rivate tutors were once the pushy parent’s dirty little secret. At last week’s National Tutoring Conference in central London, one tutor said embarrassed parents used to introduce him to contemporaries as a “friend of the family” rather than admit the truth.
No more. Not only are parents now open about employing tutors; some of them even take tutors along to parents’ evenings to explain what their children really need at school.
Tutoring is a great British growth industry, worth £6.5 billion a year. In 2001, 270,000 tutors taught 1.6 million children. Last year, 520,000 tutors taught 2.8 million pupils. What was once the prerogative of the children of the rich is spreading into the state sector. State schools have started to pay private tutoring companies to teach their children, using the pupil premium – the extra government money allotted to underprivileged pupils.
Some tutoring companies follow a noble Robin Hood principle. One tutor at last week’s conference, Mark Maclaine, cofounded Tutorfair, an agency that provides free tutoring to children who cannot afford it, funded by those who can. For every parent who pays for a tutor, Tutorfair tutors a poor child for free. Thirteen inner-city schools select the children who will benefit most from Tutorfair tutoring, largely on a one-to-one basis. Last week, Tutorfair tutored its 2,000th student for free.
Another tutoring company, Keystone, has done after-school Latin clubs at the London Oratory state school for £5 per class per child. In my part-time job as a Latin tutor, I apply a rather less charitable sliding scale: from £35 an hour for average earners, rising to £100 an hour for gazillionaire hedgefunders.
It’s a seismic move to let private tutors into state schools. For years, those on the Left have argued, rightly, how unfair it is that private schools do so much better than state schools. But then – in a perverse way – they run headlong in the opposite direction from educational measures that make private schools better: selection; intellectual rigour; discipline; plenty of fact-learning; old-fashioned teaching methods, with children sitting in rows, facing the teacher.
Everyone accepts that football academies and ballet schools select on natural talent. But, when it comes to schools, all the political parties resist selection. Look at poor Kent – where desperate parents in Sevenoaks are fighting tooth and nail to set up a new annexe to a grammar school. The wicked current legislation in England outlaws new grammar schools, but recent changes in the law let them expand – thus the clever ruse of opening the annexe to an existing Weald of Kent school, nine miles away.
By admitting highly qualified tutors from the private sector into state classrooms, the Blob – Michael Gove’s term for the amorphous, obstructive state education sector – has tacitly admitted the truth: if state schools imitate private schools, they will improve.
These are early days: the amount of private tutors in the non-selective state sector is still small. But tutoring for 11-plus entry to grammar schools – the main subject of the National Tutoring Conference – is already taking place on a huge scale. And it is now an inherent part of private education.
Some private schools and grammar schools are so alarmed by the spread of tutoring that they’ve introduced supposedly “tutor-proof” entry exams, based on thinking processes rather than facts. As all the speakers said at last week’s conference, no exam on earth is tutor-proof: one-on-one tuition can only improve a wandering mind and make it better at thinking.
Some tutors actually like tutor-proof exams, because they are perfectly capable of teaching children to think as well as cram them with facts. Sadly, when Buckinghamshire introduced supposedly tutor-proof 11-plus exams in 2013, poor and ethnic minority children did worse than in the previous non-tutor-proof exam. There are downsides to tutoring. One conference speaker lamented the fate of children who are denied a proper childhood by constant academic pressure. Some pushy parents waste money on bright children who don’t need tutoring. A tutor told of one boy who’d been overtutored to get into a school that was too good for him; he ended up having a miserable time, surrounded by more intelligent classmates.
Ideally, there wouldn’t be any tutors. But schools are far from perfect, and the growth in tutoring shows how the market has stepped in where schools, governments, universities and exam boards have failed.
I was giving a talk at the National Tutoring Conference about the decline of classics in universities and nonselective state schools. Latin and Greek exams have dumbed down, too; and the number of pupils studying the subjects in comprehensives has collapsed.
It has been left to private schools, grammar schools and – now – tutors to retain a measure of educational excellence in classics. I can’t speak for other subjects but I’ve been told by teachers that classics exams remain harder than other disciplines. Going on how easy Latin papers are, God help us!
Amid the doom and gloom about the woeful state of education in this country, there is some hope. For decades, children who were lucky enough to go to private and grammar schools have reached the age of 18 untarnished by the dead hand of the Blob. Now, with the growth of private tutoring in state schools – along with the rise of free schools – more children can have access to Blob-free education.
The irony is that those pupils who least need tutoring – in the private sector – have historically had the bulk of it. How gratifying that the balance is swinging, to a small degree, in the opposite direction.