Private Tuition In A Failing Academic System

The definition of the word "tutor" is often misunderstood. I have been a part of this industry and have been providing my services for the past six years. I`ve seen that there is a fine line between tutoring and teaching. Of course, I am asked many questions by parents but one of the most common is, "Are you a qualified teacher?" If teaching in the UK`s public sector, teachers generally hold a teaching qualification (a degree for example) and must also earn QTS (qualified teacher status) which is acquired via work experience in the classroom. In private or independent schools, however, there is no standard requirement that teachers have teaching qualifications. Yes! Some of the UK`s leading independent schools hire teachers that do not hold official teaching certificates! You would need a degree in a related field, but that is all. Now, I certainly would not expect privately run schools to perform worse in the league tables than state schools because they`re hiring unqualified teachers! According to my trusty Collins English Dictionary I have in front of me as I write this article, the definition of a tutor is a "person teaching individuals or small groups." Thankfully, that sounds like what I do for a living. A teacher, on the other hand, is defined as "a person who teaches in a school" and we`ve already established that even a school teacher does not need to hold a teaching qualification. Both a tutor and a teacher have rather different jobs in real world application. Whereas a tutor specialises in teaching people on an individual and more personal basis, a teacher is trained to carry out their duties in a classroom and is assessed more in their skill to teach and manage the class as a whole. This means being able to ensure that the average performance of the class is going upwards. I think you may know where I am going with this. Today`s teachers are primarily trained to be classroom managers and I believe this to be the key difference between tutors and teachers. They`re also pretty big classrooms at that. According to a research report investigating and comparing class size and education in the UK with other OECD countries, "About half of the countries have an average of 18 to 22 pupils per class; however the UK was reported to have roughly 24.5 pupils per class in 2009. Of the OECD countries..the UK has the fourth largest average class size after Turkey, Japan and Korea." Those certainly are not very glamourous figures. Surely then, if we take into account that teachers` pay has been frozen and pension benefits stripped, and then we couple that with our seemingly overcrowded classrooms, we can only expect the education system to worsen. Furthermore, teaching in schools is becoming increasingly difficult outside the classroom, with all the bureaucracy that`s involved and increasingly unrealistic targets set by OFSTED. This is where I believe the role of a private tutor is becoming more and more vital. With teachers chasing class averages to please OFSTED, it`s especially difficult for the children on the extreme ends to improve their abilities at an optimal rate. On the one hand, we have gifted and talented learners who aren`t being challenged enough and on the other hand we have learners who can`t keep up with the rest of the class. It is undeniably a failure of our education system if every single student in the classroom is not making the best progress possible. I actually began to think about the content of this article when meeting one of my new students. He is eleven years old and has been tutored as part of a Maths group for the past three or four years. Did I mention that he is performing at GCSE level and I have been hired to help prepare him for his upcoming exams? It really is quite amazing to witness the potential our children possess when they are individually challenged. I do not necessarily believe that this child is a reincarnation of Pythagoras but I am certain that with tuition after school his potential has been exploited far beyond what the system could have achieved on its own. If this doesn`t advocate the significance of a private tutor, I do not know what does.