It’s that time of year. Getting to know new students, developing solid working relationships, identifying each individual’s specific needs – building strong foundations.

The last couple of years have seen a change in tutoring. Once upon a time, we would have a clear idea of exactly what a student would have been expected to have learnt by a particular age, but Covid put an end to that.

Every child experienced lockdown learning differently. Some had quiet rooms, a laptop to themselves, a school that delivered high-quality online lessons, throughout the day. For others, remote learning meant trying to access lessons on a phone screen, in a household with several other children were doing the same, mum and dad working online and the whole shebang crashing every 5 minutes because there wasn’t enough bandwidth for them all. Some kids had no devices at all.

Three years later, the Government seems to have forgotten all that. Children are back to normal external exam systems, with no mitigations in place. When new students arrive, there is no guarantee that they have all the foundation blocks in place. Some do, many don’t.

So, at the start of the new academic year, we are going back to basics. Punctuation, word types, basic grammar.

Because without strong foundations, the whole structure is about as stable as a house of cards.