In fateful moments: the appeal of parent testimonials when selling private tutoring

Briant, Elizabeth; Doherty, Catherine; Dooley, Karen; English, Rebecca

doi:10.1080/14681366.2019.1629993

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 39 publications

(39 reference statements)

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“…There is a very small literature exploring franchising in North American learning centres (Aurini, 2004(Aurini, , 2006, management and employment in East Asian cram schools (Dierkes, 2010) and the potential for teacher corruption when they tutor their own pupils in post-Soviet and Global South contexts (Kobakhidze, 2014). However, aside from a few recent studies which start to explore its marketing (Briant et al, 2020), the economic geography of private one-to-one tuition remains unexplored. The opportunity to do so is a valuable one, as it is an example of solo self-employment that sits neatly between the poles of highly skilled freelancers in the creative industries (Mould et al, 2014) and low-paid gig work (Barratt et al, 2020) that are dominating this nascent debate, as tutors are most often sole traders who deliver a personal service to individuals not firms, and whilst platforms can be an important source of work, tutors are not generally low-paid gig workers.…”

Section: Entrepreneurship and The Rise Of Solo Self-employmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Solo self-employment, entrepreneurial subjectivity and the security–precarity continuum: Evidence from private tutors in the supplementary education industry

Holloway

Pimlott‐Wilson

2021

Environ Plan A

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Entrepreneurship is regarded by policy makers and politicians as an accelerant for economic development. Economic geography demonstrates that rather than stimulating entrepreneurship in general, policy makers should support specific forms of entrepreneurship that fuel wider growth. The paper's original contribution is to insist that entrepreneurship research must also explore less growth-oriented, but crucially very widespread, forms of entrepreneurial activity. The paper therefore places solo self-employment – the self-employed without employees – centre stage as an exemplar of this trend. Research is presented on private tutors who run businesses from home, offering children one-to-one tuition in the burgeoning supplementary education industry. The paper scrutinises the causes, configuration and consequences of such solo self-employment as an economically marginal, but numerically dominant, form of entrepreneurship. In so doing, it makes three conceptual advances in the exploration of heterogeneous entrepreneurship. First, in examining why individuals become self-employed, the paper moves beyond classic efforts to understand entrepreneurship through binary push/pull mechanisms in models of occupational choice. Instead, the analysis demonstrates the importance of risk in entrepreneurship and paid employment, highlighting the multiple pathways into solo self-employment as opportunities and constraints coalesce in individual's lives. Secondly, in considering how the solo self-employed think about business, the research breaks through conventional definitions of entrepreneurship to demonstrate that solo self-employment involves a distinctively entrepreneurial subjectivity and practices. Thirdly, by investigating the consequences of solo self-employment, the findings transcend dualist interpretations of self-employment as the realm of entrepreneurial wealth or economic precarity, highlighting instead a security–precarity continuum in immediate and long-term outcomes.

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Section: Entrepreneurship and The Rise Of Solo Self-employmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Solo self-employment, entrepreneurial subjectivity and the security–precarity continuum: Evidence from private tutors in the supplementary education industry

Holloway

Pimlott‐Wilson

2021

Environ Plan A

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“…These studies argue that education is 'women's work' in which women are relied upon to provide early childhood education to prepare children for school and, when there, to supplement their children's school education with enriching activities, assistance with, and to manage homework, social engagements and co-curricular tasks (Lareau, 1987;2002;Griffiths & Smith, 2005). Some of this work looks outside of the mainstream school system to include private tutoring to argue a further example of how the educational market has changed Australia's education landscape (Briant, Doherty, Dooley & English, 2020). These papers suggest that, far from being a neutral option for Australian parents, the use of private tutoring companies skews the opportunities available to students in an education market, affecting the market for scholarships in private schools and prestigious government school enrolments out of catchment.…”

Section: Responsibilisation and Educational Choicementioning

confidence: 99%

Getting a risk-free trial during COVID: Accidental and deliberate home educators, responsibilisation and the growing population of children being educated outside of school

