Leading residential tutoring company, Tutors International, reaffirms the importance of ensuring ethical practice and integrity in the tutoring industry.
Ethics in Private Tuition
From time to time, Tutors International will receive a client enquiry that prompts them to consider and enforce the matter of ethics in private tuition. Founder of Tutors International, Adam Caller, reinstates the importance of having transparency and integrity at the heart of what he does.
Tutors International is an elite private residential tutoring company that offers a highly bespoke service. Their entire model is based around tailoring tuition specifically to the client’s needs. It is committed to client experience and a customer-first ethos. Very rarely, a morally dubious request will be submitted or revealed in a client enquiry, meaning a line has to be drawn.
In 2018, The Guardian ran an article exploring some of the challenges of ethically compromised behaviour from families experienced by live-in tutors. It mainly focussed on a very small minority of clients whose children have put tutors in challenging positions during their tenure. This is such a rare occurrence and Tutors International prides itself on an impeccable relationship with their clients and tutors. Nevertheless, on occasion, a level of ‘playing the system’ comes to fruition – either upon enquiry or once the placement has started. Tutors International would like to make its position clear that in accordance with their ethos to operate ethically and thoroughly, foul play from clients can result in terminated contracts.
Playing the System
One example is a client who contacted Tutors International to supply their son, (at Oxford University), with a tutor to help him with extremely niche and specialist thesis. True to their reputation, Tutors International sourced an appropriate and qualified tutor with expertise in this area. The client had said they wanted this tutor to help proofread (English was his second language) and suggest pointers for the student's thesis. It came to light that the student had also asked this of another specialist private tuition firm. He was passing the edits from each tutor back and forth between them. He had manipulated a situation wherein the tutors where unknowingly collaboratively writing his thesis for him. When our tutor suspected this to be the case, he included a note to the assumed other tutor, confident that the student in the middle wasn’t even reading the edits thoroughly. He was right. Tutors International withdrew immediately and refunded the client, cutting all ties. The very low level of English language for an Oxford University student implied this was not the first time he had played the system.
A Question of Ethics
More recently, Tutors International received an enquiry from a prospective client, asking which exams were likely to be cancelled in 2021. Their motivation being that they would enter their child for the ones headed for cancellation, so that they would receive the teacher-assessed performance grade, instead of the exam result, which the parent assumed would be higher. This is, of course, unethical, and not something Tutors International will ever endorse, or associate with.
Founder of Tutors International and leading educational consultant, Adam Caller, concludes the elite tuition firm’s position:
“I must stress that it’s extremely rare that an enquiry or client behaviour calls morality into question. That said, I want to reaffirm that Tutors International have a reputation and code of ethics to uphold. Academic excellence and professional discretion are at the centre of the company’s ethos, but we also promote integrity and the honourable employment of our invaluable tutors.”
