How to Make Tuition Work

For most families, doubt about tuition arrives in an ordinary week. A mock comes back lower than anyone expected, or a teacher at school recommends a different way of building the essay, or a whole term goes by and the grade has not moved. The lessons are pleasant, and the family goes on investing in them. Nobody can say whether any of it is working.

How would you find out? Most of us would wait for the next grade. Tuition rarely fails loudly, though, in a single bad result. More often it comes apart quietly, through a handful of ordinary decisions that looked sensible at the time. Each of those decisions leaves something a parent can check long before the next grade arrives.

Doubt is not disloyalty

Good tutors ask families to follow a plan. Following the plan and asking what it is for are not opposites. Picture the Sunday night when a tired fifteen-year-old wants to skip this week’s topic. A parent who cannot say why it comes before next week’s has nothing to say, and the student ends up carrying the plan alone.

So trust the plan, but trust it for a stated length of time: give the sequence a term, then look at what it produced, in the work itself rather than in how the lessons felt. Find out early whether the tutor can explain why the topics come in the order they do. The explanation should make sense to somebody who has never taught. The case for finishing one method before starting another is made in Two methods are worse than one.

Past papers measure; they do not teach

Every tutor hears the question “Can we just do past papers?”, because a past paper is the one thing that looks exactly like the exam, and an hour spent on one feels like an hour of getting ready. Does that hour actually help? It does under two conditions, and a parent can check both.

The first is that the skill has already been taught. A past paper measures what a student can do; it does not teach them to do it. A student who has not yet learned to build an analytical paragraph will write the same weak paragraph on the fifth paper as on the first: opening with the quotation, naming the technique, stopping there. Each time it comes faster, and with more confidence.

The second is that the paper is marked against the real standard and then written again. The student has to see the mark, and then see what a full-mark version of their own answer would have looked like, because without that the hour was spent rehearsing the mistakes.

So instead of asking “are we doing past papers yet?”, ask “has this skill been taught, and does the marked paper come back with a better version of my child’s own writing attached?” What a past paper does and does not tell you is the subject of Effort is not a plan.

Being marked is not the same as taking part in the marking

One check takes a single question, asked of the student rather than the tutor: Before your tutor marked that, did you mark it yourself? A student can be handed marked work for two years and never once judge a sentence of their own. Why should that matter, if the marking is good?

Royce Sadler, whose 1989 paper still lies underneath most of what educators believe about feedback, argued that a student cannot improve unless they can judge the quality of their own work while they are producing it. Three things have to be in place. The student has to know what good work looks like, and has to be able to hold their own paragraph beside it and see the distance. They also have to be taught how to close that distance: not “go deeper”, but the actual next sentence. Teaching that does not deliberately build that judgement, he wrote, is “deficient”.^[1]

The Education Endowment Foundation reaches the same conclusion by a different route: teaching pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning is rated high impact for very low cost, on extensive evidence.^[2]

So if your child did not mark the work before the tutor did, they are a passenger in their own assessment. The mark on the page matters far less than the judgement built while earning it, because that judgement is what walks into the exam hall, with nobody sitting beside it.

Two methods, neither mastered

At some point a student arrives at a lesson with a technique learned somewhere else. The school teaches the essay one way and a second tutor teaches it another, and both are sensible, but neither survives being half learned.

A half-learned method is easy to spot on the page. The student opens the paragraph the way school taught them, reaches for the quotation the way the tutor taught them, and then has no idea what the third sentence is for. Under pressure the two halves come apart, and what comes out is neither one method nor the other.

A second cost arrives on results day. If a student has been taught two methods and mastered neither, a disappointing grade explains nothing at all. Was the cause the first method, the second, or the mixture? The family cannot tell, and nor can either teacher. Where one method has been followed properly, a weak result points at something specific, and specific things can be fixed.

So the rule is not a diplomatic one: pick a method and finish it. Write the other one down, ask why the two differ, and carry on with the one you chose, because a technique half learned is worse than either method learned in full.

The earliest sign is an unfamiliar question

Waiting for the next grade, as most of us would, means watching the one measurement guaranteed to arrive late. The grade moves last, long after whatever caused it has already changed. There is an earlier sign, visible months before any result, in what happens when the question is unfamiliar.

A student who has only practised the likely questions is lost when an unlikely one appears. A student who has learned how an answer is built can build one in the exam, from a question nobody expected. That is what a real method produces: not a collection of prepared answers, but a way of making one.

Yusuf sat his GCSEs this summer with us. In Literature Paper 1 he met a question on The Sign of the Four that none of us had anticipated. He had never seen it before, and there was nobody in the exam hall he could ask. Imagine your own child in that seat, with the clock running: what would they do with a question that nobody had prepared them for?

Yusuf answered it anyway, and he finished with a grade 9 in English Literature and a grade 9 in English Language.

For a parent, the part of that story to remember is the question rather than the grades: he had never seen it, and he could still build the answer. You can look for that skill in a Sunday evening’s homework, long before August.

Two grades, and neither is a verdict

Suppose your child’s tutor gives one grade and the school’s mock gives a lower one. Which is right?

Usually neither, in the way the question means it, because both are measurements, taken on different days, on different content, under different conditions and by different markers. Why two honest markers disagree so often is set out in Why your tutor and your child’s school will not give the same grade.

Instead of choosing between the two grades, send the mock script to the tutor and ask for it to be marked against the exam board’s own standard, then compared with the most recent piece the student wrote for them. If the two pieces read like the work of different writers, the cause is usually one of three things. It may be time pressure, a topic the tuition had not yet reached, or a technique that works with the notes open and stops working in an exam room. Each has a specific fix, and a parent is entitled to be told which one it is.

A tutor who will not do that comparison, or who insists their own grade is the correct one, has told you something useful about how they work.

The harder half of a disappointing mock belongs to the family: treat the mock as information rather than as a verdict. Changing tutor, method and plan in the same week, because of one morning’s paper, throws away every month of teaching that came before it.

A change should cost the provider, not the child

Any teaching that improves will change while a student is still in it: materials get rewritten, a platform gains features, and a routine that was working gets replaced by a better one.

The cost of those changes should fall on whoever made them, not the child. A family should be told what changed, why, and what to do this week, before the change happens, not after. Nothing the student has written or been marked on should disappear. If a reorganised page makes next week’s lesson harder to find, that is a fault to be fixed and not a reason for a student to fall behind.

None of those rules is an optional extra, because a student who loses two weeks to a rebuilt platform has lost two weeks of the sequence, and the sequence is the part that was doing the work.

Four questions to ask this week

Every one of these worries, from the plan to the mock, has the same shape: something does not look right, and there is a choice between guessing and checking. Four questions do most of the checking, and each can be put to a tutor this week.

1. Why is the plan in this order? The answer should make sense to somebody who has never taught. If it does not, ask again in plainer words before you decide anything.

2. Does my child mark their own work before you do? If not, ask for that to start with the next piece: the child marks it first, the tutor marks it second, and the two marks are compared.

3. One method or two? Find out which structure your child actually reaches for under pressure. Ask them to write one paragraph in front of you and say whose method it is.

4. When a mock disagrees with your grade, what will you do? The answer should involve your child’s own work and the exam board’s own standard, rather than a reassurance that mocks are unreliable.

Put these questions to the tutor rather than to the internet, and give the sequence long enough to show what it produces. Then judge the tuition by the work. The work is the one piece of evidence that cannot be argued with. What the student has to do for themselves along the way is the subject of the companion to this piece, Parents, Step Back.

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