Dear potential client
Some information about my tutoring service follows, to help you make an informed decision about how best to support your student's education with a tutor. I'm very happy to discuss the contents of this document and to answer any questions that arise.
I have a website, as you may or may not know – www.enhancetutoring.com.au. Please feel free to have a look at it.
I come to tutor at your residence. I have tutoring clients all over Melbourne so it is usually not too difficult for us to arrange a mutually convenient time when you can have a tutor such as myself come to your door, rather than you going to the hassle of travelling to them. I can arrange to meet your student at the State library or a local library if that is more convenient but generally tutoring at your premises is better. Student feels more comfortable and also I like to have the sessions recorded on the student's digital voice recorder on their mobile phones, and raising your voice in the library to get a good recording is sometimes problematic. Recording our sessions is very handy as it saves the need to take more extensive hand-written notes at the time of the session, and the students can go over my good advice and my wording improvement suggestions a second or third time, after I have left, so that represents better value.
I tutor students in VCE English or VCE EAL (English as an Additional Language), not VCE Literature or English Language. My standard rate is usually $95 hour for Year 12 students, often with some discount given for younger students. These days I can often be talked into tutoring at a reduced rate because I am trying to increase my amount of clients now that I have left teaching at school so that I can write study guides for a living, in the main.
Although these prices are subject to factors that cause variation, I can often tutor students for Year 12s for $85hr, Yr 11s for $75hr and Yr 10s for $65hr, these days.
Factors like where you live and what texts your student is studying will play a part in the decision as to my rate. The Year 12 texts are set across Victoria (there are 36 of them, and I am very familiar with them all, pretty much, with few exceptions) and so there is a very good chance I might know your Year 12 student’s text already, but Year 11 and Year 10 texts can vary considerably, and there is a chance I will have to learn at least one new text to tutor your Year 11 or Year 10 student.
$95 hour might seem like a lot of money but let’s not forget there is at least 50 hours of work or more in getting very familiar with a text and preparing good resources to support its teaching. There is also much work behind each hour of tutoring, in terms of reading the student’s latest draft beforehand and preparing feedback in advance, which is what I do, as well as other organisational aspects.
I used to employ clever university students to tutor for my business. Their charge-out rate was usually $55-$60 an hour, with some discount being given for younger students. My thinking behind this was that just because someone is not a qualified teacher does not bar them from being a good tutor, especially when they have the training and the resources and the time put into them as I put into my tutors. What I found was that this was a very time-consuming business to make my tutors good and I would sometimes have parents, who I don’t think fully appreciated what was involved in being a good English tutor, who would want to try a tutor once and so my tutor would spend 30 hours or so getting very familiar with their student’s text, and then the parent would just change their mind, in my opinion, through no fault of the tutor, and not use them after the first session, so it was all a bit disheartening. So as a general rule, I am thinking about not providing tutors any more, especially now that I have reduced my own rates a little bit.
All of my tutors had done very well on the VCE English exam and had a very good knowledge of what is involved with doing well in English, as they already had themselves, but I also spent a lot of time making them much better, and sharing with them the practical skills and experiences that I have acquired over time.
For my own part, there is no doubt that I genuinely have a love of education and learning and I take great pride in what I do and work really hard to make sure that my clients are satisfied.
Group tutoring rates are also available, if you organise the group. I give a discount on my rate for multiple students, doing the same texts.
Enhance Tutorial Services has programs supported by handbooks of resources which I have put together, to enhance students’ skills. We have a Technical Skills of English program to help people with their punctuation, grammar, spelling and other expression issues, as well as programs for the three main sorts of writing that are stipulated in the VCE English curriculum: Writing in Context, Text Response and Language Analysis.
We also assist VCE EAL students. And we understand the differences between the Language Analysis requirements of English and EAL.
Unlike many tutors and tutorial services we provide specialist text support to our students. That is, I go to great pains to get to know the novels (or films or plays) that your student is studying at school. This is very important, particularly in the demanding VCE years; you certainly need a tutor who knows the text that students are studying in a thorough way.
There are 36 texts on the VCE English list that students might need to be familiar with depending on which text their schools have chosen, so this is something that a lot of tutorial services have trouble dealing with. Not for me. I know most of them backwards or, at least, very well, and, if your student is at a school which is doing a slightly more obscure text which hasn't come up for me as yet, I promise to become intimately familiar with it. Let's see if you can find a quality tutor, who is willing to do that at the price I do.
I am a current qualified teacher and a VCAA assessor. I support my tutors with the most recent and best information and tactics so that they can pass on this information to your child to give them the edge in the VCE English exam. I know what I'm doing and I make my knowledge available to you at an affordable price. Please consider giving our service a go. You have nothing to lose except the cost of the first session. You can withdraw at any time without obligation.
Best regards
Jessie Ward