A few positives...

Ok, I know the last few posts may have painted a somewhat negative picture of tutorial agencies and the business generally, so here are a few positives just to play devil's advocate. 

There is perhaps something to be said for parents from low income backgrounds who have saved and taken time to invest in a few extra sessions for their kid. I have taught a few of these students over the years and while they represent a minority of those I have tutored, they have certainly benefited from one-to-one guidance. No matter how gifted the teacher, you can do a lot more specific and student-centred learning when it is just one or two kids. 

I have also found these students to be among the best motivated and they understand the value of education. 

As someone whose politics is left of centre, there is perhaps a positive in exposing the students to views they perhaps don't normally get to hear. I recently had a student who was looking at countries recovering from war and I laid into oil companies who went straight into Iraq, only to find out that the student's daddy was a lawyer for the said oil firm and was often on little jaunts to Iraq. However, the downside is that I suddenly realised where my salary was coming from. Ok, so not so positive. At least the student has no desire to do law and I think I've convinced them to do something useless like art history or classical art instead. 

Students who engage with learning are fun to teach. It is exciting to watch anyone begin to take an interest in a new subject and question the world around them. 

That is really all there is to say. The negatives would take much longer to discuss. 

man charged as 'radioactive paedophile' who runs tutorial agency

When you start out tutoring you usually do it through an agency. There are dozens of these to choose from and some of them make hundreds of thousands and often millions of pounds a year from desperate parents who want their child to do be a winner in the education system.

There remains very little, if any, regulation of this industry. More often than not they are set up by former tutors who have no teaching experience and can see a way to make a buck from getting other younger graduates to teach on their behalf. One agency I worked for was involved in quite a major scandal too. Here are the details in brief and I will name no names. You can find further news stories about it on the net if you're interested. 

The first I knew about the scandal was when I received an email from a newspaper journalist asking me if I could talk about the agency. I quickly found out that the owner of the business was on the run from the police. He had been due to appear in court on charges of child pornography no less. However, what made the case particularly interesting was that the judge issued a warning that he was potentially dangerous to approach because he might be radioactive. Yes, radioactive. When he jumped bail he was having treatment for a thyroid problem and for six weeks after the treatment, he was hazardous to approach. I mean you couldn't make this sort of thing up. I have this image of a glow in the dark child catcher wandering the city by night.

Another incident at the same firm involved me going into their dank basement with no windows to do some photocopying to find a child sitting by himself.

'Do you want me to photocopy those for you?' the kid said.
'You should get on with your work,' I replied.
'I've done it all.'
'Where's your tutor?' I asked.
'He's upstairs talking with one of the other teachers. He told me to get on with this.'
'What is it you're doing?'
'Geography, but I finished ten minutes ago already.'
'I see.'
'So can I do your photocopying?'
'I'll find your teacher.'

This poor kid had been left for perhaps half an hour by himself, while the agency was charging his parents sixty or seventy pounds an hour. Of course, there are good tutors. If there weren't the industry would fall apart, but there are a lot of tutors who have no qualifications and perhaps teach subjects wildly different from their degrees. There is no regulation and there needs to be. There should be some equivalent form of PGCE or teacher training. Some parents are savvy about who they employ and sit in on a few lessons, but some have no idea. Better regulation would help both the students and the tutors feel protected. 

Twelve-year-old terrorist and a pair of scissors

In the first three months of tutoring I taught mainly 12-16 year olds. The incident I want to recall was one of those rare horrific moments early in my career when I found myself in a situation over which I had little control. I had been asked to work with a thirteen-year-old kid from Hong Kong who was living in NW London. He was a straight A student. He was said to be hard working and polite. I was there to teach him History and English over the Easter break.  

‘I’m going to be the next 9/11 bomber.’

 I put down my pen and made Jason Li look at me.

‘That is not in any way an acceptable thing to say.’

Jason laughed in my face.

‘The Americans are a bunch of wankers. My dad says so. China is gonna bomb the ass out of it one day soon.’

‘Jason, I’m going to stop teaching you if you keep on like this. Now focus on the question.’

