Tutoring – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

The unbeatable value of one-to-one tutoring

Last week I wrote about how class size doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to outcomes for students. While it can have a notable effect on a teacher’s workload (and I believe that this is important), the evidence that smaller class sizes improve student performance simply isn’t there, certainly at secondary level.

You’d think, given both this and my commitment to being evidence-informed, that I would thus be in support of the idea that tutoring in small groups can be as effective as tutoring one-to-one. Quite the opposite. The very fact that research and my own experience tells me that the size of the group seems not to impact upon the outcomes for students only serves to reinforce my belief that there is something uniquely special about working in the one-to-one model. David Cameron once said that his support for equal marriage was not in spite of the fact that he was a conservative but because he was a conservative. By the same token, I don’t support the view that one-to-one tutoring has a greater impact than working with small groups in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that reducing class sizes improves outcomes; I support the view precisely because of this fact. It is my view that groups – however small – will never provide a child with the same level of intervention as working with an expert one-to-one.

During my last few years of teaching, I had the opportunity to teach a group of five students. The official line was that the small group was due to a timetabling glitch, but the full story was that the Headteacher had unwittingly made a promise to a small handful of parents, a promise which turned out to be impossible on the timetable. Because the mistake had been made by the Headteacher, she had the power to say “make it happen.” Thus, after a considerable amount of shuffling, the staff responsible for timetabling came up with a solution: we would create an extra group to accommodate the subject combination promise that had been made to those students and their parents. This left me – the only Latin teacher in the school – with three Year 9 groups instead of my usual two: one was the usual size of around 28 students, one was somewhat smaller at around 23, the third was the group of 5.

Initially, I was quite excited by the idea. As someone who had tutored one-to-one in my spare time, I felt quite certain that working with such a tiny number of students would feel more like tutoring than teaching. I would be able to offer them close supervision and thus, I presumed, their progress would be exponentially greater than that made by students in the other groups.

Certainly, I was able to pay those students more attention than I otherwise might have been able to do and certainly they all did well. Yet, so did the students in the other two groups. Over the two years I was not able to identify any measurably different outcomes for those students and the experience of teaching them was nothing like the experience of tutoring. Small class size or not, all the other variables were the same. They had the same teacher – me, like it or not – and they had to be marched through the same curriculum. Five students is still enough for there to be considerable diversity among the group, so the pace was still on the slow side for some, rather too pacey for others. While I was – of course – able to offer more individual support than in a larger classroom, it was genuinely surprising how limited the impact of this was overall. Had any of them chosen to engage a private tutor, they would have benefitted as much as any of the students in my group of 28.

As a result of the high expectations that are placed upon teachers, it is easy for them to feel threatened by the very existence of private tuition. I experienced this myself, when I watched a boy who was struggling in my subject transform his performance as a direct result of working with a local private tutor. It was a truly humbling process to witness, and I don’t deny that for a short while I felt rather dismal about my own apparent failure as his classroom teacher. But as a private tutor, I have seen the game from the other side of the fence. I know that what I can do with a child in a regular series of bespoke one-to-one sessions bears little or no resemblance to what I can achieve in the mainstream classroom. It is because I work one-to-one that I am able to do this.

As a private tutor, everything I do is in direct response to one individual’s needs. The key to outstanding private tuition is developing the ability to read each person closely; in a one-to-one session, I can watch for every tiny non-verbal cue that a child is giving: every shift in the chair, every bite of the lip, every furrow of the brow. Of course, I often noticed these signs in the classroom too, and I endeavoured to pay close attention to those individuals who were expressing some puzzlement. But how often must I have missed such nuances, due to the sheer number of faces in front of me? Every missed moment is another tiny chink in that student’s progress, another fissure in the delicate and ever-evolving construction of knowledge and understanding.

In a classroom, children must wait – an individual query may not be relevant to the whole class, and some students, especially in the younger years, seek to reassure themselves by querying what a teacher has said before the sentence is barely out of their mouth; this desire to ask questions at every stage of an explanation can ruin the flow of a lesson for the majority, and students must learn to save their questions for later, when a teacher is circulating the room. Teachers try then to address each individual query and pay personal attention to every child, indeed the importance of this is one of the things that makes teaching both challenging and rewarding. But the rules are reversed in private tutoring, when a tutor can actively encourage a child to interrupt as many times as they wish; as a result, the lesson is truly tailored to the individual and every potential misunderstanding is addressed – simply impossible in the mainstream classroom.

I am not unsympathetic to those educationalists who have concerns about private tutoring. In stark contrast to the case of my student whose progress was transformed as a result of tuition, I have also come across cases when a child has been thoroughly let down by a tutor with no professional experience. Many of those advertising at the more affordable end of the scale are university students – I would willingly have tutored for £10 an hour as an undergraduate – and some of them do an excellent job. However, such tutors have no experience of the ever-changing expectations that children are working towards; if you are simply looking for someone to de-mystify a subject then this kind of tutor can work very well, but if you are looking for your child to make progress towards a specific educational goal or to excel in a particular set of examinations, you’re taking quite a risk in paying someone who is not an expert in this process.

