Since last year, Step Ahead Tutoring and Educational Services has helped 50 children
to gain places in independent schools.
Step Ahead’s impressive total is now over 400 successes, including a number of bursaries
and scholarships.
It has been difficult for families to maintain any kind of consistent approach to home-schooling.
Many have striven to put things in place and have come to realise that it is not at all easy.
Step Ahead gets messages and calls repeatedly stating how hard mums and dads are finding home schooling,
with many appreciating, perhaps more than ever before, the value of a good teacher.
Conscientious teachers are trying to provide a partial service, even though it was in classrooms and with
classes of children that they were trained for. Some parents have reported that the outcome of what they
are seeing is inconsistent, some feeling that their children are inundated with work whilst others feel that
they are getting far too little. Some work appears to be being marked, other work left unmarked.
Perhaps unsurprisingly a large number of parents are expressing concern about their children, in effect
missing five months (maybe more) of schooling, and wondering about the longer term effects of losing so
much momentum.
At Step Ahead, where the vast majority of their work has, over the past two decades and more, been done in
either a tutor’s home or a client’s home, they have experienced a huge shift.
Even prior to Covid19, more and more families were seeing the value of tutoring by Skype, Facetime or Zoom.
Since Covid19 virtually all work has been done electronically, and even these tutors and tutees who were
unsure have embraced it and do now in fact welcome it.
Those who thought that the absence of a tutor in the room might mean a lack of concentration or allow for
distraction have seen that it is the quality of the tutoring that counts and that the right tutor gets and keeps the
focus of a youngster, and indeed that indeed more work can actually be accomplished. Homework done, sent,
marked and returned electronically can also benefit the dynamics and momentum. Without travel, which can
eat up valuable time, and with much greater flexibility as to the best days and times for sessions, it is being
appreciated that this is the form that tutoring is going to take in the future, and will become the new norm.
Step Ahead has experienced teachers who can advise, support and tutor youngsters, whether for entrance or national exams or general lessons, both through this pandemic, and importantly as schools endeavour to get back to some form of normality.
Feel free to give Step Ahead’s Director, George Hawkins MBE, M.Ed (Hons), a call 07967024726 for a no
obligation chat.
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