Every tutoring service in the country can show you a grade 9.
Some of them earned it. Others taught a student who was already heading for a 9, added an hour a week, and put the result on a poster. From the outside the two look identical, so a grade on its own tells a parent almost nothing.
So suppose two services each show you a grade 9. How would you tell which one built that grade and which one inherited it? The grade itself cannot help you, but a second number can. That second number is the first thing we look at when we judge our own year.
Distance counts for more than the grade
A student who arrives on a grade 7 and finishes on a 9 has moved two grades, while a student who arrives on a 3 and finishes on an 8 has moved five. The second student is the harder problem by a wide margin, and the second result is the one that says something about the teaching rather than about the intake.
So when we look back at a year, we count distance before we count 9s. We ask how far people moved, and whether they started far enough back that the movement could not have been luck.
Two students from this summer show what that means in practice, because both families put the details in writing and both gave us their results.
From 3s and 4s to an 8 and a 9
The first is a boy we will call by his first name, Safwan. He wrote to us himself after results day. These are the three sentences from his message that matter most, in his own words:
“I still remember when I was on 3s and 4s at the start 2 years ago.”
“Even during my mocks I wasn’t getting the grades I truly wanted, I was still on 6s and 7s.”
“I ended up achieving an 8 in English Language and a 9 in English Literature.”
The first and last of those sentences are the start and the finish, which every results story tells. The middle sentence is the one most families never get to see.
He started on 3s and 4s. Two years later, at the mocks, he was on 6s and 7s. That was already a substantial move, yet it was also the exact moment at which a lot of families panic, because 6s and 7s were not what he was aiming for. A mock is a snapshot taken in the middle of the work, and his mock grades read as a disappointment.
Suppose he had been your son, looking at those mock grades in January. Would you have kept going with the same plan? He did keep going, and he finished on an 8 and a 9.
The distance from a 3 to a 9 is six grades, and the distance from his mock to his final grade is two more on top of everything he had already gained. Neither of those numbers is available to a student who changed plan in January because the mock frightened them.
Predicted a 4 and a 5, awarded two 8s
The second is a girl whose mother wrote to us the morning the results came out. Her words:
“Faiza scored 8 in both Eng language and Literature. Her predicted grade was 4 &5 but with your help and techniques she managed to get 8 in both.”
A predicted grade is a school’s professional estimate of what a student is going to get. It is made by teachers who see the child every week and who are, most of the time, roughly right. Faiza was predicted a 4 and a 5, and she got an 8 in both.
A result like hers is not an ordinary one, and we will not pretend otherwise. We can put it in front of you at all only because her mother wrote it down, unprompted, and we still have the message.
Why English can move so far
Why do distances like these happen in English more often than people expect? The reason changes what a parent should expect from tutoring.
English is mainly a subject of skill rather than of knowledge. A student cannot fix a grade 4 in English by learning more facts about a play. The marks go to how well the student writes about that play rather than to knowing it: the quality of the argument, the handling of evidence and the control of the sentences.
Skills respond to deliberate practice, and they respond fast when the practice is frequent, marked, and corrected against the criteria the examiner actually uses. That is why every piece our students write comes back marked rather than ticked.
The fact that English is a skill also explains why the movement often looks impossible from the outside. A student who has been stuck on a 4 for three years has usually not been failing to learn. More often, nobody has taken their writing apart and rebuilt it, so they have been writing the same way for three years.
What these two stories do not prove
A results article that only lists wins deserves suspicion, so we would rather set out what these two stories do not prove.
Safwan and Faiza stayed with the work to the end. They turned up, they wrote the essays and they used the method. We have no way of telling you what happens to a student who does none of that, and we would not believe anyone who claimed otherwise.
There is no comparison group. We cannot tell you what Safwan would have scored with a different tutor, or with no tutor. Nobody in tutoring can, so any service claiming a precise figure for the difference it made has invented that figure.
We are not publishing an average. We could pick our best stories and imply that they are typical, but we are not going to. Some students move five grades, some move one, and some do the work and land just below where they hoped.
We do not count school assessments as results. Some of the biggest jumps we have on record come from mocks and class assessments done inside a school. We keep those, because a student who moves six grades in a school assessment has genuinely done something and deserves to be told so. But we treat those numbers with a great deal of caution, and we do not publish them as results. A school assessment is marked by the school, against its own expectations, on a paper the student may have seen coming, whereas the only number that settles the question is the one that comes back in August.
Safwan and Faiza were chosen. We picked them because their families wrote the details down at the time, so every stage can be checked. That is a selection, and you should read it as one, because a story with a complete written record is not the same thing as a representative story.
Ask for the second number
What should you take from all this? We would not ask you to conclude that we are remarkable, only that distance is the second number to ask about.
When any tutor shows you a result, ask the second question. Where did that student start, how long did it take, and was the record kept at the time or put together afterwards?
We ask ourselves the same questions, which is why we go back through the messages rather than through our memory of them. It is also why the two students described above are the ones whose families wrote the details down.
If you are looking at a child on a 4 and wondering whether a 7 or an 8 is realistic, the honest answer is that it depends on how long you have and whether the work actually gets done. What it does not depend on is whether they are the sort of person who is good at English. That category of person is largely imaginary, yet the belief in it has cost more grades in this subject than almost anything else.
