tutoring – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

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

Reflections on Failure

Well over two years ago, I resolved to write a blog post every single week. So far, I have managed to do so. One of the many ways that this has been possible is that I forgive myself when the writing and/or the idea I come up with in one particular week is not exactly going to set the world on fire. If I am going to achieve the goal of writing something every week, I need to accept that not every single post is going to be a work of art. I can’t even imagine the pressure of coming up with a weekly Op Ed for a respected newspaper or journal. Indeed, the only paid writing gig I ever managed briefly was fortnightly and even that was one that I had to resign from after a while; the expectation to produce a well-researched, top-quality piece of writing on a topic of interest that was relevant to the right readers was something I simply couldn’t cope with. And by the way, the going rate for writing of this sort is utterly dismal – well below minimum wage if you calculate your earnings by the hour.

One of my earliest blog posts remains one of the ones that I am most fond of. It’s called “The one that got away” and was a reflection on the student that I remember with the most regret from my career at the chalkface. A student I felt I had failed. I’m a huge believer in the fact that one should acknowledge one’s failures and reflect on them. Too often we are encouraged not to even use the word “failure” but I think it’s important. All of us fail. It’s not a dirty word, it’s a part of a full life well-lived and an ambitious career. “Show me a man who has never made a mistake and I’ll show you one who has never tried anything” is a viral internet quote which – in various forms – has been attributed to pretty much everyone including Albert Einstein, Theodore Roosevelt and – my personal favourite – Joan Collins. Whoever said it (and today I truly cannot be bothered to try and find out who did so) was absolutely right.

My failures in tutoring have been few and far between. I say this not to boast about how great I am at what I do but rather to demonstrate how much easier and more powerful one-to-one tutoring is compared to classroom teaching. If you are an expert in your subject (by which I mean the academic content and the expectations of the relevant examinations), plus if you’re used to communicating with students of the age you’re trying to work with, tutoring is a breeze. One-to-one work is so phenomenally powerful that you really don’t need to be a genius at it for it to have a tangible impact. I like to think that I am good at what I do, but compared to the ambition of being a good classroom teacher, being a really good tutor is remarkably easy. Being a really good classroom teacher? Oh my goodness it’s hard. Like you wouldn’t believe. I cannot emphasise this enough. You wonder why teachers are leaving the profession in droves? I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t the salary.

Being good at what you do does not mean you will not fail sometimes. I keep a record of students who have discontinued (as opposed to those who have simply reached the end of their time with me because they have completed the course or finished their exams). There are not many, but given the sheer volume of students that I work with there are always going to be a few. This week I decided to reflect on each case and try to glean what – if anything – can be learned from them. It turns out, they all have one thing in common.

Generally speaking, the underlying reason why a student will discontinue working with me is that they remain reluctant to engage with the sessions. This is sometimes because the tutoring has been foisted on them, rather than something they have asked for themselves, or it’s sometimes when they realise that they will have to do some work during the sessions – a student may have asked for help, but the process is not going to work unless they are up for a challenge. I have worked with scores of students who are deeply reluctant to work independently outside of the sessions, and I always make it clear to the bill-payer that the impact of what I do will be limited when this is the case; yet so long as a student engages with the sessions during our one-to-one time together then it is still possible to have some kind of impact on them. By contrast, a student that really won’t engage with the learning process will not progress. It is often because they are afraid of failure and while I’m pretty experienced with helping a disaffected student to overcome this barrier, I accept that I simply cannot win them all.

So, what can I do to mitigate against such failures? After all, there is no point in reflecting on failure unless to improve. Well, something I have got better at is the early identification of students who are not responding well to the process. I would much rather get in touch with home and have this frank conversation than continue to take someone’s money when I believe that I am unlikely to have much of an impact on that student’s outcomes. Sometimes, that very frank conversation can jolt a student into realising that they have been resistant to the process and if they actually do wish to continue with the tutoring then it’s usually the catalyst towards engagement and progress – a turnaround in what might otherwise have been a failure. If the student does not want to keep working with me, it gives them the opportunity to say so, which is fine too.

