There has been an increased interest for a Wodonga tutoring business, after COVID-19 lockdowns forced many Victorian parents to homeschool their children last year.
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Wodonga Tutoring Hub's Tanya Bryant said when Victoria was thrown into a statewide lockdown in July last year, most children were sent home to learn for the majority of term three.
"These kids, they just weren't sure what to do," Ms Bryant said.
"As they were trying to work through it all we had a lot of intake.
"Parents started to see where their children were at and what they were missing."
Ms Bryant said that inquiries doubled, but that only a handful of parents ended up enrolling their children for the tutoring service.
"Definitely lots of inquiries and lots of people just heading to the website or social media pages to see what we offer," she said.
"But still people were wary because of where they were at financially."
Ms Bryant said some parents wanted their children to receive more support, but when the Victorian Government promised to provide assistance to schools to help students catch up late last year, many parents decided to wait to see what was offered.
"A lot of parents held back, then," she said.
"They were even saying to me, 'look, we're going to wait and see what the school offers at the beginning of this year'."
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But she said now with students well and truly in term two, some parents had decided the support was not enough and the interest in tutoring had increased again.
"That's why they all held off last term," she said.
"They were thinking, 'oh, that's great, my child is going to get extra assistance at school'.
"Some of them did, if you were the lucky six that went into a small group.
"But not for everyone else. Now we've got more inquiries again."
Ms Bryant said the business had put on one new tutor to match the increased demand.
She believed the Government would have been better off giving parents funding to target their child's learning individually, rather than through giving it to schools.
She said the ineffective support frustrated her.
"I dare say parents would have been frustrated, too," she said.
Ms Bryant said some teachers had referred students to the tutoring service and she thought it was because they knew the child wasn't getting the support they needed at school.
"Even if it comes down to just handwriting or phonics. There's lots of gaps in maths and topic areas there, too," she said.
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