The Tutor Pages’ new report Elocution in the new Britain: Trends in private tuition received widespread media coverage yesterday, for example in the Independent, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. It also attracted attention across BBC local radio and on television, featuring on ITV’s Loose Women.

As well as highlighting the increased interest in elocution tuition, our report gives a snapshot of the current state of the UK private tuition industry. Based on over 20,000 enquiries sent through thetutorpages.com in 2011, the report features a ‘top ten’ of the most popular requests across academic, languages and music/arts categories. For example, it seems that Chinese is now as popular as German for language study, and that piano and singing are currently at the top of musical tuition requests nationwide.

The report also highlights ‘trending’ areas – those subjects which on average receive more enquiries per tutor than any others. Interestingly, these trending areas are often vocational in some respect, including subjects such as elocution, accounting, AutoCAD, architecture and law.

Our report really does have something of interest for everyone. To download a copy (in PDF version) click here, or access it at the end of our most recent press release at www.thetutorpages.com/media-room

On average, tutors registered with The Tutor Pages charge something between £15 and £45 per hour. These are reasonable rates – from both the tutor’s perspective and the parent/ student’s – and are rates chosen by the tutors themselves. They are clearly the kind of rates that the market dictates.

In one of the most ludicrous articles on private tuition I’ve yet seen, the Daily Mail discusses ‘super-tutors’ who charge ‘up to £300 an hour’. The article’s conflation of the ‘very particular indeed’ with the ‘industry in general’ might actually be amusing if it didn’t make a nonsense of most people’s experiences of private tuition. It is clearly designed to titillate the readership.

If you don’t wish to read the article in full, here are some extracts which I’ll leave you to cringe over:

“tutors exist in a world in which clients have so much money, their fees are almost irrelevant. Indeed, the more these parents are charged, the happier they are.”

“Highly qualified Oxbridge graduates are turning their backs on banking and deciding to become tutors instead as they discover they can name their own price.”

“For as everyone from Kazakh billionaires to Oscar-winning actors knows, if you want a tutor to brag about, they have to be British.”

“Clearly, every tutor hopes to be taken up by a super-rich family, such as one governess [...] who was chaperoning Middle Eastern princesses.“

Finally, would it be the Daily Mail if there wasn’t something salacious?:

“An awful lot of mothers hire the tutor for themselves, not the children at all, and have affairs with them in the holidays while their husbands are working.”

The Good Schools Guide is celebrating 25 years with its most comprehensive edition yet. Currently, they’re offering an introductory £9.99 subscription which will let you access all of their online content.

As well as reviewing schools up and down the country, The Good Schools Guide is one of the few publications interested in shining a light on the private tuition industry in the UK. As an aside, The Tutor Pages is one of its recommended websites for private tuition.

Recently, they published a list of 7 questions to ask before deciding to employ a tutor, which I’ve included below. It’s sound and sensible advice – exactly what we’ve come to expect:

“If you’re considering a tutor, avoid an exam horror story by asking these key questions first:

1. What are your qualifications? There’s no formal accreditation for tutors – anyone can call themselves one. So ask for chapter and verse: are they a student, an unemployed graduate, or a former teacher with bags of experience?
2. How do you keep up to date on the latest curriculum or exam requirements? Your tutor may have a PhD in astrophysics, but that won’t help your child prepare for grammar school reasoning tests. Make sure the tutor you choose is an expert in preparing for the exam your child will be taking.
3. Are you CRB checked? Over the top if your tutor comes with glowing praise from your friends, but worth asking if they’re unknown and you can’t check them out in other ways.
4. What’s it going to cost? Pin down how much, how often and whom you pay. Does it go to the tutor? To the agency? Do you have to pay extra for the tutor’s travel? What happens if you have to cancel a lesson?
5. Do I have to sign a contract? If so, check what you are committing to. Some agencies try to tie you into a ‘package’ of lessons before you’ve even met the tutor – beware!
6. Can I talk to some of your existing clients? Ask for phone numbers and make sure to ring them.
7. Do you offer small group instruction? Some magical tutoring happens in settings of three or four pupils – and it can save you a bundle in fees. It won’t suit everyone, but can work well for grammar school exams and other school entrance tests.”

You can find a tutor in a wide variety of disciplines at thetutorpages.com. The site, which is free, allows users to compare tutors in a particular postcode based on hourly rate, teaching experience and availability. It also provides lists of online tutors and suggested reading material, with prices from £20 an hour to £35 an hour for A-level French tuition.

It’s not a bad summary, and I like the fact that the author, James Charles, has emphasized that parents and students need to compare a variety of factors (not just price) when making a decision on which tutor to contact.

For that reason, I’m very pleased to mention a new maths resource created by Colin Beveridge (Tutor Pages tutor and (in his words) ex-NASA maths geek) and his award-winning graphic designer brother Stuart. It’s a colourful little introduction to algebra that aims to turn traditional maths textbooks on their head. Not only is it a snip at at £3.70 (incl. p&p), Colin and Stuart are donating 10% of all profits to the Disaster Emergency Committee.

Why not check out the Little Algebra Book website, or read Colin’s article about it on The Tutor Pages?

The article, How to sing like a star,suggests that, ‘If singing for Simon Cowell in front of a TV audience of millions sounds too daunting’ there are plenty of ways ‘to go and hit the high notes without all of that pressure’.

The Tutor Pages has also recently been reviewed by The Good Web Guide. You can check out the review here.