Beyond that, another way in which I have tried to mitigate against the risk of failure is to specialise more and more in the areas I know best. I am a GCSE expert and now I am so much in demand then that’s what I offer. I work with students who are preparing for the GCSE or who have it in their sights and am no longer advertising myself as a tutor who works outside of this field: my expertise at working with that material and that age-range is the greatest and the more I am in my field of expertise, the more likely the process is to succeed. My advice would be to be wary of tutors who offer a bounteous range of subjects and/or levels: the best tutors hone their skills in one particular offering and become a genuine expert in what they do.

One of the things I tell my students is that mistakes are important. They inform me of their misunderstandings and misconceptions, so they’re a hugely important part of the tutoring process. Mistakes and failures make us better at what we do and we should embrace them and learn from them, not see them as a reflection on us as a person or a professional. It is not the failures that define us, but rather how we respond to them. Failures can make us more likely to succeed in the future.

Shooting the Moon

During the period when I was writing my PhD, my main source of temptation and distraction was an electronic card game called Hearts. This was before the turn of the 21st century and while there were indeed some strange men in some of the science departments talking about a mysterious and abstract notion called “The Internet”, most of us had not discovered it yet. So, in 1998, I had neither cat videos nor social media to distract me, but I did have Hearts. Traditional card games such as Hearts and Solitaire (which I have always called Patience) were included along with the Microsoft software on my laptop, and it turned out to be a genuinely powerful temptation when the alternative was doing some work.

Hearts is a simple game for four players (or you plus three players driven by the computer). It is an evasion-game, in which you must try to avoid collecting any cards in the suit of hearts, plus particularly avoid collecting the Queen of Spades, which carries a heavy penalty and is essential to avoid. Generally speaking, the more hearts you end up stuck with at the end of the game, the worse your score, plus if you end up with the Queen of Spades you are particularly in trouble. I discovered all of this gradually: the motto in my family has always been, “as a last resort, read the instructions”, so in the style to which I had become accustomed, I plunged into the game and learnt the rules through trial and error.

One day, I was having such a bad round that it became clear that I was going to lose every single hand. Amused, I continued on my losing streak, keen in fact to make sure that I did indeed lose every single hand, purely for entertainment. (Please remember – the alternative was neoplatonic metaphysics). It was through this throwing in of the towel that I discovered the phenomenon of “shooting the moon” – it turns out that that in Hearts, if you lose every single hand and thus collect every single card in the suit of hearts and you collect the Queen of Spades, you actually win that round. It’s a slam-dunk, all-in move, like placing all your chips on one roll of the dice. I never managed to replicate the phenomenon and so only ever managed to win through shooting the moon on that one, accidental occasion.

In the last couple of years, I have become of aware of an increasing number of people who are keen for their children to “complete the syllabus early”. Some parents have expressed their wish that the entire specification be covered by the end of Year 10 (good luck with that!) and others adamant that they want the most complex concepts taught early or taught from the beginning. I have no idea where this notion has come from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it found its origins on some online parent forum somewhere. Some high-achieving schools used to push this kind of rhetoric but with the shift in 2018 to specifications which are far more content-heavy, most schools find themselves struggling to complete the entire syllabus on time in some subjects, never mind early. The desire to push ahead also fails to take into account the rapid development that children are undergoing in their mid-teens. What a child is capable of towards the end of Year 11 may be poles apart from what they were capable of at the start of Year 10. On the other hand, it may not. It’s impossible to predict and – lest we forget – children are not machines.

One or two parents I have spoken to are so utterly wedded to the idea that the syllabus must be completed months ahead of the exam that they simply cannot be persuaded otherwise. Sometimes they claim that their child is vastly ahead in another subject – often mathematics – and express frustration that this is not the case in all. In the past, I might have accepted their take that their child was indeed in this position and argued that languages are different. Now I am married to a man with a mathematics degree, who rues the fact that he feels – on reflection – that he did not have the intellectual maturity to cope with the more nebulous fields of study that he was exposed to during his degree, it gives me pause. Is there honestly any subject in which a child or a young adult, however intelligent, can advance so rapidly without paying a price further down the line? Do they really understand what they are doing, or will it all come crashing down like the proverbial house of cards when they get a little further down the road? My feeling is that unless your child is some kind of savant (and to date I have never met one of those, so I’m telling you your child isn’t one of them) then you’re taking quite a risk with this approach.