On the table in front of us was an A3 sheet of paper with a number of historical sources relating to the end of the Second World War. I had spent an hour at the agency digging through God knows how many disorganized files to find them. The agency had a basement room packed full of every exam paper and teaching book ever published, except all the tutors kept stealing the papers or putting them back in the wrong folders so that you had at best a 50-50 chance of finding what you needed. There were two written sources: the first a diary entry of an emaciated English POW in Burma suffering the effects of dysentery, the second a newspaper article describing the capture of Berlin by the Russians. There was also a photograph source, depicting the charred and desolate remains of Hiroshima. It was this picture which had prompted Jason’s anti-American invective, the general line of his argument being that he wanted to “blow their fat asses sky high” because they were, if I remember the words correctly, “Yankee imperialist scum”. This attitude prevailed despite the fact that Jason’s father worked for an American bank in Hong Kong and that Jason had, as a young child, lived in a palatial apartment in the centre of New York’s fashionably expensive district of Chelsea. His bedroom and study area were also caked in the trinkets of latter-day Americana. A Pixar/Disney Toy Story duvet cover swamped his camp bed, an American LA Lakers basketball net was suckered proudly to his door, and a series of framed Star Wars posters displaying characters from the piss-poor-prequels lined the wall. The only nod to the boy’s Chinese heritage came in the form of house slippers embroidered with a phoenix and dragon locked in battle. A pair had also been found for me.

Now when a child started acting up, I had been advised by the agency to seek out one of the parents. This was impossible. The mother was attending an interior design conference in Paris and the boy’s father had been in Hong Kong for the past three months. The current Li household consisted of thirteen-year-old Jason and his two Chinese nannies who spoke perhaps fifty words of English between them. Even if we had been able to communicate, their loyalty was undoubtedly towards Jason. They had laughed profusely when the boy greeted my arrival with a middle finger.

I was on my own.

‘If you were able to kill either Hitler or Stalin, which one would you choose?’ Jason asked, pulling at my jumper.

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because by answering that I’d be playing some sort of God.’

‘But it’s obvious. You kill Hitler, then the war would never have started and everyone could have directed their weapons towards destroying communism.’

‘You want to destroy communism?’

‘Only Russian communism.’

‘And where did China get its communism from?’

‘It’s completely different.’

‘That might well be true, but still it’s Russia who tried communist ideology first.’

‘My dad says the Russians are a bunch of thugs.’

‘What does your dad say about the British?’

‘He says you are easy to make money from and that you eat too much cheese. I hate cheese.’

‘Your dad has a lot of opinions.’

‘You smell of cheese.’

‘Jason. Get on with the fu…’

I stopped myself just in time.
‘Get on with the question.’

An hour and a half was a long time to be stuck with such a piece of work as this little kid. I was not one for stereotyping, but when the agency said it was a boy from Hong Kong I made the assumption that I would be teaching someone who liked studying fourteen hours a day and played about six different instruments. A crazed genius, but with unfailing discipline. Jason failed on both counts.

It is perhaps worth mentioning here that I have come across high levels of racism from white English mothers who say that there are too many Asian overseas children getting accepted to Oxbridge who are incredibly bright but not socialized. I wonder, though, if it's not a case of sour grapes because I found from my time in Shanghai, students to be well motivated but still very capable of holding a conversation. Too many of the students I have worked with in both the private and state sector are unable to take the initiative or  simply want to be spoon-fed an entire syllabus.  

I kept looking at my watch every ten minutes. I also went to the toilet twice as a way to kill time, but this was a fundamental error. Jason’s bathroom (and it was his own private ensuite) was a sleek washroom designed in the ubiquitous style of a five star hotel with a large red marble shelf along one wall over which a black marble sink was not so much built as sculpted. A mirror covered the entire wall above it. There was a large ceramic dish full of smoothed pebbles next to the sink and next to the dish was a militia of bottled soaps. Now the first time I went in there was no problem. I didn’t even need to pee. I just stood at the sink and washed my hands using as much of the swanky hand-wash as I could squeeze out of the bottle. After an hour I genuinely needed to take a piss so I went to the toilet a second time but as I stood peeing into the bowl I heard a rattling noise coming from behind me. I turned but it was already too late. The lock on the door swivelled to open and then the door flung open with an almighty bang to reveal Jason brandishing a pair of scissors. Before I had a chance to stop peeing, the boy moved over to me and waved the scissors in the vague direction of my crotch shouting: ‘Gonna cut your dick off you mother f**ker.’

I masked my penis as best I could and screamed at the boy to get the hell out of the bathroom. The boy made another lunge at me, and I turned and zipped up my flies before turning back to Jason to force him out of the bathroom. He kept swiping the scissors in the air around me, like he had hold of some crazed killer butterfly, and had a look in his eye that was truly scary. He wasn’t all there. Eventually he gave up and I manoeuvred him out of the door, locked it again and lent back against it as I tried to calm my breathing. I’ve got asthma and this little episode had all but brought on an attack. My brain was doing a three-sixty. What the f*ck was I supposed to do? I could just imagine the headlines: Young Tutor Seduces Minor in Masochistic Scissor Game.

