First of all, tuition means that teaching or instructions. In Singapore, tuition usually refers to one-to-one tuition which known as home tuition, personal tuition, and private tuition. Tuition is a special type of teaching which is taught by a tutor. Unlike school teachers, in Singapore, there is no strict certificate or rule to attain means to be a qualified tutor. There are many tuition centres in Singapore and you may have to judge a tutor by yourself. When the word qualified is used for the tutor simply means that the tutor is able and have the necessary academic qualification that meets the parents’ expectation.
Difference between a tuition centre and a tuition agency
In Singapore, a tuition agency helps parents to find private tutor for their children and also helps private tutor to find tuition assignments (students). In simple words, tuition agency acts as a middleman to match both private tutors and students. A tuition agency is easy and cheaper to be set at home and can be easily run at home with a telephone line. Anyone can start easily a tuition agency like Chinese tuition Singapore, physics tuition Singapore or science tuition Singapore. In Singapore, there are many tuition agencies, some of them are unregistered business, while some are registered.
A tuition centre on the other hand, has physical classrooms to house students. It is like a small school where the business owner or principal would engage the tuition tutor to conduct and prepare the lessons for the students who have signed up. And there will be more than one student for each tuition class, also called group tuition.
How to find an excellent tuition centre in Singapore?
There are many tuition centre in Singapore all over internet. You may or may not find the best as there is actually no official ranking of ‘Best tuition centre’ in Singapore. Nobody can guarantee it’s quality unless you perform a simple check on them.
So how do you check for an excellent tuition centre in Singapore? There is no perfect and complete way to judge a tuition centre. But there is a small guidance to roughly gauge whether a tuition centre is good or not. Here are some checklists to preview an excellent tuition centre:
- Decent track record
- Registered with ACRA and MOE certified.
- Committed and experienced tutors (minimum 3 years teaching same syllabus)
- Small-sized class (no more than 6 students/class)
- Good reviews from other parents or from educational-related blogs
For those of you who stays in the East side of Singapore, do check out one of a new up-and-coming tuition centre in Singapore, ST Education Lab. They provide a ‘More Than Tuition’ approach in which it emphasizes on equipping the students not only with academic excellence but also with soft skills such as presentation skills, resume workshop, 3D printing, etc. Check out all their testimonials on their website https://www.st-edulab.com/.