Many parents who want their children to do well are concerned about the trickiest concepts in the syllabus. Sometimes they have feedback from their child’s schoolteacher that they have struggled with one or more of these more complex concepts. What some people find difficult to accept is that much of the time, it is not the tricky concept that is the problem – the problem lies deeper, in the foundational studies that their child may have been whisked through at high speed and left with tiny, often imperceptible gaps in their knowledge. Like the invisible holes in the enamel of a tooth, these gaps store up trouble for the future and before you know it you’ve got a gaping cavity in front of you. It is the rarest of occasions when this is not the case and indeed it is often the children who have historically done well in a subject that are most at risk. The better a child appears to be doing in a subject, the harder and faster they are pushed and the greater the number of tiny, undetectable cracks are formed which will make their presence known in the future. It’s the nature of the beast and nobody’s fault, but parents do need to trust a tutor who tells them that it’s time to go back to basics.

The overwhelming joy of what I do now is having the one-to-one time in which to genuinely test and shore up a child’s fundamental understanding. Asking them the same question in multiple different ways to ensure that they possess a genuine grasp of the topic, not a superficial ability to provide a text-book answer to an anticipated question worded in a style that they recognise. Asking them to define a grammatical term and give an example. Most of all, asking them to explain why a phrase or a sentence translates the way it does – does their translation stem from the ability to skate on thin ice or from a genuine grasp of the underlying principles?

You see, shooting the moon is exciting. But risking it all on one turn of pitch and toss is – as any recovered gambler will tell you – a seriously bad idea. Success comes from baby steps, strong foundations and a genuine grasp of how things are put together. Success in study is a marathon, not a sprint, and if a marathon runner started the race with the speed of a 100-metre sprinter, they would never make it to the end, never mind win. Early and fast does not mean better – quite the opposite. It can mean failure. So be patient and trust in the process. Shooting the moon is both elusive and risky and there are infinitely safer ways to win a round of cards.

Going viral

This week, the second of two manically busy weeks, I have been struck down with the nastiest cold I can remember having for years. Since I now work from home and am largely cushioned against the slings and arrows of outrageous viruses, the whole thing has been an unpleasant reminder of just how horrible it is to feel unwell. The last virus to enter our home was just after Christmas, an equally nasty bug which my husband succumbed to while I remained blissfully immune. “This is it,” I thought. “I have reached peak immunity. I am untouchable.” Oh, what a fool.

As I write this, I am coming out the other side and today is the first day I have started to feel like I’m turning the corner. The relief is enormous and having not been ill for quite some time I am reminded how utterly glorious a feeling it is to make it to the other side of a nasty bug and feel well again. Years ago, I listened rather obsessively to one of the first ever podcasts (before podcasts really became A Thing), which was created by Ricky Gervais, Steven Merchant and their erstwhile producer and general punchbag Karl Pilkington. I recall an episode when Karl remarked that it was good to feel ill sometimes, because it made you appreciate your usual condition of feeling well. Gervais immediately launched into a diatribe telling him that this made “no sense whatsoever” and (as was standard for the podcast set-up) berated him for his stupidity. I recall finding this deeply irksome, given that Gervais studied Philosophy at UCL (he switched away from Biology when – by his own admission – he found it “too hard”). Yet Gervais must have missed or slept through the lectures he no doubt received on Plato’s Socrates, whom I quote verbatim below. The scene is from Socrates’ final hours with his friends before he is executed by the Athenian state. Socrates has been held prisoner and was wearing leg irons, which his guards agreed to remove for his final hours:

