Hi,
I wonder if there will be an association like this for
our country's tuition industry in future:
http://www.ata.edu.au
Thanks!
Cheers,
Wen Shih
In the first place, the larger tutoring businesses will not
trust each other, each looking to protect it's own bottomline
against its rivals, and it's doubtful if such an organization can
even materialize at all.
If it does somehow get set up, it will be susceptible to abuse,
ie. profitable large tutoring businesses will gang up to
squeeze out smaller operators and individual tutors.
And being a private organization, inclusion or registration
will have to be optional, and not legislated as compulsory, so
most tutors and tutoring businesses would decline to register
themselves in such an organization (which will cost you membership
fees, with no significant tangible benefit).
MOE will (quite rightly) deem it a waste of tax payers' money to
legislate and regulate what MOE has already formally declared
as "an unncessary industry".
Edited post to add :
Moreso than in other service industries, the tuition
industry is successfully self-regulating, in that if the
students/parents (increasingly demanding these days) do not quickly
see satisfactory improvement in results, they will simply drop the
tutor / tuition center, and move on to the next one, until they are
satisfied with results.
As every student and tutor is unique, different students
with different learning styles will respond differently to
different tutors with different teaching styles. Student A might
find tutor B much better, while student B might find tutor A much
better.
I actually have had students who used to receive tuition
from some other very famous and reputable tutors (in separate,
unrelated cases, involving different famous and reputable tutors,
not just for H2 Chemistry, but for other H2 subjects as well), but
the students told me (initially to my surprise, before I better
understood that different-students-need-different-tutors) that they
found these tutors to be 'sucky' or 'cannot teach' or 'waste of
money', etc.
Besides, the man behind the ATA already tried to implement this
in Singapore, and he gave up in disgust :
I WAS surprised and relieved to see the article on Sunday ('Is
your child's tutor qualified?').
I am the chief executive officer of the Australian Tutoring
Association (ATA) and last year, while in Singapore, I met two
large tuition companies here to speak about issues that the tuition
industry could address.
These issues included:
Both businesses expressed interest in forming an association
similar to the ATA. However, neither has acted despite both
recognising serious issues in the industry.
In Australia, the ATA has given consumers a choice between those
places offering accountable, honest and open tuition, and those
that do not.
We do this by having members agree to abide by our code of
conduct, which is available online to consumers and to which all
members are accountable.
Why isn't there a tuition association in Singapore which
benchmarks minimum standards for all tutors?
Why is the industry unregulated?
Who is most vulnerable?
A responsible industry has a representative body. It seems odd
that in Singapore, where there is a real focus on education, the
private sector is not called upon to demonstrate more initiative
with regard to consumers.
The worst aspects of the sector in Australia are similar to
those that occur here: Online tuition and the use of agents (in the
case of tuition agencies that are not registered with the Ministry
of Education).
I think serious questions should be asked about the tuition
sector in Singapore, and all related businesses should be subject
to greater consumer scrutiny until there is a representative body
that is prepared to publicly call for minimum standards and work
with the Government as well as consumer protection and educational
bodies.
Mohan Dhall
