The good and bad of private tuition

Dubai: The growth of private tutoring indicates there is a growing demand for it.

“The demand arises from various factors like peer pressure, parental pressure, and in some cases a student might actually need extra support,” said Mark Bray, Director of Comparative Education Research Centre, University of Hong Kong, who has done extensive research on the subject across the world.

Bray says the phenomenon needs to be understood first, before action is taken. “There are students benefitting from this, because they need extra support, but there also students who are feeling burdened and are forced to do it by parents and other factors, which needs to be checked,” added Bray.

He said demand has given rise to a mushrooming of private tutorials, many of which fail to help students and exist only to make money.

Different types of tutorials currently exist. There those conducted by school teachers at home, tutorial institutes which offer coaching at exorbitant rates and there are also many individuals who go around houses providing tutorial services.