Chapters
- 01. Why Take Private Lessons From Educational Associations?
- 02. Homework Help in Local Libraries
- 03. Free Tutoring Opportunities for Disadvantaged Students
- 04. MOOCs – Another Option
- 05. Subject-Based Resources Free Online
- 06. Assistance for Autistic Students
- 07. What Is More Effective: Homework Help At Schools and Libraries or at Home?
- 08. Alternatives to Traditional Free Tutoring
Private tutoring has long been the established method of improving a child’s grades at school. But the education crisis has not only been felt in schools. Official organisations are often overwhelmed with queries, and cost remains a concern with a great many parents. Lessons at home with private tutors cost anywhere between £25 and £60. What with school supplies, outings and transportation, this is more than many families can afford.
This is why Superprof is eager to provide you with various resources that are entirely FREE.
Today, tutoring can take on many forms:
- One-on-one tutoring with a teacher
- After-school homework help at tutoring centres, either in study groups or alone
- Tutoring in an online classroom
- Education blogs that prep you for exam questions
Whether in cities or in villages, various associations offer homework help and academic support for struggling students in and outside the classroom.
Volunteers sacrifice several hours of their time each week to help school children and A-Level students succeed.
Here are some of the opportunities offered in Britain for free private tutoring.
Why Take Private Lessons From Educational Associations?
The easiest free tutoring is studying online.
With the age of the Internet and sites offering an online writing lab, and free online tutoring in science and engineering, maths or history, you might not consider private lessons or lessons in a learning community straight away. Especially since such online tutoring services can’t be beaten for flexibility and accessibility.
However, free math tutoring online can be insufficient, while lessons with a tutor through an app such as YUP or TutorMe pricing can be expensive.
Additionally, it can be difficult to advance when there is no one in front of you to correct your mistakes and, even more importantly, explain why you are wrong and offer strategies to improve your learning process.
Taking private lessons through a tutoring program can let you:
- Get free lessons from interested volunteers
- Improve your reading skills
- Review your lessons one more time to make sure you understand them
- Understand your errors and work on correcting them
- Ask any questions you didn’t dare ask in class or that have come up since then
- Work on your study skills to eventually achieve academic success on your own.
These associations provide documentation, manuals and audiovisual materials such as textbooks, audiobooks, ebooks or exercise sheets.
Everything is generally free. A few organisations ask for a registration fee, but it’s usually not very much. It is mostly symbolic and lets you participate in all their activities and pays for photocopies. In some, you will have to pay for materials (notebooks and pens and such) and books, while others will supply everything. So make sure you browse through online testimonials before making your first appointment so you know what to expect.
Did you know you could also take advantage of free online tutoring resources?
Homework Help in Local Libraries
In many libraries in the UK, it is possible to sign up for after-school homework tutoring. Homework Help Sessions (such as here in Nottingham) offer free resources such as computers with free Internet accessibility, pens, paper, calculators etc. - ideal for children from low-income or otherwise disadvantaged households. They also have volunteer tutors eager to answer your questions about integral equations, give you encouragement and help with study strategies and career exploration.
You can usually find the library locations offering after-school tutoring and learning programs on the local council website, search for “library homework help sessions” online or use the search at gov.uk.
Free Tutoring Opportunities for Disadvantaged Students
But as wonderful as it is to see people volunteering for library homework help sessions, the tutors there will sometimes be dealing with several students at once. If it’s just a case of making sure homework is done properly and answering a few questions about the exercises or lesson, a group tutoring program is fine. But if your child has real difficulties - such as a learning disability - whether it be in calculus 1 or history or geography lessons, one-on-one tutoring is the best answer.
If your child is enrolled in a school and has problems with lessons, you should ask within the school if they have access to additional support. Some schools may provide extra help in the form of support workers, for instance.
While there is no official government programme, Britain’s educational system works with several associations to offer help to disadvantaged teens and elementary school children. Some have their own learning centre while others have an outreach program in the schools themselves.
Tutorfair
Tutorfair works with a number of schools in the UK. They provide in-class tutoring, with tutors working directly with teachers to identify students most in need of encouragement and make a tuition plan to help them progress. They also offer small-group lessons with two or three students, taking place either at lunchtime or after school.
