Do We Need a Tutor?

We sell practice software, so treat this with the suspicion it deserves. We have also spent a fair amount of time inside tutoring centres, and the honest answer is that a tutor is the right call for some families and an expensive way to feel busy for others, and the difference is predictable.

What a good tutor is genuinely good at

• Explaining a specific thing a specific child does not understand, at the moment they do not understand it.
• Being an adult who is not the parent. The same sentence lands differently, and this is worth more than families expect.
• Holding a standard. A piece of writing that will be read closely by somebody outside the family gets written differently.
• Noticing a pattern across weeks that a parent, who sees every session, stops being able to see.

That list is short and it is real. What it has in common is that all four require somebody to look at your particular child's particular work.

What a tutor cannot fix

A tutor cannot make a child want this. If the child is being carried through a preparation they did not choose, an hour a week with a stranger adds an hour a week of the same problem, and the honest version of that question is in should my child sit the Selective test.

A tutor also cannot create practice time. The hour with the tutor is not the work; the work is what happens on the other six days, and a family who has no room for that will pay for an hour that lands on nothing.

And no tutor can supply a score. There is no published minimum and no way to buy past a line that does not exist, which what score do you need sets out in full.

The questions worth asking before you pay

• How many children are in the room, and what happens in the other fifty-five minutes when you are with one of them?
• What will you send home each week, and will it name a specific weakness or a general grade?
• Do you mark writing yourself, and how long does it take to come back?
• What would make you tell us to stop?

The last one is the useful question. Somebody who has never told a family to stop is either extraordinarily lucky in their intake or is not asking themselves the question.

Group, one-to-one, or neither

A group class is cheap per hour and is essentially structured practice with a person at the front. It is worth having if the alternative is nothing. It is not worth having if the child is already doing structured practice at home, because it is the same thing at a fixed time.

One-to-one is expensive and is the only format that does the first thing on the list above. If you are paying one-to-one rates for somebody to supervise a worksheet, you are buying a group class at four times the price.

Neither is a defensible answer too. A family who reviews their child's wrong answers properly, using something like the method in what to do with a wrong answer, is doing the single most valuable thing a tutor would do.

The one component where outside marking is hardest to replace

Writing. Not because parents cannot judge it, but because a piece of writing needs a reader who will say the same thing about it every time, and the marking criteria are specific. If you buy one thing, buy writing feedback rather than general tuition, and helping with writing at home covers what you can do around it for nothing.