At Bucknell Maths our tutors have been carefully selected. All are either currently teaching or have retired from teaching.

The tutor's role is to set work and tests, to assess your child's results, and to answer any questions you may have or problems which may arise.The tutor must ensure that the child does not grow discouraged because work is too difficult or takes too long, but neither too easy so the child becomes bored.

The tutor will monitor that the child does not spend too long in a session. It will tend to become progressively more and more difficult to motivate the child if they do too much in a single session. Avoid letting your child do too much at the beginning when the system is fresh and exciting. It is better for the child to leave the system each time wanting to do a little bit more.

The tutor will be happy to take advice from parents, and to respond with work set. This may be because of perceived difficulties, the need to catch up in particular topics, or to revise for upcoming school tests or exams, or to prepare for your child's next school. You the parent may participate in deciding on topics to practice as much or little as you wish.

If your child is stuck on a particular question or exercise, the first port of call is to you the parent, or possibly an older sibling. If there is still some difficulty, try the Help button. Otherwise try the answer button, just seeing the answer to one question is usually enough to be able to proceed with the rest of the questions. Or your child may like to take the stick in and show the teacher on the class PC for help. You may of course email your tutor, or if it is urgent call the tutor there and then (sociable hours) to ask for advice.

If the exercise is too difficult for your child, perhaps because the topic hasn't been done in class yet, by all means press the "Postpone" button. This means the exercise will pop up again, possibly in a week or too, or press the "Finish" button to eradicate the exercise altogether. In either case your tutor will notice this and will take the appropriate steps.

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Assessing your child and setting appropriate work

It might take a few days at the start for your tutor to gauge your child's level, ability, speed and accuracy. The tutor may know your child's school and have some idea of where your child is in the curriculum. Your tutor may know your child's level in the Primary Framework for Mathematics. The tutor will also want to take account of your special concerns as a parent e.g. weaknesses highlighted in previous school tests or exams, lack of confidence or speed, desire to stretch an able pupil, approaching exams, or senior or other schools aimed for.

By gathering together all the relevant information, over time your tutor will be able to establish a suitable programme for your child to follow, and modify as things progress.

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Communication with the tutor

Your tutor will send new work via email attachments. Your tutor will discuss this with you at the start to ensure you can manage to download work sent via the internet and load it into the system. It is all very easy but for someone with little or no experience it may seem a little daunting until they have done it for themselves a couple of times. You may find that your child or older sibling can manage to do this quite well without your help! Whoever does it, the whole process from clicking on the email attachment to download and saving on the stick should only take a few seconds (the work file is very small) and will normally only be done on a weekly basis, or as required.

Similarly you will need to send your child's results from the memory stick to your tutor via an email attachment. Again this is very easy and should only take a few seconds. Your tutor will talk you through this as well to ensure even if you start with no experience that you can do it easily after the first few goes. You will need to send results on a regular basis, say weekly or as required.

Apart from the above, your tutor will discuss with you from the start how you would like to communicate with each other, whether via email or the phone or combination of these.

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Keeping your child on track

The tutor is there to encourage and praise where your child has kept up with the set work and to some extent reproach or enquire when agreed targets are not being met. Your child is much more likely to keep on track and do the agreed exercises if they know that someone from outside the family is checking their results.

This is one of the essential roles the tutor has to play. The tutor provides in depth monitoring of your child not just at the beginning but consistently over the months. This consistency is key and something parents would find difficult to sustain themselves over a longer period of time.

There may be occasions when the tutor will need to contact a parent if something shows up in the child's results file. For instance, the child might be doing all the week's work in bursts on the last day, or tending to drop exercises after only answering one or two questions, or keep breaking off and returning to the exercises later. All these things the tutor can pick up on and may wish to chat with the parents to try to help ensure good work habits are maintained.

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Reporting on results

A results report is available from the home page, which shows in full detail your child's results. The same report can be seen by your tutor, and your tutor will discuss the report with you as required.

As your tutor will explain, not every line in the report has special significance as the report is very detailed (one line = one exercise), so you should not make too much of any "bad" results. Every child has good and bad days, and there are several perfectly normal reasons why a single bad result may show up. It is the overall pattern which is far more significant.

If your child does the work set with reasonable regularity and effort, you and your child, not to mention the teacher at school will soon notice a difference.

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