I work for a high school tutoring company in Sydney, Australia where we tutors work as contractors so get paid for the hours worked only. I have worked as a tutor there for 2 years.
At the end of the first school year I was there, the owner of the company asked all tutors to write a report for each student detailing their progress throughout the year, what we have been working on in tutoring, any specific challenges, and what still needs to be worked on, which she would then send on to the parents to keep them happy. She estimated this to be about a paragraph. There was no mention of payment, just “please get the reports in by this date”. A friend who also works for her said this was normal and happened every year, and was stressed about having to write her 17 reports which was going to take her days. I thought this was dodgy but still was new-ish and intended to write my reports, however I missed the deadline and the owner didn’t say anything so I just never did them.
Fast forward to last year, when Sydney was hit with a long Covid lockdown, and all tutoring sessions moved online. At the end of term 3 (September, so not the end of the school year), the owner asked us tutors to write reports for our students as the parents had less visibility with everything having been online. This end-of-term (rather than end-of-year) reporting seemed like a one-off due to the Covid situation. I did my reports this time but it took me days with only 8 students. According to my Google Doc history it took about 12 hours across 4 days, for a total of 2000 words, so approx 1.5 hours per student. She then asked us to write reports again in December and I didn’t do them. Apart from sending us a few group email reminders for reports she never followed up with me personally.
Now, we are about to finish term 1 and we’ve been asked to write reports again, so it’s clearly an end of term thing now, which means writing reports four times a year. This time I am definitely going to ask for payment in order to do the reports but am unsure how to do so – should I propose an hourly rate which is how tutoring is done? I get $55 per one hour tutoring session – what would be a reasonable rate for writing the reports? The alternative is not doing them as she never seems to question it, evidently because she knows it’s dodgy. However, one of my students is a foster child and the government pays for her tutoring, and her case worker has asked for a report to continue to get funding for tutoring, so in this case a report would be necessary.
My plan is to send the owner an email stating that I am unable to complete the reports unless I am remunerated because I must prioritise my paid work. I will also detail the hours it took me to write the reports previously so she knows what to expect.
She puts her company branding, photo and name on each report so it makes her look good, and it would help with customer retention. Also, I am the only one to ask for payment, all the other tutors complete them without question, but I did that once and felt used, so fuck that.