18 Jun

The Top 5 Things To Consider When Choosing A Tutor:

At Athena Tuition we work to find tutors for students every day, and here are a few general pointers which guide our decision making in selecting tutors:

1. Is the tutor DBS checked? 

   Getting a DBS check is a must for any tutor who has registered with an organisation or tutoring agency. Safety should always be paramount for your children, and that’s why this is number 1 on our list.

2. How much tutoring experience does this tutor have?

   We have come across applicants before who have received excellent grades in their own time at school but never actually tutored the subject to someone else before. It could also have been a while since they did similar work, and some subject exams have changed significantly over the last few years. Do your best to find a tutor who has tutored the subject recently, and ideally has lots of prior experience in the subject. Investigate – ask for details and be specific into their experiences/ teaching journey and how they handled their tutees.

3. Where are they based? 

   In our experience location matters a huge amount for tutoring to succeed. If a tutor lives far away from you, that makes it much harder to find viable slots to fit a tutoring session in. A long travel time can also mean that you kiss goodbye to the ability to quickly reschedule a lesson or to fit in extra sessions when exams approach.

4. Personality and teaching style match 

   Are you looking for someone who is more routine in their tutoring, or someone a bit more unconventional with lots of flair and charisma? Think about what kind of tutor your child would respond to best. Finding a good personality match between tutor and student is very useful to speed up a student’s learning.

5. Reliability and responsibility 

   This factor is really one of the most important in this list. Look for someone who displays reliability and responsibility in every aspect of their conduct. You’re ideally looking for someone who will work with your child until their exams or learning goal is met, and you really want someone who does their absolute best to arrive on time, hold lessons when they say they will and behave conscientiously to help their student achieve a good grade. It would be much better in our experience to get a conscientious and hard-working tutor who really cares about doing a good job than a tutor with just a glittering CV