Alec Dickson is the founder and president of Community Service Volunteers and here describes their student tutoring project 'Learning Together', where students from universities volunteer to work in a school for about two hours a week over a period of at least 10 weeks, helping pupils with their studies.
When I first went to the States in 1961 it was, at the invitation of the Ford Foundation, to share experience with those who were setting up the Peace Corps. However, with President Kennedy himself declaring his commitment to the idea of volunteers going out to the Third World and appointing his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to head operations, our own effort with Voluntary Service Overseas seemed rather puny and amateurish by contrast. But I did see something that impressed me deeply - students in hundreds going into high schools to coach pupils having learning difficulties.
Experts might talk about the cross-age relationship, the youngsters themselves being helped spoke of their having their 'special friend'. To see them sitting side by side, in corridors and corners, was to be convinced. There was something so basic about the simplicity of this form of service, it had to work and it manifestly was working.
On my return I made up my mind to try to encourage this movement of tutoring in the UK. I discovered that we British had been first in the field. In 1796 Andrew Bell, riding his horse along the beach at Madras, saw Indian youngsters drawing letters in the sand, to be copied by younger brothers and sisters before the next wave rolled in. He introduced it into the school he was running and later brought it back to Britain calling it the Madras System.
Almost simultaneously, in Southwark, Joseph Lancaster started a school where older pupils taught the younger - and the clear success of this led him to spread it to the States and Latin America. But in the 1830s the first teachers' union came into being (started by one of Lancaster's former pupils) and with it the belief that teaching was for teachers.
Back from America I saw things begin to happen in Haverstock Comprehensive School in Camden, and in George Watson's in Edinburgh, with l5-year-olds penetrating local junior schools. Then the message reached the Imperial College of Science and Technology in South Kensington - very nearly, if not quite, our equivalent of M.l.T. There Dr Sinclair Goodlad not only started what he delightfully called 'The Pimlico Connection', with highly intelligent students striking sparks among the Pimlico students, but also producing one publication after another on the philosophy and practice of tutoring.
We awaited a conflagration of tutoring programmes across Britain's universities. It did not happen. Year followed year. Sinclair Goodlad soldiered on with the Pimlico Connection and did not lose heart. I confess I did.
Enter Sir Brian Jenkins, the Lord Mayor of London 1991-92. His own son had been a Community Service Volunteer, while he himself became a Trustee of CSV: this was promising. Customarily Lord Mayors 'adopt' a national voluntary organisation. Their own commitment and public concern are likely to be enhanced if a fresh vision, a new angle suddenly shines forth in the charity they are sponsoring. Elisabeth Hoodless, CSV's Executive Director, stood ready with the idea - and a blow-torch. The programme - Learning Together - aimed at getting students in 50 universities and colleges to tutor pupils in neighbouring schools. Fifty might seem an ambitious figure. Yet to date over 80 institutions of higher education have enrolled; more than £1.6 million has been raised; and 5 'mega-corporations' - BP, Royal Mail, Power Gen, B.T. and the National Westminster Bank - are seconding staff to act as regional coordinators and make thing happen. Astutely, Nat West are focussing on mathematics, calling their programme Financial Literacy. It seems that at long last tutoring has arrived.
Have I, personally, further ambitions? Yes, two. Those pupils receiving help, can they be encouraged - the in-phrase would be 'empowered' - to tutor others younger than themselves? It is a cascade, in effect, that we want to bring about. The Americans soon discovered that you don't have to be outstandingly clever in order to help someone else. Perhaps a tutor uses the accepted textbook - 'Brother, I had to learn this crap', I remember a smiling 16-year-old black telling his tutee, 'and that's just what you're going to do!' - or he may plan his own programme, inventing word games, compiling 'hip' dictionaries or devising those emotive verbal prompters that begin 'If I were President...', 'I'll never forget the day when...' or 'What I really hate is...' If our British students can emulate this pattern and encourage the pupils whom they are helping to assist others in turn, then we come nearer to the slogan 'Each one, teach one?'
Next. It is whole institutions and not only individual students that we should be involving. The violence on housing estates - Hartcliffe in Bristol, Halton Moor in Leeds, Meadowell in North Tyneside - has been of a kind which the police seem unable to cope with. Each of these places, with the elevation of polytechnics now has two universities or more in its vicinity. Have they not resources - in learning and in their own able-bodied, able-minded students - to devise a response to these situations? One of them has a Department of Urban Geography: might this not be tackling a problem of relevance since boredom and a feeling of unwantedness characterise so many of these estates? Or is Sinclair Goodlad right when he says that universities are 'thought' institutions, not 'action' institutions?
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