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Vetting & Barring: Implications for Private Tutors (Part 2) Jon 24 February

We welcome a guest blogger to Beanbag today - Ian Phillips. Along with Barry Clark, he is co-author of 'Vetting and Barring: A practical guide to the new CRB / ISA scheme'. Ian has helpfully summarised the impact of ISA registration on private tutoring.

Well, it’s nearly here. The much-trailed and, it seems, much-feared Vetting and Barring Scheme is moving into view. July 26^th is the key date, when its public-facing functions kick-off.

For tutors, the impact is fairly clear. Under the law, if you are hired by a family direct, it’s a private arrangement and there is no legal need to register. If you work through an agency, so that the deal is done between that agency and the family, then you will need to register with the Independent Safeguarding Authority. The owner of your agency will commit a crime, as will you, if you don’t do this. And you’ll need to have a meaningful conversation with the agency as to who picks up the bill (around £80).

Even if you only tutor direct with families then you will still need to consider whether to register voluntarily. From the commercial perspective, if your competition is agency-led, then many families will inevitably be drawn towards those ads that carry the magic legend ‘ISA registered’.

It’s a new world, brave or otherwise. Make sure in plenty of time that you’ve decided what you want to do.

Thanks Ian! For Beanbag tutors, you will be relieved to know that we are not an Agency - so there is no need for you to get ISA registered. Be aware however that parents will increasingly look for ISA registration as a safety 'kite mark', so it may be worth getting registered in any case.

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Panorama look at child safety and the ISA Jon 09 February

Some of you may have seen the thought provoking BBC Panorama programme last night entitled 'are you a danger to kids'.

With more than nine million people potentially effected by the vetting and barring scheme, it is something that will touch many people's lives. Certainly those who come into regular contact (more than once a week) with children and vulnerable adults will be expected to obtain ISA registration. We explained the impact on tutors in a previous blog post.

Inevitably the programme touched upon issues around how the ISA will evaluate people - they will be expected to cover not only criminal records but allegations, complaints, tip-offs and suspicions (whether proven or not). An interview with John Pinnington highlighted the distress that unproven allegations can have on an individual, their family and their career.

We will be very much in the hands of the ISA's two hundred strong team of case workers to make the right decisions. We will also be expecting them to safeguard potentially damaging personal data - no computers to be left on trains, please.

So what's our view at Beanbag? Well as parents we welcome anything that reduces the risk that those with evil intentions ever get access to our children. As individuals, we are equally concerned about the human rights issues posed.

The debate will run and run, and I am sure that we will be writing about this again.

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Beanbag welcomes its 2,000th Tutor Jon 26 January

Very good news from Beanbag Towers.

Increasing numbers of tutors across the UK have been joining our website of late, and today we said hello to our 2,000th tutor, Amy Fleming from Edinburgh.

When we set up this website it was because we wanted to improve the accessibility of tutors across the UK, giving parents the opportunity to find tutors online as an alternative to the traditional tutoring agency route.

Not resting on our laurels, we are keen to hear from tutors and parents on what they think of the website and how we can improve its usefulness to them. Please email me at jonellis@beanbaglearning.com I am really interested in what you have to say.

Best wishes from the Beanbag team!

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Getting Recommendations Jon 25 January

Now that we are rapidly approaching 2,000 UK-based tutors listed on Beanbag getting yourself noticed is becoming more important. Tutors have asked us for tips on improving their ranking in location and subject based search results.

You won't be surprised to read that tutor rankings depend on a number of factors, but that parental / client recommendations are very important. Why - well that's what customers tell us that they are most interested in. Indeed we find that tutors with the most complete profiles (including a photograph and a little about themselves) along with recommendations attract the most page views and resulting enquiry emails.

Getting recommendations is very simple. Ask a satisfied customer to log-in to Beanbag, locate your profile, clicking on the 'Recommend' feature. Simple isn't it?

Finally, please can we point tutors again to our recent blog post about email communications. Please ensure that your email is set up to receive our emails - if you don't, then all of the effort that goes into setting up your profile will go to waste, leaving our customers frustrated.

Happy tutoring!

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Every child a reader Jon 11 January

Evidence if any were needed on the effectiveness of one to one tuition was reported in the Times last week.

Research by the Institute of Education, London University has analysed the performance of children with the lowest level of achievement at the end of Year One (aged six) at ten schools. Children that received one to one reading recovery support under the £10m Every Child a Reader programme found that they are now on track to reach the expected level by the end of primary school.

They found evidence that these children made momentous progress within a few months of intensive tuition, and were ahead of their peers by about half a level in reading and a third of a level in writing by the end of year four.

What was interesting about the IOE's research was that it focused on economically disadvantaged children, with just over half taking free school meals, often with English as a second language.

We are pleased to see this initiative opening up the opportunity of private tutoring to all - and would love to see private tutoring make more of an impact in the public sector.

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Problems connecting parents and tutors Jon 08 January

We have been conducting some research on how successful this website is in matching parents / clients and tutors.

A very useful bit of feedback has been that some parents complain of no response from tutors to their tutoring requests. We have been looking at the root cause of this and find that there are two issues:

1. Our emails are sometimes being routed to the tutor's spam folder. In this day and age there is so much email spam that genuine emails also get lost in spam folders. There are a couple of solutions for tutors to address this: marking emails from Beanbag (e.g. when the join the website) as 'not spam' and adding beanbaglearning.com to their email address list.

2. Some tutors are no longer tutoring and decide not to answer the email. If this is the case, then tutors can edit their profiles to (temporarily if needs be) show that they are no longer tutoring, or ask us to delete their profiles altogether. If we find that tutors regularly do not answer emails we reserve the right to take their details off the website.

In the meantime, we will be introducing new email solutions that dramatically reduce the risk that our emails get included as spam. Needless to say, we will be keeping a close eye on this going forward.

If you are a parent / client and have feedback about this website, please feel free to email me at jonellis@beanbaglearning.com or via Get Satisfaction.

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