Effective Tutoring and School Improvement

This article sets out to define effective tutoring and to establish links between effective tutoring and school improvement. Before identifying if a school has improved, one must first ascertain the function of schools. If one accepts Lodge’s premise that the function of schools is ’to promote children’s learning’ (Lodge, 2000), then an improving school is one which improves learning itself. This paper argues that effective tutoring can play a part in helping schools to achieve this goal and outlines some practical ways in which this can happen. It draws on current practice at Greenshaw High School to explore some strategies for improving tutoring in order to impact on schools’ effectiveness.