Plenty to talk about just after the meeting.

These days I use this blog to try to promote interest in the APTC - or Association of Professional Tuition Centres (of which I am the Hon. Sec). 

The Association creates a sense of shared purpose and togetherness for about 25 tuition centres spread across the UK. It has no head office, no paid officials, just the devotion of those who believe in its worth. It was born in 2011 out of challenges posed by the recession then setting in. A discontented franchisee of Kip McGrath Education Centres in Southend canvassed others across the franchise network - and the outcome was an independent Association, the APTC.

Over the years since, the Association has maintained its membership strength, and it aims to do so for years to come. A core activity is its annual meeting, part business, part social, at a venue in the Midlands. A large section of the membership, some travelling considerable distances, gather for a celebration dinner and an AGM. This year's meeting took place near  Stafford in July.

One of the decisions of the July meeting was to conduct a questionnaire of the full membership, and this went ahead over the summer. What the results strongly showed up was a wish for more social events at a more local level. 

The APTC 'North' is already responding to this with a social planned at Barton Grange (near Preston) in November. 

The APTC 'South' is less advanced in its planning, but the seed is sown. Our get-together may be in the New Year.

If you happen to be a teacher thinking of starting a tuition centre of your own - or perhaps of taking over one that is already running - then coming along to an APTC social might be an ideal introduction. The pro's, the con's, the possibilities, the pitfalls ...

Get in touch with me by replying to this post, as APTC members have lots of experience they are willing to share.


  (Below)  JJ's Tuition Southend - founding centre of the APTC     

The Association of Professional Tuition Centres (APTC for short) is an excellent platform for independent tuition businesses across the UK because it comprises a network of teachers in business all doing more-or-less the same kind of work. Members share their discoveries of new resources, their  experience  of what works and what does not in marketing and advertising; they open their centres to exchange visits.

The cost of joining and belonging is small because the APTC is essentially run by its own members. It is probably no coincidence that the most enthusiastic and hard-working of the volunteers are also the most successful and contented in their businesses!  

The 8th AGM of the APTC, took place this year at Stafford on Sunday 1 July.

As always it was a social reunion as well as a business meeting, with our members converging from the Essex coast at one end of the country and the Lancashire plains at the other.

The meeting has set itself an ambitious agenda for the year ahead: it wants to recruit more members to replace those who are retiring. Accordingly all enquiries are welcome  whether they come  from established, new or proposed, tuition centres. Email Peter Whisson,  pswhisson@btinternet.com   

An examination question which asks for comment on a writer's use of 'language and structure' needs to be read as a two-questions-in-one instruction.

See it as two questions, and answer it in two parts, a language part and a structure part, and the likelihood is that you will gain more marks.

So what is the difference? Put simply, language is approached from the bottom up: it is everything that can be found within the unit of a sentence, the detailed tricks of the trade that writers exploit to shape, colour and give character to their sentences. So alliteration, use of simile and metaphor, repetition of words, use of second person etc. are all examples of language use.   

Structure on the other hand is approached top-down, and can at first appear more difficult to grasp. But a good way in is to treat every reading passage consisting of more than one short paragraph as a 'story' with a beginning, a middle and an end. If you can answer how the writer begins the 'story' - with what topic and with what point of view - and do the same for the middle, and for the conclusion - then you will have focused on structure, and be rewarded for your effort. (Sub-headings, if provided, can be very helpful, as they highlight topics that form structure.)    

There is, yes, a grey area or overlap between language and structure - but it won't matter if you regard, say, a the repetition of an image or idea that occurs at the beginning of the story and again at the end, as a feature of language or of structure. Just being acute enough to notice such a repetition  should earn  a high mark.   
      

When parents bring their Year 4 or Year 5 children along for an assessment they often have this question in mind. Aside from classroom measures of progress in English and Maths, stated in test scores and reported in levels, what are the broader signs of aptitude for a grammar school education? What does the Kent Test really test?

I would say there are four qualities or abilities that will underpin a high score in a  grammar school selection test. Conveniently they begin with the same letter - or at least with the same hard 'c' sound: curiosity, quickness, conversion-readiness, and carefulness.

Curiosity is observable in the extent to which a child enjoys reading - stories, histories, discoveries  - and tackling  puzzles, crosswords, word searches, maths puzzles, puzzles of any kind. Children who are actively and conscientiously curious prepare themselves for the Test without realizing it. They practise the thinking skills they will need, and they acquire the breadth of vocabulary that will be necessary for assured answering.

Quickness of thinking is required in all the Tests, if children are going to complete them without resorting to blind guessing. Quickness in arithmetic is essential to success in the Maths test. If a child has to work out multiplications and divisions (up to 144, or 12 x 12) she or he simply will not finish a sufficient number of questions in the time (only 30 minutes). Quickness of perception is necessary for successful non-verbal or spacial reasoning - and luckily, is more-or-less automatically  picked up with repeated exercise! Quick efficient reading is needed for the English comprehension, and  a quick eye for patterns in spelling and codes for the verbal reasoning. 

Conversion-readiness is a skill that is perhaps less obvious than the previous two. So what do I mean by this? In Maths, for example, it is the readiness to see and to relish the fact that many things are the same, but just take a different form, or use  different terms. A half is 1/2 is 0.5 is 50% is 'something divided by 2'. It is all the same thing. A pound is 100 pence. A metre is 100 cm, a 1000 mm, a tenth of a kilometre. And so on.

But it is not only in Maths that the readiness to convert is an advantage. In English and verbal reasoning it applies too, where conversion takes the guise of recognizing synonyms and equivalent meanings. Dark colours are sombre tones. Fighting strongly is resisting vigorously. To be able to express similar things in different ways is a higher order language skill not expected of 10-year-olds, but the ability to recognize how a word or phrase 'converts' or is equivalent to another, is an integral part of the grammar school test. 

The fourth quality is care or carefulness, and this one may seem to go without saying, but it is worth dwelling upon and expanding with the help of a few more 'c's' - checking and correcting and being self-critical. In the feverish haste of the Kent Test examination, there will be almost no time for deliberate and painstaking checking of work -  so the practices need to be internal and habitual rather than specially turned on for the occasion. Reading attentively so as not to answer inappropriately, checking that the sign in a calculation is a ' - ' and not a ' + ', and getting used to looking for correctable errors, misspellings or mistakes of grammar and punctuation - such are instances of the care or carefulness tested in the grammar school selection.

​Few children at the age of 9 or 10 are naturally adept in all four qualities and skills: curiosity, quickness in working, carefulness in working, and skill in converting. All are capable of improving in them; some will always find the going hard. Grammar schools select those who, on the day, emerge most proficient in them on the evidence of the Test.