When parents decide to use JK Educate’s services, they are not just hiring a tutor, they are bringing on board the support of a senior team of teachers and consultants who will be there to provide expert advice and quality assurance. This wrap-around care for clients, students and tutors alike makes our offering to parents quite unique. It stems from our investment in tutor training, and in monitoring every tutor’s work and every student’s progress and performance.
Why is Monitoring Important?
JK have developed the Monitoring Team function over the last few years, based on the direct monitoring and analysis that joint founders Lorrae and Katie instinctively knew was required to ensure the value and quality of tutoring provision. The impact of active monitoring on both tutor and student performance is enormous. Tutors feel supported, they know exactly what they should be doing and how much progress their students need to be making. This applies to all teaching, but perhaps most crucially to preparations for exams, such as the eleven plus or GCSEs, where timing is critical.
How Does This Enhance Tutors’ Performance?
Following a careful selection and vetting process, all JK tutors are trained in-house through the JK Academy. The training ensures that our tutors understand how to approach students, the issues surrounding different learning styles, and provides both curriculum material and practical techniques to make lessons effective and fun. Tutors are helped to identify how to help students make fast and effective progress towards their targets and how to plan a course of tuition accordingly. This is then followed up by the ongoing support, training and monitoring provided by our senior team.
Tutors often tell us how much they enjoy feeling part of what seems like a school team and how they appreciate the up-to-date teaching materials and information provided. Here’s a typical quote from one tutor, who specialises in 11+ preparations:
“I have worked for a number of tutoring agencies over the years, specifically working with 11+ children to prepare them for their entrance exams. I have never worked for such a handholding service. I knew the JK team supported parents, but I never realised how much they supported their tutors too. At every stage they give recommendations on where the 11+ tutors should be with their students, what resources to use and how to move them forward. I have learnt a lot from working with them and as the exam process is constantly changing, I feel confident that I will be helped to deliver the best possible support for my students. Working with JK Educate means I am no longer tutoring in isolation.”
How Does Monitoring Work?
The weekly JK Monitoring Team Meetings are used to review the setting and monitoring of high academic standards. The team tracks pupil progress by holding regular meetings with tutors, analysing work samples, and analysing the monthly Student Progress Reviews submitted by tutors. A recent addition to the monitoring tools is the introduction of Curriculum Reviews for students who aren’t working towards specific exams, so that they too have a quantitative measure of their progress.
Through this ongoing monitoring and tracking of students, the team ensures that tutoring provision is consistently of a high quality, enabling pupils to reach their full potential. The Monitoring Team can pull together the work of a secondary school student being undertaken with more than one subject tutor, or advise tutors where a student may need more specialist support or require extra exam practice.
Monitoring Team Impact – An A Level Case Study
Following a disappointing school report, a JK Educate client sought tutoring to help her Year 13 daughter achieve her target grades for university in each subject and to highlight any areas that required intervention. The student admitted that she hadn’t been working hard enough, so our Monitoring Manager liaised with the client and her subject tutors to agree and put in place a checklist that allowed the student to take greater responsibility for her learning and become more accountable.
To best support the student during this critical period in her education, three achievable targets were identified around focus, demonstration of commitment and producing quality work in each of her three subjects. And to ensure ongoing accountability, the student was asked to assess herself against the targets and compare it to her tutors’ overall impression after each lesson. Again, the Monitoring Manager kept a check on progress and continued to coordinate the targets, workload and achievement measurement.
The student worked very well with her new plan for self-assessment, actively reflecting on the quality of her work and progress and becoming more invested in her progress. This resulted in a marked improvement in her retention of knowledge and the quality of her written analysis, and her improved school exam results were back on track to meet her predicted grades.
Why Monitoring is Important
In summary, monitoring ensures consistent quality of both tutoring standards and student work. It has been proven to help tutors pace students’ preparations for exams, to keep in touch with the most up-to-date information and curriculum content and to bring the very best results. Tutors never feel isolated or at a loss about how to approach an individual student’s learning style or problems that arise with their progress, as there is always a Monitoring Manager (an experienced senior teacher) available for them to consult. Monitoring works. It’s a proven formula. Call us if you’d like to know more.
