At the end of last month, the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) announced it was going to recruit one-to-one tutors on a massive scale.
By October 2010, it is looking to recruit 100,000 tutors to provide extra one-on-one support for 600,000 pupils struggling in maths and English.
Tutors will be paid between £25 and £30 per hour for 10 lessons. It’s all part of a £138m government programme set out by Schools Secretary Ed Balls in the government’s latest White Paper, Your Child, Your Schools, Our Future.
Each Local Authoritywill be in charge of recruitment, and some may be offering training to would-be tutors. There has already been a useful booklet published for tutors interested in working in schools.
Currently, only tutors with Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) or with other teaching qualifications in the HE or FE sectors are eligible to apply (they can do so here).
However, I’ve spoken with a contact at the TDA who’s suggested that graduates with good degrees in maths or English (or strongly related subjects such as Media Studies) may also become eligible in the future.
This is presumably due to the tutor recruitment problems first outlined in the PriceWaterhouseCoopers interim report on the government’s tutoring pilot in December last year. The interim report mentioned that the DCSF was
“Undertaking research into the private tuition market to further understand the scope and scale of this market and the potential it has to fulfil future tuition requirements.”
The TDA is currently considering running some pilot studies with tutors who have degrees but no formal teacher training. If this is you, then watch this space for further updates!
It is not only graduates who have difficulty getting teaching posts.There are also some older teachers who have become redundant or have had to retire early who need work as well. They have just as much to offer in the One- to -One scheme as the “brightest” graduates. The point is that any good teacher “worth their salt” should be able to be valuable teachers of basic Maths and English skills in Keys Stages 2 and 3, where a lot of help is needed. The administration of the One-to-One scheme by some schools leaves a great deal to be desired at present. Some of them are making a shambles of this. For example some teachers in some areas have been offered work,and have not heard any more about it from the schools concerned. Some schools want to do it on Saturdays and Sundays,and sometimes pupils are not too keen to do this. Some schools are getting their own teachers to do it before or after the school day. This adds to the workload of the teachers concerned ,and is unfair because teachers seeking work cannot get a look in . Some areas have a “glut” of teachers , due to so many seeking work as One-to-One tutors. Today it i seven harder to get work as a supply teacher than it used to be.Many authorities do not keep lists of supply teachers anymore,and the agencies have muscled in again. In South East Surrey ,for example, there is now a WAITING LIST for prospective supply teachers .In view of the fact that the Price Waterhouse Cooper report claims that in many areas there is a shortage of teachers for One-to-One, it would be good to know exactly where these shortage areas are. Is this information in the report ?