Yet the main objection against private tuition often raised is not a lack of professionalism on the part of some tutors; rather, it seems to touch on the wider issue of so-called “helicopter parenting” and a tendency to problem-solve on behalf of our children. In truth, no matter how much a parent might wish it to be so, private tutoring is not a magic solution; it is merely an opportunity, with which the student has to engage in order to progress. A few will rock up confidently with a myriad of questions, but the vast majority have spent so long hiding at the back or trying to bluff their way in a subject they are struggling to understand that it takes some time to strip away their defences and encourage them to participate without fear.

The tutees that come to me are often in a state of despair. More than one parent has described the dreadful bouts of gut-wrenching anxiety and floods of tears as a child finds themselves getting further and further behind their peers. My subject is obscure, and few parents are blessed with the knowledge to help their child through the quagmire of this difficult and unforgiving discipline; so, they can watch in despair while their child suffers, or they can find a compassionate and competent professional to provide the right kind of support for them. As one parent put it to me, “you have turned dislike and dismay into enjoyment and enthusiasm.” Sounds like something worth paying for.

Why is translation so difficult?

I recall being puzzled a few years ago, when the languages department I was attached to invited me to present to them on how I go about teaching the skill of translation. I had assumed that the process of translation was almost synonymous with language work, and would be embedded into the teaching of all languages. It was news to me that a change in syllabus meant that translation from the target language into English was a new and hitherto under-explored field for modern linguists, and this belies my background as someone who has specialised in Latin.

When it comes to ancient languages, translation is what we do. Without delving into the thorny issue of justifying the value of studying Latin per se (!), it is a simple truth that the ultimate goal of this kind of study remains to be able to read and decipher a text that was written down in Latin and to translate it into English. Despite this obvious truth, a huge number of children who study the subject struggle with the process of translation, and it is worth reflecting upon why that might be.

Broadly speaking, the clients who get in touch with me asking for help for their child fall into two camps, and those camps tend to be based on age-group. Most of the people who want help for a younger child (say in Years 7-8) will say that their child is “okay with translating” but “struggles with the grammar”. This is always a massive red flag for impending disaster, for it means that their child’s translations are based entirely on instinct and guesswork; the child may have appeared to manage okay so far, but as things get harder they will fall apart and the child will soon find that they can comprehend very little of what’s in front of them. It is a drastic misconception, in my opinion, that “grammar” is something separate from “translation”. This really gets to the heart of Latin as a subject and belies why so many children need help with it. Grammar is not an optional luxury for those most deeply versed in the language: it is the beating heart of how the language works.

Parents of older children (broadly speaking in Years 9-11) tend to be the ones who are already experiencing the fall-out of translation without the systematic application of grammar rules. Students by this time find that their previously-successful methodologies of translating on instinct have all but collapsed. Parents of students who have reached this stage will usually tell me that their child struggles with absolutely everything and is on the verge of giving up. A few will say that their child is “okay with the grammar” (which means they have rote-learned their endings) but cannot make it work in the context of a translation. This less common scenario is what tends to happen with a highly-motivated student, generally successful in their studies, who has been told to “learn their endings” and has dutifully done so, but has not had the opportunity to sit down with somebody in one-to-one sessions and have the process of translation – actually making use of those endings – modelled and unpicked for them. This is not to say that their classroom teacher has not used the method of modelling, nor that they have not tried to dedicate some one-to-one attention to such a child. But the reality remains that such processes are remarkably difficult to embed and often require repeated, intensive one-to-one work to make a tangible difference to outcomes. This is especially true for a child that has developed the habit of translating on instinct and has not been drilled from the beginning to analyse Latin sentences rigorously. I’m afraid to say that the most popular text books used in secondary schools (the Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani) tend to encourage and compound such an approach. These courses are nicknamed “reading courses” and aim to encourage fluid and instinctive reading from the outset, eschewing the process of analysis. My personal experience with such an approach is that it is disastrous for a child’s long-term grasp of the subject and results in an inability to translate when things get even remotely complicated. Lots of people disagree with me on this, and if you’d like to hear me interview one or two of them, then listen to my podcast; in Season 2 Episode 1, I interview Caroline Bristow (Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project) and in Episode 6 I talk to David Carter, who is an advocate for a methodology called comprehensible input. If you’d like to hear me interview someone who shares my views, listen to Season 2 Episode 2 with Ed Clarke.

Much of my time in one-to-one sessions is spent asking students to justify their translation. When they tell me that rex deorum means “the king of the gods” … was that an easy guess based on the fact that they know the vocabulary? Or can they identify the fact that deorum is genitive plural, which is why it translates as “of the gods”? If they can’t unpick their reasoning behind very simple sentences, then in my experience they will never be able to translate more complex ones. My focus is therefore to present students with a variety of sentences, using vocabulary that is familiar to them, then challenge them to identify and articulate the morphology and syntax which justifies and explains their translation.

