How Tutoring can Improve Attitude, Attendance, and Attainment in Young People, by Julia Silver
My son Benjamin struggled with anxiety and depression in Years 10 and 11, and rarely felt able to attend school. He is one of many young people who experience ‘Emotional Based School Avoidance’ (EBSA) today. In the UK, EBSA affects approximately 1-2% of the school population; although, some researchers suggest it could be as high as 5%.[1]
In this article, I won’t be exploring the various drivers of this worrying statistic. Suffice it to say, in the words of author Eliza Fricker, it’s not that these young people won’t go to school, it’s that they can’t. Instead, I will describe how, despite barely participating in formal education for eighteen months, with the support of three wonderful tutors, Benjamin was able to gain six GCSEs and a place at the college of his choice just months after we despaired of him sitting a single exam.
Relationship, Responsiveness, Reflectiveness: The Three Keys to Effective Tutoring
As I describe in my book ‘Love Tutoring: Be the tutor your student needs’, effective tutoring can be characterised by three things: Relationship, Responsiveness and Reflectiveness. When taken together, these three elements can make a lasting difference to a student’s attainment, attendance and attitude to learning.[2]
Relationship:
It can help to think of a tutor as a guide, going to where the young person is and leading them towards their goals. The terrain is unknown and may feel treacherous to the student. For the tutor to successfully lead the student, there needs to be trust. The young person, and their parents, need to trust that the tutor can get them safely where they need to go. Earning this trust takes time, especially when there are mental and emotional issues underlying, but by being persistently positive and respectful it can be done.
Responsiveness:
One of the most important elements of tutoring is the tutors’ willingness and ability to adapt the learning in response to the students’ needs. Of course, this requires the tutor to know the student well. As one study put it: ‘Strong tutors were those who were able to build trusting relationships with their students and then leveraged these relationships to identify students’ strengths and needs, adjusting instruction accordingly’.[3]
This technique of ‘leveraging’ the relationship to assess and adapt learning is what makes tutoring so incredibly effective.[4] When the tutor is committed to continually ‘reading’ the student, looking to understand what the young person knows, what they can do, and how they are feeling, they can adapt the pitch and the pace of the learning accordingly. The most proficient tutors will always be willing to change, or even abandon their plans to work on what the student really needs ‘in the moment’.
Tutoring is a precision tool. Whereas classroom learning relies on a best-fit approach to planning, a tutor, as we have already identified, will be constantly assessing the student to optimise the intervention. They can speed up, slow down or go totally off-piste in service of the student’s learning goals. They can also chart a route through learning that is as direct, or circuitous as necessary. They can identify gaps in knowledge, and immediately pause to fill them. They can give targeted timely feedback to ensure the student continually makes progress, celebrating success as well as pointing out errors.
Reflectiveness:
Sometimes, the young person will refuse to engage in tutoring. They might not attend, they might underperform, or they may even walk out on a session early, as happened recently to an experienced tutor I know. In this case, the tutor must reflect on what may have happened to trigger or turn off the young person. The tutor will need to try other ways to work with the student, possibly enlisting the help of parents or carers to identify strategies which work better for the student. Again, it is the commitment on the part of the tutor to ‘do the work’, to take responsibility for providing ever better learning for the young person that characterises the most effective tutors.
Self-Efficacy: The Spillover Benefit of Tutoring
In another recent study, parents, students and teachers identified improvements in students’ confidence, attendance, relationships with their classroom teachers, and relationships with other children as results of tutoring.[5] These spillover benefits are well known to effective tutors, who find their students become increasingly willing to take risks in their learning and attempt challenging problems. In the case of my son, through the support and encouragement of his tutors, he felt able to sit his GCSEs, something we did not take for granted.
The role of mentor or coach is one that most tutors take on quite naturally. Even when the tutor is only a couple of years older than the student themselves, having someone who knows them, who cares about their wellbeing but isn’t overly invested in their lives, as a parent or carer can be, can help a young person tremendously. Tutors can be a vital part of the village that it takes to raise a child.
The transformation that tutoring can provide for a student can be called ‘self-efficacy’, or a student’s belief in their ability to learn. According to Professor John Hattie, it is one of the most powerful determiners of progress. [6] The strong association between attainment and attitude that sits behind self-efficacy means that the better a student does, the better they will do. Tutoring can jump-start the attitude/attainment cycle by building a sense of achievement for the student through instruction that is more precisely pitched than in the classroom. Tutors set their students up for success.
Relationship Matters
The better you understand your child, the easier it will be to find the right tutor and build a productive relationship with them. But before you look into their skills and experience, you must verify that they are safe to work with your child. Often, parents do not feel comfortable or confident asking tutors to see their police record. That’s why our organisation, Qualified Tutor, provides certification and daily DBS checks. You can find certified tutors on the Qualified Tutor directory. Once you have a shortlist of certified tutors, take the time to find out about them. Read reviews from recent clients, check their social media presence and website if they have one. Most tutors will use these platforms to let you know what to expect from working with them. Once you have a sense of which tutors might be right for your child, schedule an appointment to talk with them.
This should be an open conversation focussed on the needs of the young person, where the parent and the tutor together explore whether it’s a good fit.
Once you’ve found a tutor who you think might be able to help, get really clear about their terms. What do they charge, when do they want to be paid and what are their cancellation policies? These questions are vital to ensuring a positive working relationship. Beyond this, it helps to get a clear understanding of their expectations around homework and how to best get in touch with them.
Tutoring is a highly relational discipline. The better the relationship between tutor, young person and parent, the more effective the intervention will be and the more far-reaching the spillover effects. The more commitment you show for the tutoring process, the faster that all-important trust will be established.
Love Tutoring
Tutoring can change a young person’s life. It can help them to believe in themselves and in the people around them. It can unlock doors and break through barriers. It happened for my child, and it could happen for yours.
References
[2] ’The Future of Tutoring’, Impetus, 2023.
[3] Sara White, Leiah Groom-Thomas and Susanna Loeb, ‘A Systematic Review of Research on Tutoring Implementation: Considerations when Undertaking Complex Instructional Supports for Students’, EdWorkingPaper No. 22-625, 2023. Available at: https://edworkingpapers.com/ai22-652 p.31.
[4] ‘One to one tuition’ in Teaching and Learning Toolkit, Education Endowment Foundation, 2021.
[5] 85% of parents saying tutoring had positively impact their child’s confidence, 68% saying it had improved attendance, 78% saying it had improved their child’s relationships with their classroom teachers, and 64% saying it had improved their child’s relationships with other children. ‘The Future of Tutoring, Impetus, 2023. Available at: https://impetus-org.files.svdcdn.com/production/assets/publications/The-Future-of-Tutoring.pdf p.23.
[6] ‘250+ Influences on Student Achievement’, Visible Learning Plus, 2017.
About the Author
Julia Silver is the founder of Qualified Tutor, a professional development community that develops and certifies tutors. She lives in North London with her husband Simon, her five children and her Labrador puppy. Julia’s new book, Love Tutoring: Be the tutor your student needs (Crown House Publishing, 2024) is out now.