Socrates sat up on the bed and drew up his leg and massaged it, saying as he did so, “what a strange thing it is, friends, this sensation which is popularly called pleasure. It is remarkable how closely it is connected with its conventional opposite, pain. They will never come to a man both at once, but if you pursue one of them and catch it, you are nearly always compelled to have the other as well … I had a pain in my leg from the chains, and now I feel the pleasure coming that follows it.”
Plato, “Phaedo“

Socrates is observing the fact that a release from discomfort is uniquely pleasurable. Think back to the last time when you were desperately hungry and how good it felt to eat, or when you were dreadfully thirsty and finally got hold of a drink. Pleasure and pain are the two sides of the same coin and – as Socrates points out in this scene – the pursuit of one inevitably needs to the other. (Remember that the next time you’re tempted to have one drink too many). So a positive spin on the distress of feeling unwell is to celebrate the rush of relief and appreciation that comes when you turn the corner into wellness.

This week has also been a salutary reminder of the different pressures we find ourselves under to continue to work when feeling unwell. At the moment, I feel this somewhat acutely for more than one reason. First and most obviously of all, I am now self-employed: sick pay is not an option. If I had cancelled all of the clients that I had booked in for a record-breaking number of sessions this fortnight, that would have lost me a lot of income – income which I will not get the chance to earn in the same way during July and August, when bookings tail off with the end of the academic year. Specialising in the GCSE means that I lose most of my clients overnight when their exams are complete, and even those in the lower years tend to take a break for the traditional summer holiday, so wedded are we to the Victorian model of schooling.

Beyond the obvious need for an income there is also the inescapable fact that my clients need me. Lots of Year 11s had booked in for booster sessions over the holiday, many of whom I cannot fit onto my books on a regular basis as often as they would like. They are frantic for help and the thought of letting them down was simply too awful. This is a mere fraction of the pressure I felt in the classroom, which I remember only too well. In particular I felt the unbearable weight of being the only subject expert in the school. On the one and only occasion in my entire 21-year career when I was simply too ill to set cover work, my HoD rang me up to ask me what he should do; I’m honestly not sure that would happen in any other job that is paid what classroom teachers are paid. But the reality of being a one-man subject specialist was that without me there in school, literally nothing could happen – no one had any idea what I did or how I did it. The pressure was genuinely immense and my school had a rude awakening as to just how much they had relied upon my goodwill after I left my job. My successor had a nasty accident which left him physically injured for several weeks. Being far more inclined towards self-preservation and resistant to external pressures than I was, he was not the sort of chap to be working on his laptop from a hospital bed nor indeed from his sick bed at home. As a result, no cover work was set for any of his classes. I’ll give you three guesses who ended up doing it.

Last year I wrote about the toxic culture of presenteeism, which affects both staff and students in schools. This is something I most certainly do not miss about being in the workplace. I may be at the mercy of the reality of being self-employed, but frankly I think I’d rather that than the guilt trip that taking a sick day sometimes carried with it. Teaching is very much a job where your presence is required and “working from home” is not an option, a fact which I suspect is one of the reasons behind the mass exodus of classroom teachers out of the profession; the pandemic was a tipping point, during which tens of thousands of teachers not only got their first ever taste of working from home, they also got to watch other professions adapt and adopt long-term changes to accommodate this convenience for its workforce. As teachers returned to the chalkface during the two years that finally drove me out of the job, I can’t have been the only member of the workforce who found themselves wondering exactly why I was dragging myself into school when my skills and qualifications meant that I could do pretty much anything else I wanted to from the comfort of my own home. The statistics on how many of us left in the same year that I did are frankly alarming and are an ongoing issue that the government needs to address; until they take a long, serious look at why so many teachers do not want to teach any more, I cannot see the situation improving.

Why is tutoring so effective?

As a teacher of 21 years as I have spent my day job teaching groups of 25, 30 or even more. I remain fascinated by the different dynamics of the one-to-one setting in comparison to the mainstream model.

One-to-one tutoring is remarkably powerful compared to what teachers can achieve in the mainstream classroom. As a tutor, I have taken students from the bottom of their class to the top; I have also witnessed other tutors do exactly the same for students who were at the bottom of my own classes. So what is it about what tutors do that can make us so effective?