It is also important from the very beginning to present students with sentences which cannot be translated successfully without some kind of analysis. Even at the most rudimentary level, this is easy to do. While reading courses such as Suburani tend to encourage students to follow their natural instinct to read from left to right by using pronouns at the start of a sentences like English does, I prefer to present students with sentences that lack a noun or a pronoun as the subject, so they are forced to look at the verb ending in order to find out who is doing the action. During lockdown, I basically re-wrote the Cambridge Latin Course for my students and one of the main things I did was to remove all those subject pronouns. This change made an immediate and tangible difference to outcomes with the beginners in my classroom. From very early on, students were forced to cope with sentences such as ad tabernas festinas (you are hurrying to the shops) when previously they had been shown tu ad tabernas festinas, which means exactly the same thing but provides them with the subject (you) as vocabulary at the front of the sentence and hence removes the need to look at the verb ending; take away the subject pronoun, and the learner is forced to develop the correct habit of parsing the verb ending (festina-s, as opposed to festin-o or festina-t). Initially, of course, this slows the learner down, but the ultimate gain is the right kind of rigour, which will pay dividends in the long-term. While it will initially appear to take students longer to be able to translate basic sentences with fluidity and skill, their translations when they come will be based upon real understanding, not the false appearance of success. It is this false early success – in my opinion – that makes the reading courses so popular; students feel brilliantly successful in the early stages, but they are living in a house of cards.

By far the most common scenario presented to me as a tutor who specialises in supporting struggling students is a child who has enjoyed and appeared to thrive in Latin in Years 7-8, who then experienced an enormous crisis in Year 9 or at the start of their GCSE studies. These students feel cheated and let down, and understandably so. A lot of them come to me saying that they regret selecting the subject for GCSE and are convinced that they cannot do it. Happily, I am usually able to convince them that they can do it, but this involves unpicking the habits they have formed in the early years and retraining them from scratch. While reading courses such as Suburani and the CLC continue to dominate the market in secondary schools, I don’t see this situation changing in a hurry.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Routines and comfort zones

As I write this, I’m in absolute agony. I can barely move without yelping. Rolling over in bed has been a challenge and I am getting up out of my chair like a 70-year-old. There’s me thinking that I normally make myself work hard on my twice-weekly visits to the gym. Turns out that – for quite some time – I’ve just been playing at it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been making progress. On several of the machines, I can now select a heavier option than I have been able to previously, and my strength has definitely continued to improve incrementally. But if I’m honest, that progress has been very, very slow and has quite possibly reached a plateau over the last few weeks.

This week, in place of the deep-tissue massage and advice-session I normally get from my physical therapist, we met at the gym and he coached me in my usual routines. Flipping heck. I truly had not realised just how much I was staying in my comfort zone and what a difference it would make to me, having someone to push me beyond it. While Greg is anything but a Sargeant Major type, it’s amazing what a great motivator it is to have someone beside you, telling you to add more weight, stretch a bit further, try a bit harder.

“What weights should we use for walking lunges?” he asked. “Um … 4s or 5s?” I said, hopefully, knowing full well that he would push me up to working with 6s. Off he jogged to the weight store and returned, brimming with mischief. “They didn’t have any 6s,” he said, nonchalantly. “Try with these 8s.”

Ignoring this transparent deceit and weighed down by an extra 16 kilos on top of my body weight of 47, I waggled my way through a series of walking lunges. Greg did the same beside me, holding more than double the weight and chatting all the time about his son and his daughter. I’ve taught both of them, of course, because, as an ex-teacher in the village comprehensive, it is a local by-law that I must have taught the children of every single community service-provider: the personal trainer, the Sainsbury’s delivery guy, the gardener, the builder, the roofer, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. While Greg chatted, I puffed and panted and my glutei maximi made it more than apparent to me that there would be trouble ahead. Yesterday and today, that trouble became manifest.

Over the last 48 hours I have felt almost as bad as I did on the very first occasion I tried this new-fangled business of resistance training. Ouch. It’s been a serious wake up call, the sudden realisation that – while habits and routines are essential and the stuff of a (healthy) life – they carry with them the risk of complacency and comfort. Things have been way too easy at the gym recently, because I have let them be so. I cannot remember the last time that I experienced serious delayed-onset muscle soreness after a visit, and that’s something to work on from here.

This week, I also met a new client, one who is struggling when it comes to committing her work to memory. Whether it be the set text, noun endings or vocabulary, there is a serious amount of rote-learning required in the subject of Latin, and many students struggle with the sheer volume of what they need to commit to long-term memory. Supposedly, she has been doing all the right things and has made regular use of flashcards, but the fact that the process is not working is most likely because it’s been too comfortable.

