that have informed her company’s approach, which incorporates meditation, mindfulness and an appreciation of the tutee’s eating habits, bedtime and hobbies.

Private tuition, as a concept, finds itself in a bit of a bind. The more it appears to be a valuable part of a child’s holistic education, the harder the accusation bites that tuition in the private sector only serves to fan the flames of socio-economic disparity.

Parents will always do what their means will allow to give their child the best chance they can, so as long as tuition remains primarily a private enterprise, it is difficult to disentangle the industry from the same justifiable objections that face the private school system.