I cleaned up the mess I’d made around the toilet and then waited about five minutes before I had enough courage to go back outside. When I opened the door I half expected Jason to jump out and staple me in the face but, to my surprise, the boy was at his desk and appeared to be working. I sat down warily, checking the seat for drawing pins.  

‘I’m doing the answers,’ he said.

‘Well carry on.’

Jason worked in silence and I realized the boy was scared that I might tell on him. I relaxed a little. There were less than twenty minutes until the end of the lesson. I kind of zoned out and found myself peering out at the roof terrace opposite where a sturdy middle-aged woman was trimming away at a few shrubs. The terrace was little more than fifteen-square feet yet the woman had squashed no end of plants on to it. It always amazed me how small a space people called home in London. She was probably living in a small one bed and yet here I was in a five-storey house in which the kid got an entire floor to himself.

Jason finished writing and I checked through the boy’s answers and found that they were remarkably good. His written English was far above standard for his age, revealing an easy and elegant prose style.

‘When are you going to move in?’ Jason asked as I put on my jacket.

‘Move in? I’m not moving in. I’m just here to teach you.’

‘But we could play on the computer now.’

‘I don’t think your mother would be happy paying me to play on the computer with you.’

‘We don’t need to tell her. She’s away and never comes up here anyway.’

‘Well maybe some other time. I have another appointment to go to.’

‘You teach other kids?’

‘Yes.’

Jason didn’t seem to like the fact that I was working with other students.

‘When are you coming next?’

‘I’m supposed to come again next week, but I need to speak to your mother first.’

I was more than a little reluctant to commit myself to teaching a child that was potentially capable of cutting off my manhood.

‘You have to come again.’

The boy sounded sorry enough and his pleading was almost touching. How many teachers had Jason been through? I was envious of his home just off Sloane Square but it didn’t take a genius to see the kid was a serious case of neglected. Still, it wasn’t my job to sort him out. I had other kids to teach and this whole tutoring business was supposed to be nothing more than a stopgap until springtime.

As I went downstairs Jason made one last attempt to prevent me from leaving by running down in front of me and picking up my shoes. I didn’t bother to chase him upstairs but instead calmly went to the nanny and asked if she could fetch them. She wearily called to the boy who eventually returned, handing me one shoe at a time.

‘When is Mrs Li back?’ I asked.

‘Mrs Li not here this week,’ the nanny replied. ‘You must speak with her?’

‘Yes, but I can phone her.’

‘You leave message?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘He a good boy really,’ the nanny said, as though this was an oft disputed subject.

‘Yes, well goodbye.’

I stepped outside and Jason came running out after me.

‘Goodbye,’ the boy shouted, forming his arms into a Heil Hitler salute.

I never went back and I phoned the agency to explain there had been an incident in which the student had come at me with a pair of scissors. Luckily it turned out that there had been another tutor who had been punched by the boy and had left after only two sessions. I was more than a little pissed that the agency hadn't bothered to tell me that before I said yes to the job. Still, there was a bit of me that was sorry for Jason. Neglect of a child is a terrible thing, regardless of money.

F**k the mothers by all means...

This was a memorable piece of advice I received on my first of two training days at a London tutorial agency...

‘Fuck the mothers by all means but don’t touch the kids.’

The head of the tutoring company, who I will refer to as Charles, spoke to us while sitting on a table in an airless conference room somewhere in South Kensington. There were about thirty of us in there, staring back at him. Like prawns in tap shoes, we were unformed and stupid but willing to do anything to secure a teaching contract.  

‘You’ll find it much easier if you can flirt with the mothers. They’re usually the one responsible for hiring you and they're usually the one who will write out the cheque. A little flirting might be the difference between them recommending you to their friends or not.’

Charles had been educated at public school and carried that natural confidence that is the hallmark of such an education. He spoke almost entirely through anecdotes, which I soon came to learn, is the currency teachers use in socialising and competing with one another. He talked of VIP clients, the bratty offspring of C-grade celebs and even about the daughter of an MP who used to throw chairs at her tutor, although he was careful to name no names.

He was one of those men who spent all of his time talking to the women in the group and barely glanced at us men. I suppose you get to a certain age and level of success that you don’t have to worry about hiding your lust for younger women. Still, he wasn’t attractive. Not so much a silver fox as a grey manatee. He clearly liked long boozy lunches and walked around in a permanent third trimester of steak and ale pies.

After talking at us for about an hour, Charles set us a task. He drew three match box houses together on a whiteboard and said we had to work out the formula for the number of matches needed to build however many houses you required. Now let me make it clear at this point that I wanted to tutor History and English and this looked distinctly like Maths.