So, I encouraged her to work proactively on selecting the cards that she is struggling with and focus on those. Flashcards are for the words you don’t know, not the ones you do. I also warned against the well-known risk attached to using the flashcards alone, rather than getting somebody else to test you – the temptation to turn the card over too quickly and allow yourself to recognise the answer rather than to hold off until you retrieve it can be great; indeed it can be something that students do unconsciously, without even realising it. Putting somebody else in charge of the cards is a great way to mitigate against this risk. “It should feel uncomfortable,” I preached. “If you’re finding the flashcards too easy, you’re doing it wrong.” Huh. Physician, heal thyself, I thought ruefully this morning, as my muscles caterwauled their protest against Monday’s new and unusual routines.

What has this taught me? Well, it’s been a bit of a jolt. It has reminded me that we are all susceptible to the almost inevitable tendency to settle into a comfort zone, to keep patting ourselves on the back for a job well done when in reality we’ve done very little. It has also reminded me that going it alone is inherently flawed. I really understand why people hire personal trainers on a long-term basis – not because any of the exercises that they are doing are particularly complex or dangerous or requiring an expert, but because it’s just too easy not to push yourself. Paying someone to motivate you can be hugely valuable, and this has given me pause for thought. While I’m not sure it’s necessary for me to hire someone to train with twice a week every week, I can totally see the value in an occasional booster session to question my habits, to shake up my routine and to remind me to push myself harder. That’s something that I shall be investing in from this point forward.

Responsive Tutoring

One of the most powerful tools for promoting student progress is what’s called assessment for learning (AfL). When I was first teaching and the phrase was all the rage, you wouldn’t have passed an interview without mentioning it. While the acryonym AfL is less often used these days, it still underpins modern teaching.

The thinkers credited with the founding principles behind the use of AfL in the classroom are on record as saying they wish they’d called it something else. Rather than “assessment for learning”, they wish they’d called it “responsive teaching” and I can see why. In many ways, AfL is about neither assessment nor learning – at least, not in isolation. AfL, or rather responsive teaching, is about what a teacher does differently in response to where their students are in terms of their understanding.

While summative assessments (such as a GCSE examination) focus on evaluating final outcomes, AfL is embedded in day-to-day teaching in order to gauge students’ progress, clarify misunderstandings and – most crucially – to guide further learning. Effective use in the classroom presents a unique set of challenges for teachers, especially when working with larger groups. The process is infinitely easier in a one-to-one setting, where the dynamic between the tutor and the tutee shapes the entire process.

Responsive teaching is meant to be a continuous loop, the gathering and interpretation of evidence used to shape a teacher’s instructional decisions. AfL can also be used to help students to recognise their own current level of understanding and set goals to improve. It is meant to be an ongoing, dynamic process and requires teachers to have a nuanced understanding of each student’s needs, strengths, and areas for improvement. To be effective, AfL requires not just frequent feedback but feedback that is individualised and actionable. In a one-on-one setting, a tutor can more naturally meet these requirements, while in a classroom with multiple students, the process becomes complex, requiring considerable skill and resourcefulness from the teacher.

When implementing AfL in the classroom, teachers encounter several challenges that are unique to managing large groups. In a classroom of 30 students, teachers must balance AfL with the demands of covering the curriculum, managing behaviour and addressing a multitude of diverse learning needs. The time constraints are significant. For each student, providing specific feedback and tailoring instructional adjustments is an ideal that is often close to impossible to achieve in practice. In any single lesson, a teacher may only have a minute or two to focus on each student. This time is rarely enough for comprehensive feedback, making it challenging to provide meaningful guidance on areas for improvement.

In larger classrooms, teachers have to rely on quick, general assessments, such as asking questions to the class or using hand-raising methods, but these approaches can miss individual nuances and only provide superficial insights into each student’s understanding. Real-time feedback is essential for the process to work, but logistical challenges mean that teachers sometimes delay feedback until they can examine students’ work. This delay can diminish the impact of the feedback and may hinder a student’s immediate progress. It also places a significant workload burden on the teacher: even schools who have understood and embraced the principles behind whole-class feedback are still placing a considerable assessment burden on the classroom teacher in terms of work that must be completed outside the classroom.

In any classroom, some students may actively participate and show enthusiasm, while others remain quiet or withdrawn. Unless a school has fully embraced and embedded the principles of “no excuses”, teachers will struggle to gauge the understanding of all students. Ensuring equal participation is challenging, and without specific engagement from each student, teachers may only get a partial view of the overall class understanding. Implementing AfL strategies requires significant time and energy, which teachers often need to dedicate to managing classroom behaviour. Students can become disengaged, especially if they don’t immediately understand a lesson or find it challenging. The need for behaviour management can take time away from delivering AfL, reducing the effectiveness of feedback and lesson adaptation.

By contrast, one-to-one tutoring provides an environment where AfL shapes and defines the entire process. In a one-on-one setting, the tutor’s focus is exclusively on a single student and this individual attention means the tutor can tailor questions, feedback, and guidance specifically for that student. Any misconceptions or gaps in knowledge are immediately identified and addressed, without the need for complex assessment. For example, a tutor might notice hesitation in a student’s response and immediately reframe the question to clarify understanding. This kind of personalised, immediate and dynamic intervention is impossible in a classroom.

