It is now reported that over a quarter of secondary school students get private tuition to help with exams and schoolwork.
The BBC reports that “More than a quarter of secondary school pupils in England and Wales have received private tuition, according to research published by the Sutton Trust. The highest levels are in London – with 41% of secondary pupils getting extra lessons outside of school, it says.
The social-mobility charity is calling for financial support for disadvantaged families to have access to tutoring.
“With costs of at least £25 per session, many parents can’t afford it,’ said charity founder Sir Peter Lampl.”
How schoolonline.co.uk is tackling this disadvantage
Here at schoolonline.co.uk we believe every child should have equal and free access to top quality exam learning materials. This is precisely why we have spent the last 3 years developing our exclusive exam tuition videos with the UK’s leading exam markers who are uniquely qualified to guide children through past exam papers.
The BBC reports that “Such extra lessons have been seen as a hidden factor in exam results – but because of the cost, [The Sutton Trust] warns this gives richer families an unfair advantage.”
We believe no one should have an advantage in achieving their best exam results simply because they can afford to pay for private tuition. All of our content is completely free of charge, and accessible across devices.
Eddy Chan, our founder and CEO, says “The costs are simply too high. Polls have frequently shown that parents have foregone a family holiday or have even gone into debt to try and give their children an advantage ahead of their exams.
The pursuit of exam success can be relentless and is a major reason why there is an enormous gulf developing between pupils from poorer backgrounds and their wealthier peers.
Research has shown that the most popular and effective way pupils revise is by turning to past papers. For all these reasons, I have spent the past three years developing and self-funding the creation of a free website wordpress-460168-1683384.cloudwaysapps.com, which provides digitally animated individual tutorials to every single maths question on SATs and GCSE past papers dating back to 2014.
Each question has been filmed from the method through to the solution and is hosted by Patricia Warner, a teacher who currently marks exam papers for exam boards.”
Why the future of exam tuition is online
One of the ways The Sutton Trust has suggested of making tuition accessible to all is through offering means-tested vouchers.
According to The BBC, “The Sutton Trust says there is evidence such individual tutoring can make a positive difference.
But it says there needs to be a way of making it available to the disadvantaged, such as providing means-tested vouchers. Trust founder and chairman Sir Peter Lampl said such a scheme would ‘enable lower-income families to provide tuition for their children’ in an environment in which ‘private tuition is widespread’.
Mary Bousted, joint leader of the National Education Union, said such subsidies for tuition could seem appealing but the money would be better spent increasing budgets for underfunded schools or pupil premium funding to support disadvantaged pupils.”
With over three quarters of the country currently not accessing private tuition, a voucher scheme may prove too costly in these difficult economic times. Not only this, it perpetuates a potentially outdated model of one-to-one tuition from an unregulated industry.
Our online tuition videos provide free and equal access to the UK’s leading exam professionals in an infinitely scalable model. Every child can have free access to top quality exam learning materials to help them achieve the very best result they can. Our tuition videos are bite-sized, fun and easy to access.
Not only that, we have access to the most up to date past exam papers and create new tuition videos as soon as these papers become available.
Our content is top quality, free, and accessible to every single one of the UK’s children.
