Ask Your Tutor

In a student’s onboarding session we go through their dashboard together: where the session links are, when each session runs, and where their work is. Before the session ends, the student shows us where the links are and tells us what work they have to do. A few days later, a message sometimes arrives from a parent asking when the sessions are and where the links can be found.

There are ordinary reasons for that message. The student may have forgotten. A page may look different from the one they were shown. A login may have failed. None of those is a fault. The moment is still a useful one, because the answer is already in the student’s dashboard, and finding it is a skill that will be needed every week for two years. The response that builds independence is to send them back to the place they were shown. That is where the links will be every week for two years, and finding them there is part of the job. If a login has failed or a page has moved, that is ours to fix.

Why the small jobs matter

Planning a week, keeping track of what is due, and finding what you need are real skills. They are learned by doing them. The Education Endowment Foundation, which reviews evidence for schools in England, describes helping children “set goals, plan, and manage their time, effort, and emotions” as often “more valuable than direct help with homework tasks”.^[1] Supporting that skill and doing the job for the child can look the same from the outside, but they lead in opposite directions.

The evidence on parents and schoolwork points the same way. A review of 448 studies, covering 480,830 families, found that children whose parents were involved in almost any way had slightly better results. There was one exception. Children whose parents helped with homework had lower results.^[2] A study that followed 1,685 pupils over time, allowing for how well they were already doing, found that the kind of help mattered more than the amount. Children who felt the help was supportive made better progress. Children who felt it was intrusive made less.^[3] Two researchers who have spent their careers on the question put it in one sentence: involvement helps “particularly when such involvement is autonomy supportive and affectively positive”.^[4] Warm, and with the child in charge of the work.

These are patterns across many families rather than a rule for any one of them, and some of the link may run the other way, since parents tend to help more when a child is already struggling. But the advice they support is consistent. Take an interest, keep expectations high, and leave the work with your child.

Where a question belongs

Every student has around four hours a week with a live tutor: a two-hour Deep Work session, the one- hour Live Modelling session, and a one-hour Strategy Session in which their own work is gone through one by one. Those sessions are where questions belong. A question asked in a session is answered while the work is on the screen, with the tutor and the student looking at the same piece of writing, and the answer can be tried at once. A question sent by message a day later has lost that context. Almost every difficulty a student has can be settled inside the sessions, and learning to raise it there is the habit we want them to build.

When a question comes to us from a parent on a student’s behalf, we answer the parent, the parent explains it to the student, and the student receives a second-hand version without having practised asking. The next time something is unclear, the same route is the natural one to use. Over a year that adds up to a student who has had a great deal explained to them and has rarely had to say “I don’t understand this part” to a teacher, which is one of the things these two years are for.

So the default we ask for is that the student brings the question to their next session. A message to us between sessions is not wrong, and we will answer it. It is the second choice, because the help that solves the problem is already on the timetable, and we want students to use it at the time it is available. There are also times when a parent should contact us directly: when a problem keeps coming back after the student has raised it, when it touches on wellbeing, when it is about access to the platform or to a session, or when a child needs more support than the sessions are giving them. Send those yourself; they are quicker to deal with when they come straight from you.

“The lesson didn’t help”

Sometimes a student comes out of a session and tells their parent they did not learn anything. Two things are true at once. First, what a student feels they have learned and what they can actually do are not the same measurement, and they can move in different directions. In a randomised study of university physics students, taught with identical materials, the group in active, demanding classes learned more but reported learning less; the researchers found that the extra effort was part of what made them feel that way.^[5] That was a university lecture hall, not a GCSE English session, so we take from it only the general point: the feeling is real information about the student’s experience. On its own it does not measure what they took away.

Second, a session can genuinely have missed. A step may have been taught too fast, or assumed something the student did not yet have, or the student may have been lost from the first ten minutes and unable to say so. Research on tutoring found that students who asked better questions did better, but also that students “need training to improve these skills”.^[6] A student who sits quietly is not necessarily disengaged. They may not yet know how to tell where their confusion starts, and helping them find that point is part of what we are for.

So when a student says a session did not help, we look at both halves. What did they understand, what can they now do that they could not do before, and where exactly did it stop making sense? And on our side: what did the teaching actually enable, and what needs to be taught again or differently? A student’s marked work is where those questions get answered, because it shows what they can do rather than what anyone felt.

What to say at home

You do not need to understand the difficulty. You are not the student, and a problem inside an analytical paragraph is not something a parent can be expected to diagnose. What a student needs from home is simpler than that: to be sent back to us with the question.

Every session is built to take questions. In Live Modelling we check understanding as we go, give time to ask, and before the session ends we ask whether anyone has a question left. In the Strategy Session the student’s own work is gone through one by one. In Deep Work a tutor is in the room for two hours. A student who leaves a session confused had several chances to say so, and will have them again next time.

Where it goes wrong, in our experience, is when the student says nothing to us, walks away, and tells you at home that they were confused. From where you sit, that can look as though the tutor you are paying is not helping. Almost always, the question was never asked.

So the reply that helps is short, and the same every time: “Ask your tutor. Take it to Deep Work, or to the Strategy Session.” Warm, and firm. The research on help-seeking gives one reason to keep it warm: children who feel connected ask for help more, and children who feel unable tend to hide the problem instead.^[7] A child who is made to feel that being confused is a failing will hide the next difficulty, and a tutor cannot answer a question they never hear.

If it helps, get them to put the question into one sentence before the session and write it down. Do not try to answer it. If the same difficulty is still there a week later, or it is about something bigger than one lesson, message us yourself.

When they ask you for a link or a session time, a useful answer is “Where did they show you to find it?”, followed by waiting while they look. And once a week, keep asking one real question about the work, as we described in The one part you can’t outsource.

Our part, your part, their part

Our part is teaching that is clear, instructions a fourteen-year-old can follow without help, marking that says what to fix and how, checks that the teaching landed, and changes when it did not.

Your part is the routine and the expectation: sessions attended, work attempted, and concerns raised with us plainly when something is not right.

Their part is the learning. They attempt the work, they use the feedback on it, and they learn to notice when they are lost and to say so. That last skill is the one we most want a student to leave with. No adult can do it on their behalf.

A lesson can be well taught and still need the student to do something with it. When a family and a tutor each hold their own part, the student is the one who gains. If you are not sure whether the teaching is working, we have written separately about how to check: How to Make Tuition Work.

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