Gustav and Mateo, volunteer tutor and pupil

Gustav is a law student in London and finds tutoring a refreshing change from his degree. It gives him the chance to meet all sorts of different people, and working with primary school pupils has really improved his communication skills. Every week he works with Mateo, a Year 6 pupil who wants to be an engineer. Mateo thinks Gus is great and likes that tutoring gives him a chance to ‘step up’ his knowledge of maths and English.

Gustav says,

“I’m studying law at university and tutoring is completely different, such a contrast, and that’s mostly why I picked it. I saw it at a careers fair and thought this will be something very different to my degree, much more rewarding. It’s such a great escape, it’s so enjoyable. I’m thinking completely differently. Being able to communicate with a ten year old is a very useful skill!

I’ve definitely noticed a change in my pupil. The questions [my pupil] is asking are far more analytical and also the confidence, that’s another thing – at the beginning, obviously anyone would be frightened to ask certain questions and now he’s realising that there’s no stupid questions.

It’s nice to see that we’ve built a rapport and he doesn’t feel afraid.

My pupil is quite confident anyway, but even by his standards I could see he was quite timid. If I prompted him he’d talk but then outside of that he wouldn’t. And now he actively might interrupt me and ask a question which is good. That’s exactly what I want.

Lots of volunteering is working with people that you wouldn’t normally work with, or you can’t work with in a corporate setting. The thing that I’ve found the most is that it’s an escape from my degree – high pressure, constant work, dealing with people all the time and also very stressed. This is a world apart from that, people that are down to earth and that are learning themselves.

There’s so much to love about it. There’s lots of support from Action Tutoring in particular. The workbook makes it easy to get through the work and there’s also a lot of scope to do things you want to do. If you want to take it a step further you can, but if in some weeks you’re busy and you don’t have the time you can just stick to the workbook.  I think Action Tutoring is a very good option.”

Mateo says, 

“I like tutoring because they kind of like step it up. They teach me words that I never really experienced. They let me read textbooks and sometimes they have extra information that I can use if I have to do English lessons.

I think my tutor is very nice. He makes it simple for me to understand and he’s great.

I want to be an engineer. I want to make some things, mechanical parts! English doesn’t really help with it but I would like to study English at university. I like to read books from authors’ imaginations or sometimes real books about people, autobiographies.

[I think other people should have tutoring] because it could help them a lot if they don’t understand certain things, because you have a baseline assessment – so they kind of go through things we need to go through and I think tutoring just helps with that a lot.”