Private tutoring at transition points in the English education system: its nature, extent and purpose

Private tutoring may also be carried out at a distance using the mail and telephone, and
nowadays tutors use the internet to deliver tutoring on-line. In England, private tutoring
usually provides the student with teaching on a one-to-one basis or in small groups (Tanner,
Ireson, Day, Rushforth, Tennant, Turcuk and Smith, in press 2009).

Private supplementary tutoring may be distinguished from tutoring that is freely provided in
school. A key distinction between these forms of tutoring is that private tutoring is provided
for financial gain. Private tutoring may also extend beyond the areas covered by the school
curriculum, whereas tutoring that is provided in school is designed to assist learners with the
school curriculum, such as literacy and numeracy. For example, in England and New Zealand,
one-to-one tuition is provided through the Reading Recovery programme to assist students
who make slow progress in the acquisition of basic literacy skills. In England, government
policy to increase personalised learning in schools (DfES, 2005) has lead to a number of
initiatives to provide extra support that is tailored to the needs of individual students,
including one-to-one tuition for pupils aged 7 to 14 who are falling behind. As these forms of
tutoring are provided in school they are excluded from existing definitions of private
supplementary tutoring, yet they reflect differing traditions, policies and state provision of
tutoring and set the context in which private tutors operate in a country.

Nature and extent of tutoring: variations and trends

International surveys undertaken at the end of the last century such as TIMSS (Beaton,
Mullis, Martin, Gonzalex, Kelly & Smith, 1996) and PISA (OECD, 2001) suggested that the
prevalence of private tutoring in Western Europe was relatively low. An analysis of TIMSS
data found large differences between countries in the extent of supplementary tutoring in

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