It may seem a simple thing to find a home tutor for a child, but it eventually turns out to be a very complicated process. Naturally, you will look for a reliable, qualified, trustworthy home tutor who will have the responsibility of helping your child study. You will soon realize that finding a serious, well qualified home tutor is not very easy. You may easily be fooled by persons pretending they have the qualifications you are requiring if you are choosing to use a newspaper advertisement for recruiting candidates. Many of those answering your ad may not be reliable; therefore you should also take into consideration the option of using a tuition agency's services.

At first sight you will think that a tuition agency will offer serious, professional services. Well, some tuition agencies are trustworthy, other are just after your money. Therefore be careful and do some research on the background of the agency!

The most common unscrupulous behavior on behalf of a tuition agency is to make their home tutors lie about their qualification, age or tutoring experience. There have been reported a number of complaints filed by people that have used these kind of tuition agencies. Customers asked for a home tutor to posses a certain educational qualification or a certain age, but tuition agencies sent them persons that didn't meet those requirements. For instance, a certain family was looking for a home tutor that would be a university graduate, but got a junior college student for a tutor. In this case, the family was lucky: the home tutor sent by the agency was honest and told them from the start the truth about his real qualifications. He admitted that he had been instructed by the agency to lie about his age or current occupation. The agency didn't have any suitable home tutors available for this assignment, and didn't want to lose the job, so they made the junior college student lie.

If anything like this happens to you, you should know that the responsibility for the lie is belonging exclusively to the tuition agency. Home tutors are usually college students that are in deep need for money, so the perspective of being fired from the tuition agency is scaring them strong enough to lie about age or educational background.

Therefore, we are advising you to always double check the background of both tuition agency and home tutor. Ask the tuition agency to give you recommendation letters from previous customers. You can even call there customers for confirmation. But, most important, you should call the university and check if the home tutor is as qualified as he says. You can even ask the tuition agency to present you diplomas or documents that will prove the home tutor's qualification.