The Problem with Tutoring — and How We’re Helping Fix It
By Breanna Lee
Education and its problems have interested me for a long time now. I've done my fair share of studying and have been a private tutor for more than a decade. The bottom line, as all educators know, is that you can't be kicking around in the system for very long without noticing some pretty big issues.
I've always had a difficult relationship with the idea of private tutoring. I want students to get the support they need, but without tutoring being available to every student, the extra help provides affluent students with an advantage that matters.
High school is about ranking and one ranking in particular - the ATAR. Tutoring is a tool for unlevelling the already mountainous playing field for students. It makes the HSC a pay-to-win game.
The available solutions are not appealing. If you try to make tutoring cheaper so that it's accessible to more students you have to make huge sacrifices. Some companies do this by having one tutor teach multiple students simultaneously, recreating the fractured attention and impersonal lessons of a classroom. Other companies reduce costs by being online only, sometimes using offshore tutors paid less than the cost of a coffee per lesson. Others still reduce the workload on tutors by sticking to prewritten curriculums which fail to address the student's real needs. Cheap or free community programs attempt to bridge the gap, but ultimately can't compete at the same level as the big players. What can we do?
You could turn to freelance tutors. There’s a lot of variety when it comes to freelancers. You can pay everything from $15 per hour to $150, and be taught by a high schooler or an HSC exam writer. Your tutor might be the best in Australia, or they could be doing more harm than good. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for students and parents to distinguish between good and bad teaching. By the time hundreds of dollars have been spent and the report card comes in, it's often too late. What’s more, freelance tutors are almost totally unregulated and most operate without any sort of safety measures or quality control.
In 2022, I founded Future Tutor, a tutoring company which combines the best of both worlds and tries to make a dent in the inaccessibility of tutoring. By operating as a team, our tutors can teach and improve together to maintain a high quality of pedagogy while providing stability to our students. Managerial oversight ensures that when tutors leave the business, which is very common for freelancers who finish their university degrees, another suitable tutor can be brought up to speed. All the while, lessons are one-on-one and tailored to each student’s individual needs.
If this sounds pretty expensive, it's because it is. We keep some costs low through measures like home and library visits rather than having an office, but good tutors cost good money—that's why we pay ours more than 80% of our session fees, despite the industry standard being about 30%.
We’re dedicated to providing fantastic teaching to our students, but this alone won’t prevent us from contributing to the same rifts emerging in education. While many tutoring companies offer lessons to help students win scholarships, very few offer scholarships for tutoring itself. About 5 tutoring scholarships are awarded annually in NSW, amounting to one for every 165,000 students. At Future Tutor we want to play our part in providing disadvantaged students with more opportunities. We are currently accepting applications for our Term 2 2023 scholarships.
We're here to change the tutoring industry for the better. We stand for children's wellbeing, excellent quality education, paying tutors fairly, and combating the rat race culture of modern education instead of contributing to it.
To find out more about Future Tutor, see how we do tutoring differently, or enrol for tutoring, go to https://futuretutor.com.au.