Additionally, they provide texting-based tuition. A new GCSE maths program allows students to communicate with tutors on-demand via instant messenger.
To receive their qualifications, tutors have to provide a DBS check and receive child protection training.
The Access Project
The Access Project also partners with schools to provide support on-site at GCSE and A-Levels. Tutors work one-on-one with the child in weekly sessions and stay in contact with the student’s teacher to track vulnerable subjects and their progress.
They also offer mentoring for applications and interviews to undergraduate courses at college and higher education courses.
Action Tutoring
Action Tutoring offers in-school tutoring in reading and writing as well as mathematics as an after-school program (no summer tutoring). They supply workbooks and work either one-to-one or one-to-two, with an average of ten tutors per after-school tutoring program. Qualified teachers have completed a training program and DBS check.
LanguageFutures
Language Futures concentrate on helping students learn a second language at the primary and secondary levels.
Their scope is a little wider, providing not only support for students with difficulty but also More Able, Gifted and Talented students. They partner with schools to broaden the opportunities for language learning and help students stay motivated and reinforce independent study skills.
Are free tutoring websites effective without the benefit of a one-to-one tutor's guidance?
Khan Academy
The online tutoring services of Khan Academy as a whole is not aimed specifically at schoolchildren, but some of its content is. It is a wide-reaching website that caters to both learners and teachers.
Khan has a wide variety of subjects from math to engineering to computing to arts and humanities and much more. They deal with kindergarten to university level. Each subject has a series of subsets (such as trigonometry, for maths) made up of a series of learning modules (for example, how to solve a differential or integral equation or calculate a certain type of probability).
Each module is made up of a series of videos explaining the different aspects.
You can sign up on the website (parents can sign up for young children) and save your progress.
Khan Academy also has its own YouTube channel.
Snap Revise
Snap Revise offers a series of videos on most subjects offered at GSCE and A-Level. They give a concise review of the important information, letting you hear it all again, and offer questions on the individual segments, just like a school exam, but without the classroom atmosphere - no whiteboard here. You have to sign up, but it’s free.
BBC Bitesize
BBC Bitesize offers revision texts and videos for all grades throughout Great Britain and Northern Ireland. No matter what test you’re taking, BBC Bitesize has an explanation text and can help you revise for it.
CrickWeb
CrickWeb offers a number of little games to expand upon various subjects and consolidate what you have learned. Aimed primarily at younger children, it touches on all primary school subjects, from Numeracy to Literacy to History to Languages. You can learn reading and counting in a fun way with CrickWeb.
IXL
IXL allows you to practise Math and English (only these two subjects at this time) at all school levels. These are practice quizzes with instant feedback, so you can go back right away and figure out what’s wrong before the mistakes become ingrained - increasing the effectiveness of the training. The company is situated in the U.S., but they offer several versions of the English site tailored to the curriculum in Great Britain, the U.S., New Zealand, Australia, and more.
MOOCs – Another Option
Massive Open Online Courses are free or fairly affordable courses available online, usually consistent with university level. Some of these sites offer group courses from different universities, so you will be learning from some of the most interesting institutions in the world. Others let private tutors upload their own classes, so you can find MOOC sites that offer a different pace of learning.
The courses aren’t live, but some offer tests. Usually, the courses are free unless you are working toward a degree.
- FutureLearn has various courses in the sciences and economics (for example, accounting), and you can even earn a degree in some of the courses over the website.
- Eliademy offers courses designed by individual teachers rather than universities. Some are paying, some are free, some are relevant to students, others let you work toward a nursing certification or teach you about crowdfunding.
- Udacity offers some free courses; others are paying but not quite as expensive as elsewhere. Subjects range from robotics to Natural Language Processing to an Intro into Self-driving cars. Definitely worth a look!
Subject-Based Resources Free Online
Almost as important as having the right teaching sites are the right sites for looking things up. Your child will soon get lost exploring the resources in these fascinating sites. They provide useful tools for school subjects and hours of fun learning more about the world.
BP Educational Resources
BPES specialise in scientific subjects. It isn’t a tutoring website per se but offers various additional resources such as infographics, experiments or activities that can help consolidate the information received in class. It can be sorted according to age group and subject, such as the “periodic table”, “living things and their habitats” or even “STEM clubs”.
