The teacher/family relationship during home tuition assignments

The work of the home teacher may be defined as a key "bridging" intervention, whose aim is to restore and maintain the relationship between the student and his or her class at school, thus representing a first step in getting back to "normal". Teaching at the student's home involves a certain degree of complexity (Capurso et al., 2021), first due to the location itself. The literature on the issues implicated in home tuition, and in the relationship between teachers and the families of sick children, remains sparse. In this paper, the theme of teacher/family relationships in home tuition settings is addressed by examining the words of 223 teachers (from primary to upper secondary school level) in Lombardy (Italy), who were responsible for their school’s home tuition project or had personally delivered home tuition, and who had completed an online questionnaire in relation to the 2020/2021 school year, with a particular focus on the strengths and weaknesses of their work with sick students. This was in the context of an exploratory, qualitative study on the experiences of teachers involved in home tuition interventions.