Why do some teachers dislike tuition?

Teaching is a profession in which, since time immemorial, the educators have given a lot of themselves to the educated. Teaching is often referred to (wrongly in my opinion) as a vocation, a calling. Leaving aside the view that this exposes many of our teaching professionals to the expectation of overwork and the burden of extra admin, we have to look at how our work here at Chatterton Tuition can best support pupils, and by extension, teachers. 

Tuition is designed to give individual, targeted support, to fill in any gaps left in a student’s understanding. As such, tuition supports the school too. It (ideally) reinforces topics already covered in school rather than introducing new topics. It gives the student time to reflect on their learning at their own pace, without being swept along too quickly and overwhelmed with a deluge of information.  Nevertheless, some teachers see tuition as a bad thing, almost as an indictment of their teaching, that it hasn’t been good enough. In an ideal world, all students will fulfil their potential in every class, in every school. But guess what, our world isn’t ideal.

The sausage-machine view of education is that all pupils get homogenised into one large mass, a grade-achieving academic juggernaut. But what happens if a pupil is more suited to being a rasher of bacon or a lightly fried egg, sunny-side-up? The sausage machine experience will not be pleasant for that child, and countless autobiographies outline the bad school-age experiences of people who turn out to be outrageously successful, creative and happy in their chosen field. 

Fortunately, school league tables (another contentious point) emphasise grades and produce copious stats for parents to deliberate over. If tuition can boost grades, and that makes the school look good, well isn’t that a win-win? Most teachers adopt a reasonable view, that Teacher A cannot get through to all of the students all of the time, and nor can Teachers B, C and all the way to Z. We as tutors want nothing more than just a ‘thank you’ on results day; we let the pupils grab the glory. And if the schools claim some reflected kudos too, well that’s all well and good. We respect the sheer effort that many teachers put in, so if they can get something other than financial rewards for their hard work, assisted by us, well that’s a good thing.

Spanish Tutors

When I was at school I studied German and French at O level.  For me Spanish wasn’t an option.  These days many schools offer so many more languages and most offer Spanish.

There are 480 million native Spanish speakers in the world so it really isn’t surprising that many students choose to study this subject.  Spanish is spoken in over 20 countries (including Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina and of course Spain).  The sheer number of Mandarin Chinese speakers in the world has also led to schools offering lessons in that language, to equip students to deal with the international challenges of the future.

To cope with demand we have several Spanish tutors on our books at Chatterton Tuition, some are native Spanish speakers and some speak Spanish as their second language.  However we have recently had an increase in demand for A level Spanish tuition and we just don’t have enough tutors to cover all our enquiries.

Some of our competitors may have some great Spanish tutors (such as First Tutors, Personal Tutors or some of the more local ones such as Up Your Grade or York and Area tutors) and I have no doubt that you will get a good tutoring experience with these.

However we are constantly working to address these imbalances.  We have a widespread network of teachers and tutors in the local area.  We have good working relations with many of our local schools and before you could say “Hola”, we now have several new Spanish tutors who are going through our rigorous recruitment procedure.  We have some excellent new Spanish tutors now working with us.