Great Books Online
Great Books Online offers many basic resources such as the complete works of William Shakespeare or Grey’s Anatomy as well as classical works of fiction or nonfiction. Learn Victorian expressions and Elizabethan curses - excellent for writing tutors or anyone taking English Lit GSCE or A-Levels - a public library in the comfort of your home.
Geography AS Notes
Geography AS Notes offers a series of articles on various aspects of Geography - Coasts, Health Issues, Population and Rivers. They started as notes taken by a Geography student and transferred from whiteboards to web pages. They have been rewritten and expanded since.
The History Learning Site
The History Learning Site has articles on topics throughout world history for students seeking an introduction to a subject for a paper or wanting to explore history some more. Some students learn better when the subject is put into a greater context or if they are allowed to explore it in-depth. Libraries are good for whole books on a subject, but smaller articles such as here possess more of a potential for learning addiction.
Sumanas Inc.
The company Sumanas Inc. has a series of animations available online for various science subjects, including biology, psychology and neuroscience, astronomy, environmental science and chemistry. The animations illustrate specific instances such as how a solar cell works or the cycle of acid rain (environmental), synaptic transmission (neuroscience), the life cycle of a protein (molecular biology) or the mechanism of the Mannich reaction (chemistry). These info-animations are perfect for students who do better learning visually than from a textbook.
Assistance for Autistic Students
While it is generally considered healthy for students on the autistic spectrum to learn alongside non-autistic students, the daily routine of school and homework and interpersonal relationships can be very challenging to someone with autism or other social disabilities.
Brain in Hand is a combination app/support system. The smartphone app offers a calendar function with reminders about upcoming tasks and how long they are estimated to take. It will remind the child of upcoming deadlines and any changes in their daily routine. This gives the child a greater sense of security because they always know what is coming up next.
But in addition to daily task reminders, the app also provides the child with coping strategies. When they are confronted with a stressful situation, they can look on their phone and find reminders on how to stay calm, and what questions to ask to get the answers they need to centre themselves.
And if that doesn’t work, the student can press an “emergency red button” that puts them in touch with someone at the National Autistic Society.
Reminders can be inputted by parents and teachers with official access to the app.
There are several planning apps for autistic children out there, but Brain in Hand offers an impressive support structure for the pupil and school.
Discover how to make the most of the free tutoring apps available to every student. You should also ensure you are getting all of the help you are entitled, as the benefits that are offered by the Government can also be put towards paid methods of tutoring and other resources.
What Is More Effective: Homework Help At Schools and Libraries or at Home?
Associations with their own rooms or a tutoring centre will have access to games, computers and other equipment. However, from a psychological point of view, it is generally a better idea for teachers to help out at the student’s home.
The idea is not to do housework or cook dinner but to avoid wasting too much time travelling to and from school, tutoring and home. Having an educator come to their home means that the student isn’t taken out of their comfort zone - often useful when the student has learning disabilities.
Students are often less apt to play tough and pretend to know more than they do when they aren’t in unfamiliar surroundings.
However, in some cases, a challenging family situation will make it easier for some students to learn outside of the home, and some students with other types of learning disabilities might profit from props and games that are not necessarily portable.
Home tutoring is generally the better option, but it is important to tailor free math tutoring (or tutoring in any other subject) to the needs of each child. An individual learning curriculum also means adapting in terms of physical places for lessons or even organising an online tutor session via Skype. A school counsellor can help figure out which strategy is best.
Alternatives to Traditional Free Tutoring
Some associations seek to improve their activities and take them to the next level. Not content to help students with their numeracy or improve in their second language at home, some have expanded beyond home tutoring.
Long-distance tutoring can take several forms. There are two main ones:
- Online tutoring
- Tutoring by mail
If the pedagogical basis is sound, they can give a good working ethic, adapted to school rhythms, with excellent resources for algebra, physics or chemistry.
Long-distance learning is nothing new, but the Internet has definitely changed the game. An online learning academy is particularly attractive to teens. They can even include video conferences with a live math tutor or chemistry tutor and several friends. Without having to factor in travel time, schedule just became a lot easier!
There are places you can turn to for free tutoring in the UK if you are struggling, and don't forget to find support wherever you can, especially for young people who find traditional school environments challenging.
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