How to Make Tuition Work

Most families reach a moment of doubt. A mock comes back lower than expected. A teacher at school recommends a different technique. A term passes and the grade has not moved. The lessons are pleasant. The invoices are paid. Nobody can say whether any of it is working.

Tuition does fail. It almost never fails in an obvious way. It fails quietly, through a handful of ordinary decisions that feel sensible at the time. This article is about those decisions, and about what a parent can check.

Doubt is not disloyalty

Good tutors ask families to follow a plan. Following a plan and asking about it are not opposites. A plan you cannot question is a plan you cannot understand. A parent who does not understand the plan cannot back it up at home, so the student ends up carrying it alone.

The kind of trust that helps is provisional. Follow the plan long enough for it to show what it produces. Then check what it produced, in the work itself.

If a tutor cannot explain why the topics come in the order they come in, that is worth knowing early. The explanation should make sense to someone who is not a teacher. Our own version of this argument is in Two methods are worse than one.

“Can we just do past papers?”

Every tutor hears this. It is a reasonable thing to want. Past papers are what the exam looks like, and working through them feels like getting ready.

They pay off under two conditions.

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. Faster, and with more confidence.

The second is that the paper is marked against the real standard and then redrafted. The student needs to see the mark, and then see what a full-mark version of their own answer would have looked like. Without that, the paper is an hour spent practising the mistakes.

So the check is not “are we doing past papers yet?” The check is “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

Here is the difference that decides most of it. A student can receive marked work for two years and never once judge their own writing.

Royce Sadler, whose 1989 paper still sits under 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. That takes three things. They need to know what good work looks like. They need to be able to hold their own work up against it. And they need moves for closing the gap. Teaching that does not deliberately build that judgement, he wrote, is “deficient”.^[1]

The Education Endowment Foundation arrives at the same place from a different direction. Teaching pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning is rated high impact for very low cost, on extensive evidence.^[2]

A parent can check this in one question, asked of the student rather than the tutor. Before your tutor marked that, did you mark it yourself? If the answer is no, the student is a passenger in their own assessment. The mark on the page matters far less than the judgement built while earning it. That judgement is the thing that walks into the exam hall.

Two teachers, two methods

At some point a student arrives at a lesson with a technique from somewhere else. A teacher at school teaches the essay one way. A second tutor teaches it another. Both are defensible. Neither survives being half learned.

The usual result is that the student does neither properly. Under exam pressure the two methods blur, and what comes out is a mixture that belongs to nobody.

There is a second cost. It arrives on results day. If a student has been taught two methods and mastered neither, a disappointing grade explains nothing. Was it the first method, the second, or the mixture? The family cannot tell. Neither can either teacher. With one method, followed properly, a weak result points at something specific. Specific things can be fixed.

So the rule is not diplomatic. Pick one method and finish it. Note the other down, ask why the two differ, and carry on with the one you chose. A technique that is half learned is worse than either whole one.

What it looks like when it is working

Parents usually look for the grade to move. The grade is slow. It moves last. There is an earlier sign. It is visible months before any result.

Watch what happens when the question is unfamiliar.

A student who has been drilled on likely questions is exposed by an unlikely one. A student who has learned how an answer is built can build one on the day, from a question nobody predicted. That carrying across is what a real method produces. Look for it in a Sunday evening’s homework, long before August.

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 answered it anyway. He finished with a grade 9 in English Literature and a grade 9 in English Language.

The grades are not the point of that story. The question is. He had never seen it. He could still build the answer.

When the mock says something different

A tutor gives one grade. The school’s mock gives a lower one. Which is right?

Usually neither, in the way the question means it. Both are measurements. They were taken on different days, on different content, under different conditions, by different markers. We have written about why they disagree so often in Why your tutor and your child’s school will not give the same grade.

What happens next is the part that matters. Send the mock script to the tutor and ask for it to be marked against the exam board’s own standard, then put beside the most recent piece the student wrote for them. If the two pieces read like different writers, the cause is usually one of three things. Time pressure. A topic the tuition had not yet reached. Or a technique that has not yet become automatic. Each has a specific fix, and a parent is entitled to be told which one it is.

A tutor who cannot do that comparison, or who answers it by telling you their own grade is the correct one, has told you something useful.

The harder half of this is for the family. Treat the mock as information rather than as a verdict. Changing tutor, method and plan in the same week, on the strength of one morning’s paper, is the most expensive decision available in this subject.

When the provider changes something

Any programme that improves will change while a student is inside it. Materials get rewritten. A platform gains features. A routine that was working gets replaced by a better one.

Those changes belong to the provider. They carry obligations. A family should be told what changed, why, and what to do this week — before the change lands, not after. Nothing the student has written or been marked on should disappear. If a change makes the next session harder to find, that is a defect to fix rather than a reason for the student to fall behind.

None of that is a courtesy. A student who loses two weeks to a reorganised platform has lost two weeks of the sequence.

What to ask for

Every worry in this article has the same shape. Something does not look right, and there is a choice between guessing and checking.

Four things are reasonable to expect from anybody teaching your child, and each one is a question you can ask this week.

Why is the plan in this order? The answer should make sense to someone who is not a teacher.

Does my child mark their own work first? If not, ask for that to start.

One method or two? If the school and the tutor disagree, find out which one your child is actually using under pressure.

When a result disagrees with yours, what will you do? The answer should involve your child’s actual work and the exam board’s actual standard.

Ask the questions of the tutor rather than of the internet. Give the sequence long enough to show what it produces. Then judge it by the work, which 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, Ask Your Tutor.

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