Tutoring Primary School Kids - a worthwhile option?

At this time of year this is something many parents consider. I think that the answer to this one depends upon your reasons for believing it necessary.

Also, factors will come into play such as:

The age of the child

The ability of the child

The motivation of the child

I think it is important to consider ability and motivation. Bottom line – if your child is not likely to be able to respond to extra tuition because they find school work unappealing, boring or just too difficult then you will probably be wasting your money. You may feel better but if the results are not going to be forthcoming, it probably isn’t worth it.

When a child is young, 4 – 8 years old I think that there are very few, if any, circumstances where tutoring is the best thing to do. Usually, this sort of approach is in response to a feeling that “my child is behind at school”. Therefore, if they are given some additional 1:1 support, then it has to be a good thing, right? Not necessarily. I often tell parents at my school, if you want to prevent the need for coming to see me in year 2 or year 3 with this sort of a concern, get reading with and talking to your child, or helping them to write fun stories, play at spellings, learn addition and multiplication facts from the beginning of formal schooling at age 4. With reading and sharing stories, right from the first weeks of life works best!

Time is the most precious commodity we can give our children. It is also perhaps the most difficult. If we give a little, and often, right from the word ‘go’ it is likely to be a) more effective and b) considerably cheaper than paying out for expensive tutoring further down the line.

Liaising with the school in terms of how you can best support your child at home is likely to be an effective way of devising the right sort of program or strategies for the needs of your child.

Remember – tutors are in it to make money. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas and tutors are almost bound to promote their services in terms of usefulness for your child. That doesn’t mean that there are never circumstances where additional tutoring is useful, there are. It does though mean that you need to be realistic about your expectations and wary of ‘throwing money at the problem’.

So when can tutoring be a good idea then?

I think that there are circumstances where 1:1 tuition can be beneficial to a child. Top of my list for these would be preparation for entrance examinations or other sorts of tests.

I say this because often the sorts of skills required for these are not really taught as part of the national curriculum. Non verbal and verbal reasoning tests would spring to mind as two examples of just such tests. They require a specific approach to a particular sort of problem solving and practice at the technique itself can be of come use in terms of giving a child the best chance.

So, if you are in area where your child has the chance to sit 11+ tests to gain admission into a Grammar school, or if you are considering sending them to an independent school, then 1:1 or even small group tuition could be of some use.

Even here though, most of the independent schools are able to provide you with past papers and there is a multiplicity of materials available to buy at places such as W.H.Smiths. So, if you have the time and the confidence to tutor your child yourself, it can be done easily enough. There is nothing guaranteed by paying for it.

School Dinners anyone?

How can you be sure that school dinners are of a decent standard?

We are all familiar with the Jamie Oliver effect, I guess! One thing that happened after the outcry surrounding his TV programmes was that the national food standards agency imposed new strict standards on school kitchens, limiting the amount of saturated fats offered to children as well as eradicating processed foods. So, in terms of choices available to kids nowadays, it has never been better.

What will vary is the quality of the individual catering consortia and, more pertinently, the individual cooks. All of the standards in the world will not improve things for children if the cook can’t actually ‘do what it says on the tin’! (i.e. – cook)

Of course another by-product of the Jamie Oliver factor has been the tendency for a lot of kids to go over to packed lunches which are, of course, entirely unregulated!