How to find the right tutor who teaches children with special needs in Singapore?

Children with special needs are often looked down upon and this causes them to be marginalized in society; unfortunately. On the other hand, not all teachers are prepared to teach students with special needs because it requires a whole set of skills for which tutors need to be trained for separately. Moreover, such a tutor needs to have the virtue of patience in order to empathize with the such children and help them in every way possible.

Source: parentcircle.com

Firstly, there are many centres that cater to different needs for the students. For example, some centres may contain special needs tutor that specialise in teaching students with dyslexia while other centres may have teachers that specialise in teaching students with autism. Parents, based on what their child needs, can search for the suitable tuition centre that they think will be apt for their child.

Source: brighttutor.sg/

If the tuition centre is specialised to help cater to the needs of the child, parents can be assured that the tutor will be experienced and skilled at teaching the student. If the centre is not specialised, then parents can talk to the tutors at the centre to inform them about the needs of their child. It is important to inform the tutors of this as enrolling the child without informing the tutor can result in the tutor being very under-prepared for teaching the student.

Secondly, there are websites that can help to find tutors that cater to special needs and match them to the respective students. For example, LearnIn was a social enterprise set up to help match the students to the specific tutors that can cater to their needs. The disabilities of the students could range from visual and hearing impairment to autism and intellectual disabilities.

Source: aaac.co/en-us

By using these types of websites, parents can easily find apt tutors for their child instead of adopting a trial and error method. Parents do not necessarily have to use these specialized websites. They can also try using other typical websites that help to find a tutor but indicate that their child has special needs. Tutors may end up rejecting because of this reason but there are still a few tutors out there that will be willing to help the child.

Finally, even if the tuition centre or even the tutor promises that they have the capability to teach the student well and cater to their needs, this may not exactly be true all the time. Every student is unique and sometimes a teaching technique that worked on another student may not work on another student with the same special needs.

Thus, parents should try asking the tutor if they can sit in for the lesson to monitor how well the lesson goes and based on this, they will be able to make a more informed decision. If sitting in while the lesson is going on is not possible, parents can simply ask their child to rate the quality of teaching of the tutor. At the end of the day, they are the ones that will be affected the most by all of this.