The ISA was set up under the Labour government as a measure to try to protect young people and vulnerable adults by placing around a quarter of the UK’s adult population on a database. The ISA’s Vetting and Barring Scheme (VBS) received severe criticism from many quarters and from diverse perspectives, including:

• a community perspective (‘vetting breaks down informal relations of trust and judgement between adults and children, and ultimately damages child welfare’);
• a civil libertarian perspective (‘vetting is an unjustified intrusion of a centralised state, and assumes all adults are guilty until proven innocent’);
• a financial/ workability perspective (‘no estimate has been made of the likely number of children who will be saved from abuse, and the money could be better spent on improving social work’); and
• a security perspective (‘if (unproven) database information is released in error, it will be personally, socially and financially ruinous for individuals’).

Despite the disadvantages of the VBS, some of those involved in private tuition saw it as a useful measure to replace the so-called CRB (Criminal Records Bureau) disclosure certificate which, although generally accepted as valid for 3 years, is by its nature out-of-date the moment it is issued.

An alternate bureaucratic measure now being rolled out across the UK is the enactment of what the media have termed ‘Sarah’s Law’. In the words of the government guidance on this, the so-called ‘child sex offender disclosure scheme’ means that ‘If you are worried about someone in your child’s life, you can get them checked by the police to see if they have a record of child sexual offences’ and that ‘anyone can ask for a police check on someone they are worried about’.

On the face of things, this may seem like a reasonable alternative for parents to check the background of a tutor before employing them. However, I can see three major flaws in such an approach:

1. for parents to actually make an application, they have to visit their local police station in person with some ID (such as a passport or driver’s licence) – how many parents are seriously going to want to do that?
2. the government guidance on this consistently states that the system is set up for individuals to enquire about ‘someone they are worried about’. A private tutor you’ve never met before is not someone you are worried about – he or she is simply someone you don’t know about. How many police forces up and down the country are going to be happy about processing possibly multiple applications on a single tutor on a ‘just in case’ basis, when they are no grounds for suspicion in the first place?
3. the final, related and perhaps most important point is that all enquiries about an individual will undoubtedly be recorded by the police. Are innocent tutors really comfortable with the idea of multiple checks being processed on them by the authorities? Since the system is set up for the investigation of those whom members of the public are ‘worried about’, any application is likely to result in bureaucrats deciding that the activities of these individuals may need to be monitored. In an even stronger sense than with the VBS – because this new disclosure scheme is an active rather than passive process – innocent people may suddenly find that they are under suspicion.

Ultimately, as we pointed out in our interim statement on child protection in the private tuition industry, the vast majority of child sex offenders are not known to the authorities at all. This means that bureaucratic measures such as the VBS or Sarah’s Law will always be comparatively weak tools in the fight against abuse. Concerned parents must instead take responsibililty themselves for the welfare of their children. Measures such as asking for two references from a tutor and following them up, and sitting in on lessons or leaving the door open are a sensible start.

Concerned parents are encouraged to read our Safety Advice, the link to which is prominently displayed on our homepage. Further advice on this topic will be available soon, but in the meantime, we recommend the Stop it Now! campaign, including their 5-minute introductory video.

Shortly after our launch (at the beginning of 2008) we started publishing statistics on the number of enquiries received by our registered tutors.  Since April 2008, the total number of enquiries to tutors has now just topped 20,000 (July 2010 figures). This figure excludes the many enquiries made by students after clicking through from our site to a tutor’s own website.

Our detailed statistics help us to ensure that all tutors registered with us are receiving a good number of enquiries.

For more details, just see our monthly statistics page.

The RCM Woodhouse Centre has been one of our consistent supporters since we launched in early 2008, and I was really pleased to meet the students and graduates, not least those who are already using our services to find work.

As well as insightful presentations given by the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), the Musicians Answering Service (MAS) and others, four RCM alumni came to open a window on their current careers.

So, how does a musician become successful in today’s increasingly harsh economic climate?

From the four alumni presentations, two important lessons stood out for me:

• don’t limit your possibilities with a narrow view of success. As a musician, having a rigid idea of what success means for you is almost a recipe for disaster. All four RCM alumni demonstrated an openness to new challenges, and welcomed opportunities that were perhaps initially only in their peripheral vision. Despite the private ambitions they nurture, they haven’t closed their eyes to the bigger picture. Phillip Neil Martin, one of the speakers, demonstrates what’s possible: according to the PRS website, his work ‘crosses the divide from experimental concert music, electronics and installations to fashion, film and new technology, concept and artistic direction, regularly collaborating with fashion designers, filmmakers, architects, artists and dancers’.
• become an educator to complete the circle. Al Mobbs, one of the other contributing alumni, is a bassist, writer, producer, manager and label boss. But like his fellow presenters, he also put strong emphasis on teaching, education outreach and ‘giving something back’. The music business is a two-way street, and all four speakers acknowledged the phenomenon of planting seeds which will one day grow into opportunities. Not only does teaching keep you part of the community, it keeps you sharp and learning all the time from your pupils.

Looked at in this light, The Tutor Pages is another opportunity for musicians to get their names and their skills out there. It’s another chance to showcase  talent, and to become receptive to opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist. And with recent improvements allowing tutors to upload music and video files (see an example here), there’s never been a better time to sign up.

(Many thanks to Howard Felton and to Diana Roberts for organising this event, and to Maria Marchant and Robin Ashwell of the Sacconi Quartet who also gave talks).