How do you find the right tutor?

 

If you are reading this you are probably sat at your computer actually trying to find a private tutor or at least looking into the possibly of using some form of tuition service. Using a search engine to trawl the internet is always a useful place to start. I don’t want to teach you ‘how to suck eggs’ but your search term should include the area you live in, the subject and the word tutor/tutors. Many science teachers specialise in one area of science so make sure they have the expertise in the area you want.

 

Your next step is obviously to go through all the sites that are listed. This can put a lot of people off. You will find many sites run by national companies that will put you in touch with someone in your local area. You will then have to make contact with the tutor personally and the company running the website will take a slice of your money for making the referral. Often information about the tutor and what you get for your money is vague. These companies often use tutors who, although they are usually experts in their field, have no teaching experience. Don’t get me wrong, many of these companies provide a good if not excellent service. However, you are more likely to find the right tutor for your child if you know more about them and they are trained teachers.

 

So my advice, which you may happily ignore, is to concentrate on the websites that provide a local service, provide good quality details of the tutors they use and they use trained teachers. The ones offering a local service will be easy to spot as they will often have your area name in the name of their website which is at the bottom of each search result. A local tutor, if they are a trained teacher, will either be working in a local school or have worked in at least one of the schools in your area. This means they often understand what the schools do (for instance, what exam board is used) and how they do it. In addition you should easily be able to double check what they say about themselves by talking to people you know.

 

If you can find a tutor who actually uses their own website, then often you won’t be disappointed. They will have invested time and effort into developing tutoring as a career rather than earning a little bit of extra cash to pay for this year’s holiday or to help them through university.