English

2021

Journal of Pedagogy

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Numbers coming out of education departments in Australia suggest that, even though most Australian schools are open, and families are able to send their children to them, increasing numbers of parents are deciding to keep their children at home for their education (Queensland Government: Department of Education, 2020). It may be that, as the president of Australia’s home education representative body stated during the pandemic, Covid school closures offered a “risk-free trial” of home education (Lever, 2020) by providing an a-posteriori experience of education outside of schools. Building on the Covid experiences, this paper suggests that ‘accidentally falling into’ home education may be significant in understanding parents’ home education choices. Using numbers of home educators from Australia, and the associated data on their location and ages, this paper argues responsibilisation (see Doherty & Dooley, 2018) provides a suitable lens to examine how parents may decide, after an a-posteriori experience such as Covid school closures and previous, often negative, experiences of schooling, to home educate in the medium to long term. This paper proposes that increasing numbers of home educators will be seen in various jurisdictions where families perceive themselves responsibilised to home educate due to Covid as an a-posteriori experiences of home education. The paper proposes these families are ‘accidental’ home educators (English, 2021). By contrast, much more stable is the ‘deliberate’ home education population, those whose choices are based in a-priori beliefs about schooling. The paper proposes that the accidental home education category may be better able to explain the growing numbers of home educators in Australia and across the world, providing a means for governments to respond to the needs of this cohort, and the policies required to manage this population.

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“…Given that the need for tuition during the pandemic was higher amongst those less able to pay, tutors experienced difficulties in marketing their services. Prior to the pandemic, academic literature on tuition marketing centred on the ways it normalised tutoring, making it seem like a reasonable solution embraced by the responsible parent ( Briant et al, 2020 , Doherty and Dooley, 2018 ; Hallsén & Karlsson, 2019 ). The landscape shifted in the pandemic, and tutors who sought to replace lost clients now found themselves confronted by a sometimes-angry public, who chastised them for offering a paid-for solution to virus-based problems: [T]here is a huge backlash against tutors asking…to be paid, and there was quite a lot of tutors that got some very bad trolling…you got blasted out the water “Why are you trying to make money out of this awful situation?”…the whole of their [tutors’] livelihood has just fallen off the edge of a cliff, they didn’t know how they were going to pay their mortgage and buy any food…and now they’re being told they should give their services for free…I’ve been quite careful with the advertising I’ve been putting out because of that…it’s not really…very nice when you get trolled!…But also…I don’t want…either a local reputation, or Facebook reputation, of being one of those sorts of people who tried to cash in…that’s not going to do your future business any good.…”

Section: Covid-19 and The Economic Geography Of Private Tuitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supplementary education and the coronavirus pandemic: Economic vitality, business spatiality and societal value in the private tuition industry during the first wave of Covid-19 in England

Pimlott‐Wilson

Holloway

2021

Geoforum

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This paper challenges geographers to examine the lucrative, but vastly understudied, global supplementary education sector (e.g. private tuition; learning centres; cram schools). It marks a break from research in Geographies of Education on locational, socio-cultural and political-economy issues, by concentrating directly on the economic geography of this metaphorically monikered ‘shadow education’ sector. Centred on the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the paper’s aim is to investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the economic vitality, business spatiality and societal value of private tuition in England. Methodologically, it utilises in-depth interviews with tutors providing one-to-one instruction in English, maths or science in the regionally-differentiated tuition market. The findings demonstrate business vitality was impacted: COVID-19 related disruption to schooling produced a profound economic shock for the tuition industry, though new opportunities also emerged from the crisis. Business spatiality was fundamentally rewritten, not only in terms of delivery but also as local markets became national ones. The social value of the industry was drawn into question, as the service was both vital and regressive in its distribution. In conclusion, the paper argues geographers of education must: (i) Embrace research on supplementary education in its own right and as it articulates with state education provision; (ii) Pursue economic analyses which consider both how markets work to produce unequal outcomes for potential consumers, and how they emerge as a space of educational entrepreneurship for those seeking to make a living; and (iii) Urgently examine how the coronavirus pandemic is rewriting processes across the education system.

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In fateful moments: the appeal of parent testimonials when selling private tutoring

Cited by 11 publications

References 39 publications

Solo self-employment, entrepreneurial subjectivity and the security–precarity continuum: Evidence from private tutors in the supplementary education industry

Solo self-employment, entrepreneurial subjectivity and the security–precarity continuum: Evidence from private tutors in the supplementary education industry

Getting a risk-free trial during COVID: Accidental and deliberate home educators, responsibilisation and the growing population of children being educated outside of school

Supplementary education and the coronavirus pandemic: Economic vitality, business spatiality and societal value in the private tuition industry during the first wave of Covid-19 in England

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