The race to ace: how mass tutoring risks children’s mental health and entrenching inequality
Post-lockdown parental anxieties have led some to predict a boom in private tutoring, but experts say that risks stressing kids and widening the gap between rich and poor
Sydney-based mother of two Fiona* was stressed about the effects of lockdown on her 10-year-old son’s learning. “When the lockdown happened everything went haywire,” she says, and they could barely cope with schoolwork. So she and her husband decided to “take a [financial] hit” and book their son in for four hours a week of coaching, all on the one day, at a cost of $800 per term.
Fiona is a recent migrant to Australia, and scarred by a comment made by a stranger about public schools “scraping the bottom of the barrel” in terms of student success rates. She is determined to do right by her child, whose motivation dived during lockdown. She hopes that tutoring will reinforce the expectations around school work that were a little more solid before the pandemic began.