A new peer tutoring programme launched this month with forty student tutors trained over two weekend sessions, offering free help in mathematics, sciences and languages to any student who signs up — no teacher referral required.
The no-referral rule was deliberate. “The students who most need help are often the least likely to be sent,” said programme founder Grace Tan. “They’re managing quietly, until they aren’t. We wanted a door anyone can walk through without a form explaining why.”
Tutors completed training covering how to explain without simply solving, how to recognise when a difficulty is bigger than the subject, and when to point someone toward advising staff instead. Tutoring happens in the renovated north common room’s study pods, in one-hour bookable sessions.
Early demand
In the first two weeks, 130 sessions were booked — more than the timetable comfortably holds. Mathematics accounts for over half of all requests. Tan said the programme will train a second tutor cohort at the winter break and is asking teachers to suggest strong candidates.
Explaining fractions to someone for an hour taught me more about fractions than three years of being good at them.
Deniz Aydin, sophomore tutor
Students can book sessions or apply to become tutors through the programme’s page in the student portal. Tutoring is free; tutors volunteer and receive service-hour credit.
Built on evidence from elsewhere
Tan’s proposal to the council cited results from peer-tutoring schemes at comparable schools, where regular sessions were associated with measurable grade improvement — for the tutors as much as the tutored, a finding that surprised the council and settled the funding debate. The programme will collect its own numbers: participants’ term grades in tutored subjects, tracked anonymously with advising-office oversight, will be compared against their prior trajectory. “If this works, we’ll be able to show it,” Tan said. “If it doesn’t, we’d rather know than feel good.”
The programme’s narrowest early bottleneck is scheduling: tutors and students must share a free period, and the portal’s booking tool cannot yet see timetables. For now, matching is done by hand each Sunday by Tan and two volunteers with a spreadsheet and, she reports, “strong opinions about colour-coding.” A timetable-aware booking upgrade has been requested from IT services.
