Surrey Homes | SH33 | July 2017 | Interiors supplement inside

Education
Extra Help
Susan Elkin explores the demand for unqualified tutors
Credit: FreeImages.com/Picaland
Tutoring is a mixed blessing. In my time I’ve done
plenty of it – teaching all day in school and then
coaching children privately from other schools
in the evening because I had a young family and there
was never enough money. And of course many parents
buy extra help for their children because they are not
satisfied with what happens in schools especially when
there are entrance tests or public examinations at stake.
But what about tutors employed by schools? It seems to
be quite widespread. Earlier this year I saw, at Southwark
Playhouse, School Play by young playwright Alex MacKeith
whom I also interviewed. The play, now published by
Oberon, is inspired by Alex’s experience of being employed
as a new graduate, to tutor groups of primary school
pupils. The aim is to get the SATS results to the right
level so that the school qualifies for the level of funding
it needs. He was so fascinated by the dynamic of teachers
and tutors (and he knows lots of others) working alongside
each other in schools that he wrote a play about it.
Then, the other day, I found myself sitting at a family meal
next to a distant, by-marriage relation on her gap year. She’s
due to start a bio-chemistry degree at a prestigious university in
September. Meanwhile she’s working in three secondary schools
tutoring small maths and English groups to boost GCSE
results. “They’re not interested in science because it’s the maths
and English which affects the statistics,” she told me ruefully.
I find this both intriguing and worrying. The concern seems
to be driven entirely by figures, tables, the status of schools
and the future of the people who are working in them.
I’m surprised, too, that the teaching unions aren’t jumping
up and down, furious that their members are being “sidelined
by unqualified teenagers”. My dinner companion tells me,
incidentally, that she is paid even less than a teaching assistant
so it’s a good bargain for the school. She works in the north of
England and is paid partly by the schools she’s in and partly
by the local authority. She is, of course, one of dozens.
There’s nothing new in education. Both my maternal
grandmother and my mother trained as teachers through
the “pupil teacher” route. In-school tutoring seems similar
except that I doubt most of today’s tutors will go on to be
teachers. And isn’t the underlying question – to which I
don’t know the answer – that if these youngsters can teach
effectively why do we bother to train teachers expensively
for three years? Perhaps it’s time for some radical thinking.
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