The overwhelming benefit comes – in my opinion – from the opportunity to delve in and unpick a student’s understanding – or rather their lack of it. I usually uncover a whole raft of small misconceptions or gaps in a student’s knowledge within the first session. I imagine a student’s developing knowledge of a subject as like a wall; students who come to a tutor for help have often got bricks throughout that wall that are either misshapen or missing altogether, causing the whole structure to be at risk of collapse. This is where tutoring comes in: repointing, replacing and reinforcing the bricks as required.

During the process, a tutor can build a real relationship of trust. Some of these students are so convinced that they’re “rubbish” or simply can’t do it that the revelation that they can understand the concepts in front of them is remarkably powerful. It is not that a tutor necessarily knows their subject and better than the classroom teacher – it is the fact that a tutor has one-to=one time dedicated solely to one child’s needs; it is also that the tutor is (or should be) skilled in identifying and resolving a host of minor misconceptions or gaps in a child’s knowledge that are holding them back. The result can seem like a miracle.

There’s a lot of talk in education that teachers can and should be doing this – that through the right kind of differentiation every single child’s needs can be met by their classroom teacher. The truth? This is absolute nonsense. Of course classroom teachers can’t do that, as anyone who has been one will tell you. Of course children with particular needs can fall behind in the mainstream classroom – those who have missed a large amount of the curriculum through absence, those with SEND, those who have fallen behand for whatever reason and indeed those who are ahead of their peers.

Students who often suffer the most are the quiet ones – they can fall behind without being noticed; yet they can have enormous potential in a subject – again without being noticed. I’ve thought a lot in my work about non-verbal cues, those tiny indications that an individual student can give off when they’re not following something – a twitch of the mouth, a furrow of the brow. In tutoring, that’s the moment to pause and rewind: it’s an absolute joy to be able to do so. In the classroom, not only do I not have time to respond to every non-verbal cue but the reality is I am more than likely to miss the majority of them in the sea of 30 faces.

Like anything, there are of course downsides to the one to one setting as well as benefits. Tutoring can be at risk of lacking direction – you’re potentially not following a set curriculum, rather tailoring each session to the child, and as a result the sessions can seem to lack direction and it can be hard for inexperienced tutors to assess where to go next in terms of content. Similarly, how does one pitch one’s expectations and also how does one manage those of a client who’s paying for our services? Some parents see a tutor as the panacea for everything, not realising that what their child needs is – for example – some basic but regular help with learning their vocabulary. Of course, tutors can and should advise on the methodology, and there is definitely a place for a skilled subject-expert working on vocabulary with a child as part of their time together; but parents sometimes need to invest a little of their own time in their children’s progress too. Vocabulary learning should be done little and often (ideally in short bursts every single day); so unless you can afford to employ a full-time live-in tutor (and believe me, there are some families who actually do so!) then you need to spend some time on supporting your child with their learning.

One of the biggest issues to consider in the one-to -one setting is the risk of cognitive overload, especially in sessions lasting an hour. (I counsel clients against the hour-long model for this very reason). One-to-one tutoring is remarkably intense, both for the student and for the tutor, so we really do need to consider how to pace our sessions to mitigate against this. Cognitive overload is counter-productive and can make students even more anxious and overwhelmed; tutors need to consider how not to over-burden students’ working memory during the session whilst still keeping the level of challenge high.

I have enjoyed my 21 years at the chalkface immensely and my time in the mainstream classroom has gifted me with what I hope will be a long-lasting insight into the problems that my clients are facing when they come to me; it also grants me an insight into the challenges faced by teachers and my aim will always be to support them in the almost insurmountable challenges they face. Tutors should never undermine the classroom teacher, nor use resources that could ruin their lesson: there is nothing worse for a classroom teacher than handing out a resource and then hearing a child pipe up “I did this with my tutor at the weekend!” So don’t do that, please! In an ideal world, a tutor should be able to communicate with the classroom teacher to enable a powerful support network to form around a child who is struggling – I think we are a long way off teachers reaching that level of trust just yet (something I might explored in another post), but I hope to see it happen before the end of my career.