Delivering high quality tutoring is the fundamental priority of Tutor Trust.

Tutor Trust ensures that every single hour our tutors spend with a young person is positive and effective. The young people we serve deserve the very best tutoring, and our partner schools know that our tuition is high quality and impactful. As a charity, we constantly review and refine every aspect of our work, drawing on extensive feedback from schools and utilising the best research evidence and professional practice available.

Recruiting our tutors

We pay our tutors well, and we want to recruit only those people who have the potential to become exceptional tutors. Our multi-stage recruitment process looks not only at tutors’ academic qualifications and experience, but at their personal qualities, motivations for applying, and ability to build rapport with young people. All potential tutors who are shortlisted after the application stage are interviewed by two members of staff, with the interview including a mock tutoring session.

We routinely review our recruitment metrics to ensure that they are positively correlated with the work tutors go on to deliver, and are confident that our processes help us to identify those people with the potential to be inspiring tutors and role models.

Training

Once tutors are selected to train with us, we share our high expectations with them from the beginning.  During our training, tutors consistently see our quality criteria, and we explore what fantastic tutoring programmes look like. All of our training is delivered by education professionals with senior leadership experience in schools and/or in teacher training. They ensure our tutors know how to plan engaging, high-impact sessions with clear objectives, that are directed to their pupils’ learning needs.

Our training programme includes a number of assessed tasks, culminating in tutors producing their own plan for a session. Any tutors who need additional support receive it, and we only make tutors eligible to bid for assignments once we are confident they meet our high quality standards.

Monitoring and support

Once tutors are on assignment, our Quality Team of 11 teachers ensure that they are delivering fantastic work. In the 2020/21 academic year, we monitored 92% of tutors who delivered work for us. Monitoring is carried out in two main ways: observing actual sessions in schools or recorded lessons online; and checking tutors' lesson plans when they start a tuition assignment.

Tutors either receive feedback via email or through an online conversation where their strengths are celebrated and their areas for development are shared, so that they can improve the quality of each hour of work they deliver. Last year, we were delighted that 95% of tutors we monitored were delivering good or outstanding work - and, of course, the 5% who required a bit more support from us received it.

Ongoing professional development

The Quality Team also organise further support throughout the year, sometimes in partnership with other organisations such as TeachFirst and Place2Be, so that tutors have frequent opportunities to develop their knowledge and skills. These may be in the form of our programme of CPD (Continued Professional Development) events, or through Tutor Trust Tutorials, an online training development resource that can support our tutors' professional growth and tuition skills.