LEARNING GAP
Mind the gap A
lex Dyer, Director at Tutor House is on a mission to ensure school children don’t fall behind with their academic learning with his new residential tutoring service. In our
first Feature Focus piece on bridging the summer learning gap, he explains why it is important to keep children studying throughout the school holidays and what parents can do to help them.
July should be a quiet month for a tutoring company, exams are over, the term is coming to a close, parents are booking holidays, but funnily enough it’s not, it’s a busy one. Parents are (almost) petrified that their children will fall behind, get bored and forget everything during the 6-10 week holiday! 6-10 weeks off school... and parents are panicking! We help to reduce any stress by offering residential tutoring (a tutor travels with or stays with the families for a few weeks at a time) private tutoring (usually 2-4 weeks focusing on a variety of subjects, taught in the family's home) and tutoring with activities (similar to private tutoring but with visits to museums, playing sport, learning an instrument, etc.)
At the start of the school holidays, a genuine
concern for many parents is that the weeks and months away from school will mean their children forget everything they have learnt over the academic year, and that they will get into bad habits and start the new term already falling behind their classmates. If learning is abandoned during long breaks such as the summer holidays it can be very difficult for children to simply ‘pick up where they left off’ on their return to school. A lack of learning in the summer has been documented since the early 1900’s. Professor William White’s paper ‘Reviews Before and After Vacation’, published in the American Education Journal, was the first to detail some of the adverse effects that a long break away from school can have on a child’s academic progress. Indeed, it is no secret that the effects of long school holidays can present challenges for school children. It can take teachers weeks to reteach them the material they have forgotten, limiting their time to get through the new syllabuses, and this can leave children feeling disheartened and pressured from the outset. But most importantly children and students can lose interest in a variety of subject areas. The key during the holidays is to add interest to subjects, to ignite passion, to teach different ways, and focus on enjoyment, not exams and revision. Once children have a genuine interest in their subjects, this fuels confidence, which in turn fuels motivation and
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passion. An experienced tutor working on a 1-1 basis can really help. No child is the same, and that is both between families and within families, siblings are different, so individual attention and care is needed. Planning for one child won’t be the same as planning with another.
While school holidays are an important time for children to rest, recuperate and have fun, it is beneficial to keep children learning and progressing in their academic subjects throughout. Of course, there is a balance. Children shouldn’t become fatigued and should be given sufficient time to relax, enjoy themselves and play sport, learn an instrument or new
July/August 2017
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