Out from the Shadows: The Billion Dollar Tutoring Industry

  By Bronwyn Reid O’Connor, Katherin Cartwright and Ben Zunica Governments in Australia can no longer afford to abstain from engaging with tutoring. The tutoring industry has boomed over recent decades, with 2022 estimates suggesting it is now a billion dollar industry. Right now, departments of education across the country are confining themselves to the interest of schools alone, overlooking the broader realities of how society currently engages with education. Let’s bring tutoring out of the shadows in Australia so we can stop leaving children and parents unprotected, and the education system unbalanced.

Why should we be concerned?

Parents and children are doubly vulnerable when it comes to tutoring. First, children are in a natural power imbalance with their tutor as the tutor is the authority figure. Second, parents are vulnerable as consumers who are paying for a service in a marketplace with no rules. If the tutoring is not safe or high-quality, there’s no clear system of protection. It’s a bit like childcare without any standards.  Parents are trusting someone with their child and their money, but there are no checks or safeguards. This leaves tutoring open to child safety risks. It also makes parents susceptible to predatory business practices. Some tutoring companies openly exploit parents’ fears, making big promises with no evidence to back them. Without regulation, companies and tutors can make nearly any claim of qualification, quality, and effectiveness. This places all the burden on parents to make decisions about who should tutor their children.

Reinforcing social inequalities

Socially, tutoring often reinforces educational inequities, where families can use economic advantages to secure educational opportunities for their children. Whilst families should have choice and the freedom to pursue tutoring, we should think carefully about the educational systems that are put in place that reinforce the ability to financially secure academic advantage. Tutoring has been termed ‘shadow education’ because, like a shadow, it is cast by social anxieties and educational pressures. For example, in NSW the selective schools test sees many parents invest thousands of dollars in tutoring for test preparation. The pressure of high stakes exams in the senior years of high school also drives parents to seek tutoring. Of course, tutoring is not only sought for high-achieving students. It’s also used by parents who seek tutoring for students who need support. In these cases, tutoring is casting a shadow on how some schools continue to be inadequately resourced to meet the needs of increasingly diverse learners. We expect teachers to cater for 30 individual students, but the range of needs can be nearly impossible for a single, under-resourced teacher. Schools and their teachers need to be better resourced and supported to address the diverse needs of all students.

Why Regulation Without Evidence is Risky

Tutoring is currently a policy blind spot in Australia. Self-regulation has been attempted by the Australian Tutoring Association but is unlikely to reach most practitioners. Government needs to engage in the regulation of tutoring. But this regulation must be well-informed otherwise we risk ineffective measures which may have harmful consequences. China’s attempts to regulate tutoring have had unintended negative consequences. Regulated poorly, we could risk driving tutoring underground, worsening inequalities, or misallocating resources. So, what evidence might we still need? We need to understand the real size of the tutoring industry. Right now, we have no reliable data on the numbers of tutors and what education qualifications they have. There is also a lack of conclusive evidence for the effectiveness of tutoring. Despite being a multi-million-dollar industry, we cannot point to any data, nationally or internationally, that conclusively confirms that tutoring has a positive impact on student outcomes. We are still yet to have a robust body of research about how this impacts teachers and students at school. Anecdotally, we know that tutoring has academic and social impacts on teachers and students within the school walls but we don’t have robust research on this. We also do not have data on the perspectives of tutors and we don’t have a deep understanding of the pedagogy of tutoring. We need that if we seek to link outcomes to practices. The voices of students are also largely absent from research. The small body of research on parents’ motivations also needs to be continued to understand the modern drivers of tutoring.

A call to action for researchers and policymakers

Evidence without regulation will continue to be toothless, and regulation without evidence risks ineffective policy. We need evidence-informed regulation which is focused on the best interest of children. It is concerning that an industry of this scale still lacks reliable data on its true size and impact. The Australian Government does collect data on private tutors numbers but these figures don’t capture the large proportion of tutors who operate undeclared. To date, state and federal governments have had little appetite for monitoring or regulating the tutoring industry. Our new research calls attention to why this needs to change. We raise a call to action for governments and the research community, as regulation and evidence must go together.

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This article was originally published on EduResearch Matters. Read the original article.

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