Although the survey results don’t appear to be up yet on their website, eGov monitor covered the story yesterday.

In line with the rules of the VBS, 88% of those questioned thought that vetting should take place where the activity is weekly or more. However, 66% supported vetting where the activity is monthly or more, 66% wanted schools to check authors and other similar visitors to schools, and 61% said that parents involved in school exchanges should also register with the VBS.

Ironically, these are the very areas of the VBS which were scaled back last December amid a storm of protests from parents, teachers and volunteers that the government had gone too far. At the time, the seven main representative organisations for school and college leaders wrote a letter to Ed Balls saying that the newly introduced system was “disproportionate to risk”. The result was a government climbdown involving a reduction in the number of adults who would have to register from around 11 million to 9 million.

It is hard to know what to make of the new Fairplay For Children survey. Jan Cosgrove, its National Secretary, is one of the few outspoken supporters of increasing the scope of the VBS. Sitting firmly on the other side of the fence are campaigners such as Josie Appleton and the Manifesto Club. Personally, I’m impressed by the views of Mark Easton, BBC News’ home editor, who has described the VBS as “a child of moral panic” and “a textbook case of how media hype, political expediency and bureaucratic process lead to conclusions that can later appear disproportionate”.

Last month, we published our own survey which suggested that there was widespread opposition to the VBS among private tutors, for whom signing up is voluntary.

We’re now doing some research into the risk of child abuse within the private tuition context. We’ll be asking questions such as How big is the risk? Is there any evidence that a voluntary system for tutors will actually reduce the risk of abuse, or is it just something good for the tutor’s CV? Could the VBS actually increase the risk of child abuse? John Adams (expert in risk compensation, Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London and Honorary Member of the Institute of Risk Management) recently raised this spectre in his blog:

Leaving aside the mind-boggling expense and bureaucracy required to perform this feat [introduction of the VBS], its effect is almost certain to be perverse. A CRB check will be seen as an insurance policy; behaviour that might previously have aroused suspicion is now less likely to be questioned because some superior authority has certified the suspect as “safe”.

John Adams states on his website that he is “intrigued by the persistence of attitudes to risks” and laments “disputes about issues for which conclusive evidence is lacking”. Quite. We’re hoping to get some more evidence together on the subject of risk in private tuition, for the benefit of parents, tutors and other interested parties. Watch this space!

Gordon Brown and Ed Balls are looking pretty cheery about the government’s one-to-one tuition programme – but will it work?

The programme is aimed at helping struggling children in England’s state schools. In July last year I reported on how the government is trying to recruit 100,000 one-to-one tutors for the purpose, and at the time, PriceWaterhouseCoopers brought to light the problems involved in recruiting such a large number of tutors.

Well, yesterday PriceWaterhouseCoopers published their final evaluation of the tuition pilot scheme, and the problems with tutor recruitment haven’t gone away. Only 37,000 tutors out of the proposed 100,000 have decided to sign up. They state,

The number of pupils receiving one-to-one tuition is still below the allocation of 10% of pupils per pilot local authority. Head teachers/school pilot leaders suggested this was partly a consequence of the ongoing challenges around recruitment.

Back in July, I discussed the recruitment issues with a Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) official who suggested that graduates with good degrees in maths or English (or strongly related subjects such as Media Studies) may be eligible to become tutors for the scheme in the future.

This sounds like a sensible idea: it would provide rewarding employment to graduates struggling to find work, and at the same time provide real support to pupils who are struggling at school. As my previous posts have emphasized, the most comprehensive research into tutoring demonstrates that the ‘active ingredient’ of tutoring is not the expert teaching skill of the tutor – it is rather the creation of a space for active pupil contributions which makes all the difference. Therefore, tutoring is something that intelligent graduates can certainly handle without requiring them to undertake conventional teacher training.

However, whether the government would ever consider this feasible or acceptable to the teaching profession or general public is another matter.

So far, 52 local authorities have signed up, and both the concept and the website are impressive. A typical secondary school might expect to pay only about £250 per year to advertise all its teaching and support vacancies. Job-seekers use the service for free.

Yet all the British media, including the TES, have fallen silent, and it’s not hard to see why: if the Government annexes this huge source of advertising revenue for themselves, it poses yet another threat to the beleagured British newspapers.

Google News, which collates all references to news items, has only five references to the Schools Recruitment Service, one of which is an article on a journalism website. This article links to an angry blog post by the editor of The Northern Echo, Peter Barron, who states,

I can’t help thinking that there’s a conflict between what the Prime Minister says about the importance of local papers, and one of his ministers rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of vital advertising revenue being taken away from those same local newspapers and diverted into a Government portal … The irony is that the Schools Minister is actually sending out press releases to local newspapers across the country, asking them to advertise (for free) the Government’s new on-line service which is designed to undermine their businesses.

The Schools Recruitment Service has the potential to revolutionize the way teachers apply for jobs in schools. However, whether it can gather enough support from the educational community remains to be seen.

Under the Government’s new Vetting and Barring Scheme, every adult who has regular contact with children outside their family will have to register on a state database. Each individual will then be assessed by officials in terms of the risk they pose to children.

This is simply not true. There are many circumstances where registration on the ‘state database’ will not be required – one massive industry being private tuition. That’s right: self-employed private tutors who are employed by parents are not required to register on the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) database.

The ISA needs desperately to make its role much clearer in order to prevent both media and public over-reaction.

But as far as private tutors are concerned, it’s very much business as usual. As we’ve tried to make clear all along, self-employed tutors neither need a so-called CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) check, nor do they need to belong to the new ISA database. Although it may well be in a tutor’s interests to voluntarily register with the ISA (to demonstrate an added level of credibility to parents), it is not a legal requirement.

When compiling information for our e-book on tutoring, we contacted the ISA for guidance on this topic. John Sheridan of the DCSF clarified the relationship between the ISA and the private tuition sector for us, and a short interview with him can be found in our e-book. This is what he had to say:

It’s true that self-employed regulated activity providers working for parents will not be required to register with the ISA, because parents will not be required to check these individuals’ ISA registration status. Parliament decided in effect that it would not be appropriate to criminalise parents for not making checks, and it follows that there should be no requirement on the regulated activity provider to register. The online check will be quick and free, and we hope that market pressure from parents wanting to do the check will, over time, lead increasingly to self-employed providers registering with the ISA.

Any tutor or parent who needs to obtain more information on this topic can download our free e-book here.

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!

In March, the UK Government Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) published its own guide for tutors who are going to be working one-to-one with children in the state sector in England.

It’s all part of the new DCSF intiative called Making Good Progress which aims to offer one-to-one tuition to children who are falling behind in English and Maths. The target is ambitious: to have one-to-one tuition available to 300 000 state sector pupils a year in both of these subjects. (There is currently a serious shortfall in the number of tutors recruited for this scheme, and there is even a possibility of recruiting tutors from the private tuition sector.)

Having recently completed our own guide to private tutoring, I’ve read the government guidance for tutors with interest.

Aside from our own guide, I think it contains the clearest advice on the nuts and bolts of tutoring I’ve yet seen, and the strategies it details could easily be applied in the wider world of private tuition.

Of particular note are:

• a list of principles and teaching strategies for tutors (headings: enquiring into prior knowledge - drawing pupils into a modelled process - prompting pupils to share their thinking - what to say when a child is stuck - praise - how to draw attention to weaknesses and errors)
• a model tutorial teaching sequence (introduction – remember - model - try - apply - secure - review and reflect)
• 30 pages of sample one-to-one lessons for maths and English at various levels

You can download a PDF of the guide from the DCSF website here.