In tutoring, feedback is instant. If a student misunderstands a concept, the tutor can pause and offer corrective feedback on the spot. There is no need to wait, no need to press ahead with the curriculum. This timely response to a student’s needs helps to solidify learning and build confidence, making AfL truly effective. Tutoring allows for a flexibility in pacing which simply cannot happen in the classroom. A tutor can spend as much time as necessary on a particular concept, adjusting the level of challenge to ensure that a student remains engaged. For example, if a student masters a topic quickly, the tutor can introduce more complex material. Conversely, if a student is struggling, the tutor can slow down, review foundational concepts, or use alternative explanations.

One-to-one tutoring fosters a relationship where the student may feel more comfortable expressing misunderstandings or asking questions. I actively praise my students for interrupting me and asking questions, although I am careful to highlight for them that this is the right environement in which to do so; it is important to me that I support classroom teachers by clarifying to students that they cannot – nor should they – demand this level of individual attention and feedback in the mainstream classroom.

Reading their minds?

Classroom teachers are expected to be psychics. According to the Teachers’ Standards, which are many and complex, every classroom teacher must not only understand how children think and learn but must know when and how to differentiate appropriately, using approaches which enable pupils to be taught effectively; they must have a secure understanding of how a range of factors can inhibit pupils’ ability to learn and how best to overcome these; they must have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with special educational needs, those of high ability, those with English as an additional language and those with disabilities; they must be able to use and evaluate distinctive teaching approaches to engage and support all of these different young people … and all of this must happen while there are 30 of these diverse learners in the same room.

Much of what is demanded of the average classroom teacher is impossible. I say this not to be a doom-monger or to preach the acceptance of mediocrity – far from it. Throughout my career I strived to be the best teacher I could possibly be. Yet in reality, we cannot be all things to all men and we cannot possibly fathom the inner workings of every single one of the minds that are sat in front of us.

I have written numerous times on the differences between classroom teaching and tutoring but this week something hit me that had not occurred to me before. While I have always been aware that one-to-one sessions give me an insight into the misconceptions each child may have and thus the ability to address those, it has not previously dawned on me that tutoring a large number of students in the way that I do has given me a broader insight into how children think and learn in a way that I could not have experienced as a classroom teacher. Working one-to-one means that I get to listen to how my students think and reason in real time.

It is often said by modern cognitive scientists that education has placed too much focus on the diversity of learners in the past. While every parent likes to think that their child has a unique set of needs that can only be met in a unique way, the reality is that there is far more that unites young learners than divides them. We now know a great deal about how memory works and how best to support students with the learning process: this is not to say that some will not find it harder than others and require more time and effort than others, but broadly speaking the approaches that work for those with special educational needs in fact work well for the mainstream classroom as a whole. If you tailor your classroom towards providing the best learning support for your neediest learners, everyone benefits as a whole.

Working one-to-one with the huge number of students that I do has furnished me with a real insight into how students tackle the process of translating and what the common pitfalls are when they are doing so. It has also provided some perhaps surprising insights into which constructions that children tend to be able to translate on instinct, without a full grasp of understanding. This information is actually gold dust and links to what I blogged about last week – the necessity of designing a curriculum around the learners sat in front of you and in relation to the time you have available as well as the end goal when it comes to examinations. I have realised in the last year or two that there are some complex constructions which many classroom teachers tend to focus too much time on, to the detriment of the basics, when in fact many students could translate those constructions without difficulty so long as they had a grasp of their verb and noun forms and their vocabulary.

Working one-to-one has given me more of an insight into what doesn’t need to be taught as well as what does. While most of my students have gaping holes in their basic knowledge, many of them have spent an unnecessary amount of time being taught things that they do not need to understand in detail. Sometimes, a construction has been so over-taught that a child has been left in complete confusion; their natural grasp of it, one which they would in all likelihood have stumbled upon if given the right basic tools and a decent dose of confidence, has been lost forever.

I am still pondering what to do with these insights as it occurs to me that they could quite honestly be of enormous use to any classroom teacher who is willing to listen. For now, my understanding of how children go about acquiring the skills that they need to do well in Latin is ever-increasing and remains endlessly fascinating to me.

The best use of curriculum time

“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”

Theophrastus.

On Wednesday, I had my regular fortnightly meeting with the new teacher who has taken over the teaching of Latin in the school where I used to work. This teacher is an ECT (in her first year of teaching) and while she will of course have a professional, in-house mentor to oversee her development within the school, the Head was conscious of and rightly concerned about the fact that she will have no subject expert in the building to offer her support. That’s where I come in. This week, I found my young protégé in a bit of a flap about one particular part of the language curriculum and since reflecting on our time together I realise that I was less helpful than I could have been. Rather than letting our conversation continue when it comes to the grammar at a granular level, what I needed to do was to get her to reflect on which aspects of the curriculum actually require the most time spent on them. Next time I see her, I shall do so.

