Leading provider of full-time home tuition, Tutors International, today reported that more enquiries for full-time home schooling are coming from parents who are tired of long commutes to and from school.
The world’s leading provider of full-time private tuition, Tutors International, today announced an increase in the switch to home schooling because they feel that the excessive commutes to and from their child’s school are harmful to the family’s daily life.
Adam Caller, who founded Tutors International in 1999, said that more parents are contacting him for full-time home tutoring because “it offers an alternative, and, in my opinion, a better education, than any a child receives from even the best private schools. The key difference is that more can be accomplished in a ‘home school day’ than in seven hours in the classroom, and there’s no arduous commute.”
Mr Caller reports the experiences of one mother who recently contacted him. “She spends six hours each day travelling to and from her son’s private school. In the winter it’s dark and icy. In the summer it’s sticky and hot and everyone wishes they were doing something else.” The school is an hour and a half away from their Devon home, and while the school was considered the best option to provide an excellent education for their son, they now feel that three hours spent in the car is not beneficial to him, and the six hours his mother spends driving each day means that there is little time left in her day for her own pursuits.
“When the idea of private home tuition was introduced,” said Mr Caller, “they immediately saw the benefits to everyone in the family. Parents sometimes say that it’s good for the child to have some down time, some time ‘in neutral’, but I’ve never met a single child who enjoys sitting in a car for three hours every day. Home schooling with an excellent, hand-picked private tutor is the ideal solution: a one-to-one education and the flexibility to study around hobbies, sports activities and socialising.”
Mr Caller explains why high quality private tuition is so sought after: “Nothing beats personalised, one-to-one learning, blending topics and applying them to real life. The breadth and depth of knowledge that a privately tutored child displays is largely unachievable in schools. It is quite usual that even when following the same US or UK school curriculum, what a child might learn in a seven-hour day at school is covered in half the time at home with a private tutor.”
Long school commutes are not the sole preserve of countryside-dwellers. Cross-London school commutes can be comparable, often taking an hour or more on public transport, and many parents, according to Mr Caller, choose to live in the capital while driving their children to independent schools in the neighbouring counties each day.
“School buses,” comments Mr Caller, “do provide children with a way to socialise and relax to and from school, but they’re not standard as they are in America. They often don’t pick up from close enough to a child’s home to be useful, and may not have dedicated on-board staff to supervise during the journey. For some children, the school bus is a miserable ordeal.”
Some schools are setting maximum distances that children can travel to attend the school, according to a newsletter article by The Good Schools Guide. The BRIT School in Croydon states, “We discourage students from making a very long daily journey to and from school.”
More information about engaging a full-time private tutor can be found at www.tutors-international.com.
