As one of our tutors, Nicola Beaverstock, said ‘you can sing from the same song book, it’s really all about communication!’

With a little communication, your tutor will provide exactly the support you want your students to have to a point that you can almost leave the tutor to it! With a tiny bit of time and organisation, you can ensure greater success for everyone involved. Nicola shared with us her six top tips to building a solid relationship with your pupils’ tutor to ensure a joined-up approach:

1. Before tutoring starts, the tutor needs to know which areas of learning you would like them to cover with your students. Telling your tutor in advance is a big help, as they may want to prepare resources for the first session.
2. The ideal tutoring model involves a face-to-face meeting between the teacher and tutor in the first session. If you have several sessions starting at the same time, or you are teaching other students while the tutoring takes place, tell your tutor, most tutors will work around these variables.
3. Compile information the tutor should know about the students, but don’t worry about including too much detail. Tutors will get to know your students quite well over the course of their sessions.
4. Tutors should provide you with notes after each session. These comments will give you a good idea of how confident your students are with the session content, where progress has been made and where there was some difficulty. As well as keeping you informed, this may be helpful if you are preparing a similar classroom activity alongside tutoring. 
5. Don’t worry if you need to reschedule due to an unforeseen clash, these things happen. Talk to your tutor, changing the time or date is not normally an issue.
6. Like the first session of a block, the final session should ideally include a face-to-face meeting between the teacher, tutor and students. Don’t worry if you aren’t available, ask your tutor for a report. This will allow you to see at a glance how the sessions have benefitted each student.

Like with teachers, communication is key to striking up a solid tutor-student relationship too and with Pearson tutors all being past teachers, this isn’t a problem at all.

From the very first introductory session, tutors will use their skillset to find out what makes the learner tick, and begin to forge a good bond. What do they like? Do they have any hobbies? Do they follow any sports? Do they have a favourite team? Do they have any pets? And so. This first session helps tutors to build a picture of the student they are working with, sparking ideas as to what future sessions could be focused around, maybe a writing session on football or dogs, for example. This informal chat also helps to remove any anxiety. Over the sessions, the tutors will get to know their students more. One of our tutors, Fran Sutton, discovered that one of her learners loved finding ‘that’ question he didn’t think she would be able to answer while another liked to turn the tables and be the one asking the tutor the questions. 

There is no definitive right or wrong way to build relationships, as Fran mentioned, everyone has a slightly different approach on how they wish to communicate with their tutors, especially teachers but what is definitely known is that solid relationships can be formed and all involved can work in harmony to ensure students thrive.