One of the most frustrating things about leaving teaching is at last having the time to see and understand how one could completely re-write the curriculum to reflect more accurately the way that the exam papers are written. What those outside the profession will find difficult to understand is that it is left in the hands of often new and experienced teachers to design an entire curriculum to prepare for an exam they did not write. No real guidance is shared by the exam boards (and on the odd occasion when some guidance is offered, it is usually either unrealistic or unworkable in some or most settings). What we really need is for exam-setters to work alongside schools to build an appropriate curriculum, but that’s never going to happen.

As we talked, my instincts were telling me that this teacher was becoming unnecessarily bogged down by her worries about a particular construction and was planning to spend a huge amount of time on it. I need to make sure that she does not do this. The reason? Well, I have just reviewed the 8 separate past and specimen papers that we have from the exam she is entering her students for, and this particular construction appears either once or twice in each language paper. Around half of the time, its appearance is supported by comprehension questions, which guide the candidate towards the correct interpretation. The rest of the time, the examples used are almost exclusively ones which most students would be able to translate on instinct, even if they had never been taught the existence of this particular construction. Compare that to another kind of construction, which most teachers skim over very briefly, but which in fact appears multiple times in every single exam paper. Which would you focus on? Sounds obvious now, doesn’t it? But you wouldn’t believe how few teachers go through this thought-process when designing their curriculum and planning their lesson time.

Having made the switch from the classroom to private tutoring, I am in contact with dozens of students from multiple different types of schools. Something I have come to realise is that almost all teachers over-teach the aspects of the curriculum that they believe to be difficult. It is not that their beliefs are incorrect, but what they get wrong is the amount of curriculum time that they dedicate to these concepts as a result of their relative complexity. It’s a common assumption in education that one must spend more time on something because it is difficult. In fact, this must be weighed up against three crucial realities: firstly, the nature, knowledge and curriculum history of the students that we have in front of us; secondly, the amount of time that we actually have with them; thirdly – and perhaps most crucially – the relative weighting that this difficult concept carries when it comes to final outcomes. This requires an understanding of how much, how often and with how much depth that difficult concept is tested, as well as how many marks that testing carries. Once you start trying to balance this equation, it can lead to some surprising conclusions, which might not seem obvious to anyone but the most experienced in curriculum design.

If a concept or construction is so difficult that its full understanding will require multiple hours of curriculum time, yet that very construction is only likely to add up to three marks on one paper, which converts to 1.5% of the student’s overall score … is that concept actually worth teaching at all? It’s something to think about, at least. Perhaps one could teach it in a very condensed form, teach some broad strategies that work in the majority of cases and leave it at that. Certainly, what one should not do, is spend hours and hours of precious curriculum time trying to bring students to the point of full understanding whilst neglecting other concepts which we might consider simpler but appear multiple times on the paper and are thus integral to success. It simply isn’t the sensible approach, given the huge constraints that all schools face when it comes to curriculum time.

The tendency for teachers to labour what’s difficult is something which I share openly with my tutees. I am very careful not to criticise or undermine the school’s curriculum, but I simply explain that it is natural for teachers to spend lots of time on the things that they know are difficult as they are setting the bar high for their students. Children of the age that I work with are perfectly capable of understanding that this might be a noble and understandable approach, but is perhaps not the best strategy to help them if they are struggling with the basics. Even the most able students, who are aiming at the highest grades, can still be reassured by the knowledge that the most challenging aspects of the curriculum are of less importance than perhaps they thought they were; it actually frees them up to grapple with them, once they have been released from the anxiety that their full understanding of this concept is absolutely essential for success. Knowing that you’re working on something that might gain you an extra mark or two is very freeing, and it enables the students who are aiming high to make sensible decisions about how to spend their own time, which is often very stretched.

In Latin, it is not only the language paper that requires this frankness of approach and a realistic analysis of where one’s time should be directed. I have written before about the extent to which teachers over-teach the stylistic analysis of literature texts, when the overwhelming majority of marks are gained in the exam through students simply knowing the text off by heart. I emphasise this over and again to the students I am working with, many of whom come to me because they are scoring very low marks in this aspect of the examination. Students can score at least 80% by simply knowing the text like the back of their hand, so this should be the overwhelming focus of the lesson: despite this, I have so far come across only one school where I would say this is happening – where the focus is on drilling and making it clear to students that they must be learning the text in detail. I shall not name the school, but one thing I will say is that it is a very high-achieving school, where the Latin department produces results of almost exclusively 8s and 9s in the GCSE every single year: this goes to show that the school is not avoiding the trickiest concepts – there is no way a student could score a Grade 9 without getting a decent score in the style questions – but it shows that they understand how to balance their curriculum and focus their efforts on what gains students the biggest advantage. The emphasis must be on knowledge, with the complex skills being supplementary to that. The final clincher, which again I share with my students, is that the high-level questions become infinitely easier and more doable once you know the text. Thus, a student who has already gained a solid knowledge of the text that is in front of them has a much better chance of being able to understand and apply the ideas he/she is being taught to gain those elusive extra marks.

What price safety?

