If you have a strong desire to teach young students, yet you’d prefer to steer clear of the classroom setting, tutoring at GCSE level might be perfect for you.
GCSEs are hugely important as they can determine what career path students consider, so as a GCSE maths, science, or English tutor you would potentially have a big influence on students’ academic careers.
This may seem like a big responsibility, but it’s something that should be motivating rather than intimidating.
Think about it: you get to use your teaching skills and subject knowledge to help young learners figure out what they might like to do with their lives.
You could be the one tutor they think about later in life as someone who believed in their abilities and pushed them to reach their academic potential and ace the notoriously stressful GCSE exams.
So what qualifications do you need to pursue to become a GCSE tutor in the UK?
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Essential Qualifications for GCSE Tutors
Let’s start with the good news: you don’t need any qualifications to become a private tutor in the UK.
That’s right, you could start tutoring tomorrow regardless of whether you have any qualifications under your belt.
There is a catch, though, as few students or parents will take you seriously as a tutor if you have nothing to show for your teaching skills.
So even though there are no essential qualifications as such, there are some preferred qualifications that people like to see in a tutor.
Since there isn’t a great deal of information out there concerning tutor-specific qualifications, your best bet is to draw from the requirements to be a teacher in the UK.
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Teacher Qualifications
According to UCAS, an independent charity with a wealth of information on education and university admissions, here are some useful qualifications to have if you want to be a teacher:
- Undergraduate degree or an equivalent recognised qualification
- Grade C/4 or higher in GCSE maths and English
- Grade C/4 or higher in GCSE science (if you are teaching pupils aged 3-11)
- National Extension College (NEC) course if you haven’t got the required GCSEs
- Subject knowledge enhancement course (SKE) if your degree doesn’t match the subject you want to teach
Of course, you should take this list of qualifications with a grain of salt because it’s intended for would-be teachers rather than tutors.
Plus, the qualification/s you decide to go for must be relevant to what you plan to teach. For example, as a GCSE tutor, you won’t need a grade of C/4 or higher in GCSE science unless you are planning to teach science as a subject.
What you can take from this is that generally speaking, most people who go into the teaching profession will have a grade of C/4 or higher in the most important GCSEs (English, maths, and science). If not, they will have an NEC course that counts as an equivalent.
As for the university, it certainly isn’t a necessity if you want to be a private tutor, but like with most professions, it won’t hurt to have a degree to your name.
There’s no telling the impact a degree can have on your ability to market your tutoring services and convince parents that you’re the right person to teach their child. While a degree isn’t everything, there’s something about committing to study a subject at a higher level that says a lot about your character. It also lets others know that you’d be a good candidate to teach, as you’ve spent a lot of time as a student.
The SKE courses aren’t really necessary for GCSE tutors, as the depth of subject knowledge required to teach the subjects at the GCSE level isn’t profound.
So what else can contribute to a top GCSE tutor CV?
The Ideal GCSE Tutor CV
Ok, so you aren’t going to need a glowing CV to become a tutor, since, well, nobody necessarily needs to see it.
There’s no employer to impress with your life experiences and qualifications, so what’s the point of having a CV in the first place?
For the students and parents.
As a tutor, if you want to make living teaching students, your job is not only going to be one-on-one sessions, but also raising awareness about your services. To make enough money to get by, you of course are going to need students who are willing to take your classes, and continue to take them for several weeks or months.
The best way to impress prospective students, and perhaps more importantly their parents, it’s a good idea to draw up an impressive CV.
Unlike your average CV, as a tutor, you should try to make the CV as personal as possible and relevant to what you aim to teach.
There isn’t much point in listing a job at a pizza place or supermarket since it isn’t relevant to what you can do as a tutor.
Instead, focus on experiences you’ve had in education, why you came to love the subject you teach, and specifically what you offer.
This also comes in handy when you apply to online tutoring platforms. Superprof, for example, will help you market your services as students will come to you, but you need to create a compelling profile to make yourself as marketable as possible.
Once you have that, you’ll be able to teach your students either in person locally or online through the Superprof platform.
Find out how to teach English online here.
What Other Skills do you Need?
Aside from qualifications and CVs, what other skills make the difference between a good tutor and a great one?
For a start, it’s important to know that the role of the tutor is different from that of the teacher.
Why?
Because instead of wrestling for the attention of 20+ students in a classroom, you’ll have just the one sitting in front of you.
What this means is that while you won’t necessarily have to fight to get their attention, you will have to create some kind of rapport to help them feel at ease.
Whereas in school a teacher can throw questions out and pick whoever raises their hand first, in a private class setting you’ll have to make the student feel at ease so that they feel comfortable asking questions.
You can do this simply by showing an interest in them and their motivations with the subject. You can encourage the student to ask questions by not judging their responses to your questions. As soon as young learner feels as if they will be judged harshly for a response they’re not sure is correct, it’s hard for them to open up and get curious about the subject.
Another important skill as a tutor is making every class tailor-made to the student and engaging.
Whereas teachers in school follow strict curriculums and have lesson plans to follow according to textbook exercises, you will be more or less on your own.
You have full creative freedom (within the confines of the curriculum) to teach each concept they need to learn how you wish.
That means you can make the most of online resources, which we highly recommend, to make your classes entertaining. The more interactive and enjoyable your classes are, the more invested the student will be and the more likely it is that they will continue taking classes with you.
Find teach English online here on Superprof.
How to Climb the Career Ladder
So you’ve been a tutor for a while now with enough classes to fill your week, but you’re craving more. You want to make a real difference and help more students, or you simply want to make more money.
How can you go about this?
Two words: online marketing.
One byproduct of how fast we’re moving as a civilization towards everything digital is that these days to stand out you need an online platform.
As a tutor, you can no longer rely on just leaflets, newspaper ads, and local word of mouth to reach new students.
No, you need to establish an online presence for yourself if you want to grow your tutoring business.
There are several ways to go about it, and you can use one or all of the following strategies:
Social Media
Social media gives every single one of us with access to the internet the ability to reach potentially hundreds, thousands, or millions of people around the world.
While you’re unlikely to make it big unless you commit a lot of time and energy to it, you can at least grow a following of around 100 people or more, which will boost your status as a tutor and inevitably lead to more classes.
Create Video Content
If you enjoy speaking in front of a camera, that’s great.
You can create video content that students can show their parents or use to learn about various topics.
You can either go the YouTube route and set up a channel with regular content or you can create an online course that could generate passive income over time.
Blog
If you’re more of a writer, why not set up your own blog?
Write about the subject you teach in a way that’s entertaining and informative, and you never know, you might find that there’s an audience for your words out there.
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