I have been attending the training sessions for One to One tuition in Brighton. They have been quite useful, mainly because it’s nice to chat with other tutors about their practice. Apparently it may be difficult to find work if you haven’t done these trainings and most schools do check this.
It is interesting that they are accepting tutors in all subjects, so you don’t necessarily have to be an English or Maths tutor. Although I think this may be difficult for some tutors and the student’s may suffer if they don’t have an experienced tutor in their subject. Many tutors seem to finding work through word of mouth or their children go to the school they work at.
So far I have done the separate reading and writing courses, which I found very useful. The other two courses I’ve done are the ‘One to One Introductory’ course which would be useful if you were coming to the tutoring for the first time or were teaching a subject you hadn’t taught before. The ‘Addressing Achievement in One to One tuition’ looks at teaching methods and emphasises the need to be a reflective teacher (something we should do anyway), but it’s nice to be reminded. The main focus is adapting teaching as you go along and not to simply have your ten lessons ready as you would as a class teacher. You need to look at what individual students are interested in and what they specifically need to learn.
I usually focus on improving students’ sentence structure, punctuation, spelling (giving them a list to work through at home), vocabulary and expression even though these do not carry the most weight mark-wise in English – but they are more quantifiable. They look at a range of different texts and I check their exercise books in other subjects to see that they are applying what they have learnt.
Some of us were asking why you need to do the ‘Child Protection’ training if you have already done this at your school. You need this to get the One to One stages one and two certificates. They have cancelled the dates to do this training in Brighton but I have been told that some new ones will be added shortly. To get info on what trainings are available here are the websites:
http://www.school-portal.co.uk/GroupCalendar.asp?GroupID=664856
http://www.school-portal.co.uk/GroupWorkspaces.asp?GroupId=583397&WorkspaceId=1426197
