Sri Lankan tutors

Tutors in Sri Lanka who are as young as 17 and earning as little as £1.57 an hour

Hmm:

Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said: “First of all there’s a question about whether it’s ethical to be paying £1.57 to £3.07 an hour, outsourcing in this way. It also raises a bigger issue about why this money is being paid to the private sector whose objective in life must be to make a profit.”

So, who actually makes the profit out of this?

Assume that UK tutoring costs £17 an hour – an actual figure plucked from familial experience.

For each hour of tutoring received from a UK based tutor some other UK based taxpayer must give up £17 worth of consumption – assuming zero cost of tax collection. That’s a gallon at ‘Spoons that someone doesn’t get to drink in order to beat sums into the head of some liddle darlin’.

OK, maybe that’s worth it.

So, we now use the Sri Lankans at £1.70 an hour. For that same gallon not supped we gain 10 hours of tuition. Or, perhaps we allow the drinking of 7 pints and gain the hour.

The profit is either the student in gaining the tuition or the taxpayer in not losing consumption.

Who in buggery cares what the intermediary is making given that profit?

Our Man in Swindon’s equally dismissive view of this complaint is here.