‘But here’s the tricky bit. I want you to teach the problem as if you were teaching a twelve-year-old,’ Charles added.

I was thinking that bit wouldn’t be so hard. All I had to do was imagine I was talking to myself.

We had to team up with a partner and I found myself working with some girl, whose name might have been Glandular, Angela or Angina. She had the worst set of teeth I had seen on anyone in a long while. I'm not sure if it’s just bad genes or that the upper middle class simply don’t think their teeth matter, but she’s not the first case of posh girl with bad teeth I’ve seen. Being partnered to an American, I have found the cliche about the poor quality of English people’s teeth to be largely true. Our mouths are generally like the Somme. Most of my friends haven’t been to a dentist in over a year and some even longer. I think something like a quarter of all deaths in the medieval and early modern period were in some way linked to tooth disease. That’s the bit they didn’t show you in Shakespeare in Love: Paltrow leaves Shakespeare, moves to the New World and dies of tooth decay.

Anyway, Angina and I were about to tackle our little algebra problem when this old fellow puts up his hand. Now most of the tutoring candidates were Oxbridge graduates, but there were a couple of older, established teachers, who had come along in the hope of a bit of extra income.

‘Yes?’ Charles said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Tanner,’ the man replied. Mr Paul Tanner.’

James Bond he was not.

‘Mr Tanner. What’s the problem?’

‘Well, I’m an English teacher. I have been for thirty-five years. I hope you’re not expecting me to teach Maths.’

‘We sometimes find it useful that our tutors can help out with other subjects. This is GCSE Maths here, nothing complicated,’ Charles answered.

‘I hope you’re not expecting the Maths tutors here to chip in with the English because I think that would be a bloody cheek.’

We all shifted in our seats. Charles looked at the man with that confident, don’t fuck with me, rugger-bugger face.

‘Well, don’t feel you have to participate Mr Tanner.’

We all knew that was the end of Mr Tanner’s hopes of any tutoring work. Mr Tanner knew it too. He got up from his seat, gathered his things and made for the door, stopping just long enough to help himself to a couple of slices of cake which had had been laid on for free with tea and coffee.

The rest of us turned our attention back to the Maths problem and, to my surprise, bad-toothed Anaemia was pretty good at algebra and came up with a solution. 

The rest of the day was spent roleplaying, which I loved, but it did very little to tackle the problems I later faced when tutoring. Other than the advice that we shouldn’t touch the children up, the other thing I remember from that first day, was an older female teacher, who warned me in no uncertain terms that I should do this for one year and one year only. 

‘If you’re still here in a year, you’ll be here in five. It’s the same with teaching in a school. It’s a vocation, whether you admit it or not. If you want to do something else, then now is the time to start thinking about it.’

She had that haggard look of someone who had been at the coalface for years. Someone who had lost their ambition. It turned out she wanted to be a writer too. She wanted to write a historical romance novel set in the French Revolution and all I could think about was that meant she wanted to do Les Miserables. However, she was right about getting stuck. I tutored because I thought it was easy and it was easy a lot of the time. Far easier than teaching in a school where you have the politics, paper work and gallons of children pouring through your classrooms every day. But, as a thirty-year-old I have come to understand that tutoring is a kind of half-life, twilight place or vegetative state in which time has been lost. I can try and justify these last seven years by the few good acts, by pretending that I have brought a little socialism into the lives of students who have investment bankers for progenitors but there remains a sense that it is I who have been fucked up by the mothers, manipulated into helping many of the students to obtain grades they do not deserve. I would go as far to say that most private school A grades are actually B or C grades that have been massaged by the collaboration and collusion of teachers, parents and tutors. 

Confessional Courtesies

So, here is the first of many posts that aim to chart my experiences in the world of private tutoring, although I hope to discuss many topics related to education. For obvious reasons I have changed the names of those involved and I am writing under a pseudonym, but pretty much everything that follows has happened. I’d love this to be a safe space for people to discuss and talk openly about what is going on with education in this country. I feel I have been part of a largely unregulated industry that very occasionally does good, but more often than not has aided the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. I grew up in rural Suffolk, attended a state comprehensive and had no extra help other than what I received at school. My education was pretty good but all schools are different and there have been moments in the last six or seven years when it has felt like I’ve been shitting on my fifteen-year-old self by helping those who really don’t deserve it. However, although I have seen amazing levels of privilege I have also been privy to levels of neglect and maltreatment that have shocked me. I have begun to move away from tutoring and into running workshops and following my first love writing and performing. This is really a record of some of the things I have experienced and seen and you can make of it what you will.