The Weekend edition of the Financial Times had a major feature on the rise of private tutoring in this country that is well worth a read for anyone with an interest in the subject.
For the most part it backs up our own experiences and research in the first six months of running Beanbag, though it does seem to suffer from some significant exaggerations in places (1.5 million tutors! £100 per hour!).
The big point it makes that we have always come up against is that their does still seem to be a certain amount of secrecy and stigma around tutoring despite its widespread use. Parents don't like to admit their children are receiving tutoring and schools are loathe to admit their pupils are getting help elsewhere as it rather undermines their own claims of academic excellence!
The article also points out the huge range in the people who tutor. Even here on Beanbag amongst our almost 600 tutors we have a range from undergraduates offering help with GCSEs to former teachers with decades of experience and pretty much every level in between.
Something that is mentioned in the article that came out very clearly back when we originally researched the market for Beanbag was the issue of instilling confidence in the students. This is something that is a real strength of one-to-one tutoring which is difficult to achieve in a class of 30 plus at school.
All-in-all its a pretty balanced article, not exactly an entirely glowing endorsement of the world of private tutoring but certainly not negative either and its interesting that the issue is seen to carry sufficient weight to warrant such a high profile article.
You can read the article on the Financial Times website for free.
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