One of the things I love most about what I do now is the stealth and anonymity. As a frontline classroom teacher in a modern educational setting, you are constantly exposed. Teaching means being quite literally on display at the front of the classroom putting on a show for multiple classes, multiple times per day. You’re also putting on a show for management, who in turn are putting on a show for each other, for parents, for OfSted or for the ISI. Everything, frankly, is performative. The whole world’s a stage.
Even more stressful than this is the fact that your results are under scrutiny. The pressure of this will vary from setting to setting, but there are vanishingly few schools now which do not now make individual teachers directly accountable for the academic results of the students in their classes. At the high-achieving grammar school I first worked in, the Headteacher would meet with every academic department every year and go through A level results with a fine-toothed comb. Every member of the department had to prepare for the meeting and bring along their justifications as to why some students may not have made the grade. It was a toe-curling and sometimes genuinely upsetting experience.
These days, with the work that I do, I am very much behind the scenes. I’m the person you’re not supposed to see. Black leggings and a balaclava have replaced the vibrant costumes I had to wear for my classroom performances. While there are some students or parents who inform the classroom teacher of my existence, most do not. I hear reports of teachers that are amazed, delighted and genuinely mystified as to how a student has made such a marked improvement in a short period of time. Some of them must (surely?!) hazard a guess as to how this might have happened, but many seem to remain in the dark, along with my services. In terms of the results that my tutees achieve, those results go on the books of their regular classroom teacher and they are welcome to them. I know the truth, as does the tutee and their parents who paid for my work. There is something strangely satisfying about it. I genuinely love being the secret silver bullet, the hidden reason why a child makes the shift from the bottom of their class to the middle or even to the top. I cannot tell you how exciting and rewarding it is.
One student brought me up short this week when she described the situation in her classroom. In a high-achieving school, in which many of the students studied Latin from an early age in prep schools, she has always felt slightly behind the curve and I knew this already. What I did not know was the extent to which the classroom teacher relies on the fact that students have prior knowledge and thus doesn’t feel the need to teach new concepts in anything like enough depth for a novice.
“You’ve actually taught me this stuff,” my tutee said, as we celebrated her improved understanding of the uses of the subjunctive. As I listened while she elaborated, I became more and more horrified. She explained that the classroom teacher pitches the work in a manner that works for those to whom the material is not new. The overall assumption seems to be that the students already know the basic grammatical structures and thus the teacher’s job is simply to give them a quick reminder plus some further practice. The problem is so bad for those in the class that do not have the prior knowledge that several other students have also acquired a tutor over the last few months, since they too are struggling to keep up. “What I find really funny,” my tutee said, who is wryly perceptive for a young person of her age, “is that everyone who needs one always gets a private tutor, and then the school congratulates itself every year on amazing results.”
While I have never taught in the private sector, I have some experience of this phenomenon in the grammar school I used to teach in. We had a couple of teachers who were basically ticking off the days until retirement and quite frankly they were diabolical. As an A level student, if you were put into Mr Dudley’s German class, you knew that you would never get through the exam without external help. As a result, every single member of Mr Dudley’s class was given the benefit of support from a private tutor by their families. (Parents who have got their kids into a grammar school are usually well on board with the idea of private tuition: it’s how most of them got their kids into the school in the first place). So, Mr Dudley’s class would crash its way through an untaught syllabus, with lesson after lesson being provably and audibly chaotic. But guess what? Mr Dudley’s results were better than all of ours put together. And he got the credit for it, despite his palpably dreadful teaching. To be honest, it used to drive the rest of us wild.
Private tutors’ work is incredibly difficult to track because its behind-the-scenes nature means that is not systematically recorded. Without centralised data collection or mandatory reporting, it is impossible to measure how widespread private tuition is or indeed how significantly it affects educational attainment and inequality. But when a high-achieving school boasts consistently outstanding results on their website, I must admit I do find myself wondering just how many tutors there are behind the scenes to make them possible.
