Is this the way to fill the teaching skills gap?

Teachers are hard to find, maths and science teachers more so, the reasons are many and taking the problem on requires some innovation around the way schools are staffed.

Tutors have always been around schools but have been kind of outside of the fold. With some careful coordination, using tutors to supplement teaching could make available a highly skilled, flexible resource to schools who find themselves short-handed.

There are advantages, tutors are available after hours to answer questions about homework, they can be brought in to help with a project or during exam times for an extra push when school staff are super busy, or used to allow children to explore the curriculum in directions that they’re interested in.

Tutors also have specific expertise in subject areas which isn’t always possible for teachers in say a large, under resourced school.

But for the model to really sing there needs to be rigorous strategy and delineation in place to make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction.

Dr Selina Samuels, the Chief Learning Officer at Cluey Learning, an online tutoring service, recently ran a pilot in a primary setting to see how integrating its tutoring resource with classroom teaching might work.

The two parties worked closely together, making sure direction, goals and process were aligned and that teaching and tutoring were complementary.

“We make sure that whatever we are doing is aligned to curricula. We’ve started working alongside schools to provide granular differentiation, which is difficult of course in a classroom context, we know that if you have a class of 30 children even the best teacher in the world finds it difficult to adapt everything to each student.

“We’ve found that if a student is interested in a particular angle and would like to pursue it we can do that one to one. We want very much to work alongside teachers to make sure we are all working towards the same goal which is obviously the child,” Dr Samuels says.

Cluey Learning’s pilot happened in a Sydney Primary school in the maths program with one period a week spent working with a Cluey Learning tutor alongside the teacher. Cluey worked to identify the individual needs of each student, their strengths and weaknesses, which were integrated into the program.

“The children loved it, that might sound like a trivial concern for conservative educators but for the young children it’s very important that they do. They enjoyed it and they then progressed at every level and we received a very good score in the teacher ratings.”

The approach is transferable to senior school which is the next stage for Cluey Learning’s initiative.

“At this point we are working at a much more individual level with schools and we are able to tailor everything.

“So, for example, in secondary English, if a student wants to write better essays, say on Macbeth or To Kill a Mockingbird or Dickens, whatever, if you give them a generic essay writing course it doesn’t get them quite the way they want to go. We tailor every program to that particular student and school. We want to make sure we’re supporting what they are doing in classes, not working against them.”

Cluey Learning delivers a personalised tutoring experience for students in Years 2-12, across Maths, English and Chemistry. Learning sessions take place live and online via its learning platform. All content is mapped to the Australian National Curriculum. 

“It’s not a marketplace, not just anyone can join and offer their services, the tutors are our employees and they teach our curricula. We make sure they have the right content knowledge and the right skills and we support them with the pedagogy.

 “We match the students to our tutors, let’s be honest, some students are over teachers so we find that they respond very, very well to a second-year uni student who has been through the whole thing and is able to help them tackle the VCE or the HSC,” Dr Samuels says.