An increasing number of Danish parents are paying for private tutoring for their children.
According to Berlingske, parents are not satisfied with the quality of the compulsory school homework cafes, ‘lektier cafe’, which are meant to help pupils who are lagging behind in some subjects.
READ MORE: Homework cafes will be obligatory
My Academy, one of the companies that specialise in providing private tutoring to pupils, claims to have increased the number of students it assists by about 60 percent to 1,000 since 2014.
Lektier cafer don’t make sense
“There are so many schools where this system [homework cafes] does not work at all,” Rune Sørensen, the country manager at My Academy, told Berlingske.
“Sometimes there are 60 pupils sitting in a classroom with one teacher, and it is not a teacher who can actually help them, but just someone to see that they are there. This may be fine for those students who get 10 [out of 12], but for those who get 00 [a low grade] and need help to get started, this makes no sense.”
Niklas Kany, the managing director at Mentor Denmark, another private tutoring company, confirms the trend, noting that about 75 percent of their students are so-called weak students.
Despite criticism from the opposition and the Danish Union of Teachers, the new government insists the compulsory homework cafes remain part of the school curriculum.