Within the last week, the BBC have reported that over the past 20 years more than 90 private tutors working in the UK have been previously convicted of sexual offences involving children. Dame Rachel de Souza, the children’s commissioner for England, is now calling for reform in light of the BBC’s findings. Currently, there is no legal requirement for people offering private lessons to undergo any kind of criminal record check before working with children and young people.

No legal definition exists of “tutor” and anyone can set themselves up as one. This also applies to many other professional-sounding titles such as “counsellor” or (one which might shock you slightly more because it sounds kind of medical) a “psychotherapist”. These are not legally-protected terms and the gravitas which people tend to assume they embody is entirely imagined. This is not true of all professional services. To take one example, I regularly see an osteopath. By law, to call himself an osteopath, the person that I see must be registered with the General Osteopathic Council (GOsC), which only accepts practitioners who have a qualification in osteopathy that is recognised by them. They must also comply with their standards of practice. Osteopathy is therefore a regulated health profession and you can look up the details of this on the NHS website.

While a professional body for tutoring with proper checks and a Code of Practice does exist in the form of The Tutors’ Association, membership is entirely voluntary and is shockingly small in comparison with the number of adults who are actively marketing themselves as a “tutor” and taking people’s money for their services. This should give all of us pause. One of the things that has troubled me most about leaving the teaching profession and switching to self-employment is the feeling of being in the wild west when it comes to safeguarding and due diligence. All you need to do is to take a sweep through Facebook chat rooms to discover hundreds of self-employed tutors chatting openly and almost proudly about how membership of a professional body such as The Tutors’ Association “isn’t worth it” and how the process of acquiring a DBS check “isn’t necessary” either. For the record, my membership of The Tutors’ Association costs me just over £8 per month – that’s around the same amount that I pay for my Fellowship with the Chartered College of Teaching. (The latter, by the way, does not require me to update evidence of my criminal record check – The Tutors’ Association now does). The DBS update service – which renews my criminal record check every year – costs me just over £1 per month. Getting your first check done and getting onto the update service when you’re self-employed is a little more onerous and expensive at the outset, but that is something which The Tutors’ Association can do for you, as can a paid membership organisation such as Qualified Tutor. To be brutally frank, there is zero excuse for a tutor not to have invested in an enhanced DBS check if they are to call themselves a professional: if you’re currently paying a tutor who baulks at the question when you ask them, I would advise you to sever all ties with them immediately.

One of the things that has been most striking about the news reports has been people’s incredulity that these checks and legalities do not currently exist. So cushioned are we by the robust processes that do exist in vetting the adults that work with our children in schools, we perhaps tend to assume that this situation must apply to all walks of life. Do we forget that legislation does not control every single facet of our private lives? “I guess I kind of assumed there was some sort of protection in place,” said one parent interviewed by the BBC. In truth, if a parent employs a private tutor without researching their credentials, they are inviting a random stranger to work with their child.

It is perfectly legal to market oneself as a tutor with no relevant qualifications – be they in one’s subject or in teaching or education – and it is also legal to do so without a criminal record check. Finally, and this is what will upset and shock people the most, it is legal for a person to do so if they have already been convicted of offences that would disbar them from working in a school. The BBC investigation found that, over the past 20 years in the UK, 92 working private tutors have been convicted of sexual offences involving children. The figures, which the BBC obtained by combing through newspaper reports and court filings, are very likely to be an underestimate.

It is often said that an enhanced DBS check is the bare minimum that anyone working professionally with children should have, and I completely agree. All a DBS certificate proves is that the holder of the certificate has no prior convictions for a crime that would disbar them from working with children in a school or through other official services (social services, the police etc). Nothing more, nothing less than that. Beyond that basic minimum check for prior convictions, it relies again on the professionalism of the tutor to ensure that their own knowledge and understanding is up-to-date, both when it comes to their own professional knowledge and when it comes to safeguarding. I was privileged last week to attend the in-person safeguarding training held at the school in which I used to work. I am a regular visitor to the school, so it’s good for them that I was a part of this training and it’s good for me too. It keeps me informed and supplements the regular training that I keep up with online, which is detailed on my website under safeguarding.

I would appeal to all those employing the private services of a tutor to do their due diligence and ensure that anyone they employ to work with their children is – as a bare minimum – in possession of an up-to-date criminal record check. Personally, I would also ask them what safeguarding training they have undertaken within the last two years. Can they evidence it? Beyond that, I would also quiz them about what relevant and direct experience they have with the specific qualification they are claiming to be able to help my child with. Because believe you me, there are an awful lot of cowboys out there.

John Nichols, President of The Tutors Association, on BBC breakfast last week

Tough love?

Yesterday, I had a bit of an epiphany. It suddenly occurred to me why it is that tutoring can help anxious students so successfully.

Anxiety is not a professional specialism for me, and I’ve never experienced anxiety myself. Like all people, I’ve faced my challenges, but feeling overwhelmed by anxiety has never been one of them. Mind you, in the era I grew up in, such things were not named and certainly not medicalised. Whatever my views on the undeniable over-use of recognised psychiatric conditions to describe normal feelings (and believe you me, I have some), I think it is also undeniable that there is a genuine uptick in young people who experience what I would definitely call anxiety in some form.

