Every tutoring service in the country can show you a grade 9.
Some of them earned it. Others taught a student who was already on course for a 9, added an hour a week, and put the result on a poster. From the outside the two are identical, which is why a grade on its own tells a parent almost nothing.
There is a number that does tell you something, and it is not the grade. It is the distance.
What we mean by distance
A student who arrives on a grade 7 and finishes on a 9 has moved two grades. 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, that is the number we look at. Not how many 9s. How far people moved, and whether they moved from far enough back that the movement could not have been luck.
Two students from this summer are worth describing properly, because both families put the details in writing and both gave us their results.
Two years, and a written record of every stage
The first is a boy we will call by his first name, Safwan, because that is how his message came to us.
He wrote to us himself after results day. Here is the part that matters 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.”
Read those three sentences in order, because the middle one 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 is already a substantial move, and it is 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 it read as a disappointment.
He kept going. He finished on an 8 and a 9.
The distance from a 3 to a 9 is six grades. 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 course in January because the mock frightened them.
Predicted a 4 and a 5
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.
She was predicted a 4 and a 5. She got an 8 in both.
That is not an ordinary result, and we will not pretend otherwise. The reason we can put it in front of you at all is that her mother wrote it down, unprompted, and we still have the message.
Why English specifically
There is a reason these distances happen in English more often than people expect, and it is worth understanding, because it changes what a parent should expect from tutoring.
English is not mainly a knowledge subject. A student cannot fix a grade 4 in English by learning more facts about a play, because 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, the control of the sentences.
That is a skill. Skills respond to deliberate practice, and they respond fast when the practice is frequent, marked, and corrected against the criteria the examiner actually uses. This is why our students write every week and why every piece comes back marked rather than ticked.
It 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. They have been writing the same way for three years, and nobody has taken their writing apart and rebuilt it.
The honest limits
We would rather set out what these stories do not prove, because a results article that only lists wins deserves suspicion.
These are students who stayed the course. They turned up, they wrote the essays, they used the method. We do not have a 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, and any service claiming a precise figure for the difference they made has invented it.
We are not publishing an average. We could pick our best stories and imply that they are typical, and we are not going to. Some students move five grades. Some move one. 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 it is worth telling them 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. The only number that settles the question is the one that comes back in August.
And these are two students, 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. A story with a complete written record is not the same thing as a representative story.
What we would actually ask you to take from it
Not that we are remarkable. That the distance is the number worth asking about.
When any tutor shows you a result, ask the second question. Where did that student start? How long did it take? Was the record kept at the time, or assembled afterwards?
We ask ourselves the same question, which is why we go back through the messages rather than through our memory of them. It is also why the two students in this article are the two 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 is largely imaginary, and it has cost more grades in this subject than almost anything else.