When I first started teaching in 1999, I do not recall children’s anxiety even being mentioned as something I would have to deal with during my career. Fast forward to my final couple of years in the classroom, and you could not walk down a corridor without discovering a student outside virtually every classroom: not because they had been thrown out for poor behaviour, but because they were refusing to enter it in the first place. There was – without question – an explosion in students who were citing anxiety as the reason for their reticence. Some of them school-refused altogether and I had more than one student that I would see only once in a blue moon, so chronic was their conviction that school was a terrifying place. I have some hypotheses as to what has changed in society to spark this epidemic, but it is not my intention to explore them here. My intention is to examine the small part I can currently play in getting some kids back into the classroom.

As I have already stated, I would never claim working with school-refusers or children crippled by academic anxiety as a specialism. I have no significant training in this field and if anything I have endeavoured to avoid it. Bottom line, I believe children should be in school. There are exceptions to that rule in extremis, but the current and growing trend towards home-schooling as a viable option causes me genuine concern. Children are better off in school for a whole myriad of reasons, not least the fundamental and inescapable truth that school is the norm and thus integral to one’s experience as being a part of society. Saying this won’t win me any friends amongst my peers and competitors, but here goes: I am concerned that too many people in the tutoring industry find the upsurge in homeschooling professionally very convenient. Homeschooled students – unlike those attending school – open up the opportunity for daytime work, and lots of tutors want that. I worry, therefore, that professional tutors are not as motivated to get kids back into school as they should be. As a result of these concerns, I have increasingly steered clear of working in this field: I do not want to be a part of an industry that benefits financially from children being outside the school system.

Despite all my concerns and despite my lack of training in this field, countless parents have attributed to me their child’s increase in academic confidence and in some cases a return to the classroom. Much of this is in some ways unsurprising. I have written many times on the reasons why one-to-one tutoring is so remarkably powerful and effective, and this applies all the more so when a child has felt isolated, abandoned or forgotten in a classroom setting. But something more is going on with these most anxious of students, I suspect, and yesterday it hit me:

It’s because I can push them, and force them to take risks in a safe environment. Nothing is more effective when it comes to defeating anxiety.

In a classroom, a teacher has to pitch the class at one level for all. Inevitably, this carries the risk of some students becoming bored and disengaged by the lack of challenge, alongside the risk of others failing to understand what is happening. This is not just true of the lesson overall, it is true of every component part. Anxious students tend to fall at every hurdle, as their fight, flight or freeze response means that they spiral into panic and/or give up as soon as they sense danger – in their mind, that “danger” means as soon as things get tricky, as soon as they encounter something they don’t understand or as soon as they get something wrong. In any one lesson, that’s happening constantly, or at least it should be – learning cannot take place without challenge, micro-failure and frustration. In such a classroom setting, anxious students tend to take themselves out of the situation – either by physically leaving the classroom or by staying in their seat and disengaging; for example, answering “I don’t know” every time they’re asked a question, or even refusing to open their mouth at all. Classroom teachers even find themselves instructed by SLT, Heads of Year, SENDCos, parents and others not to ask certain students a question because – we are informed – they are too anxious to cope with it. Nothing could be more damaging to the educational process; if professional adults genuinely believe that a child literally cannot cope with being asked a question in class, then we have a major educational emergency on our hands. The solution is not to stop asking them questions. That simply isn’t good enough.

Happily, now out of the classroom, I can do what I like. When faced with an anxious student in a one-to-one scenario, I can afford to take risks. Firstly, before any risk-taking takes place, I can ensure that they really do understand something on a level that may not have happened for them before. Anxious students are so risk-averse that they are not good at taking a punt or going with the flow – they don’t trust that they understand anything well enough, so they need everything unpacked in detail. Once I have gained that student’s trust (and it doesn’t take long), they can ask all the anxious questions they’ve been storing up over the years and never felt able to ask. In this way, they can gain a command of the basics they’ve never had before, which empowers them to tackle more complex challenges.

At this point, the freedom I possess as a one-to-one tutor is immense and liberating. I can present my anxious tutee with something they never thought they could do and I can push them into doing it. In a one-to-one session, this is partly because the situation allows infinite freedom for row-back: if my instincts are wrong and the challenge is too great, I have the possibility of ditching the idea altogether before things get sticky, or of coaching the student through the process in incremental steps so that they cover the ground they could not have covered alone. Usually, my instinct is to do the latter – the need to abandon a task is vanishingly rare, but the option is always there. As the student’s trust in the process grows, so does their confidence.

Nothing is so wonderful as the look on a student’s face when they do something they did not believe themselves to be capable of. Nothing is more potent when it comes to smashing through the invisible barrier that anxiety weaves around these students. Nothing gives me greater joy than watching them fly past that barrier like it was never there in the first place.