Every year we watch a small number of students take an unnecessary risk, and it is almost never the one their parents are worrying about.
It is not that they are working too little. Often they are working hard. It is that they are running two different methods at once, and getting the benefit of neither.
The student who nearly talked himself out of a top grade
One of our students this year was, on paper, in an excellent position. His writing was genuinely strong: high quality, and full of ideas that were his own. In a subject where the exam is largely an assessment of how well you write, that is most of the battle.
What worried us was his approach, rather than his ability.
When we set a topic, he would question whether it was the right topic. When we taught a technique and explained what it was for, he would wonder whether a different one might be better. Again and again the same suggestion came back: could I just do past papers instead?
Past papers are useful. They are also the last stage of preparation, not the first, and doing them before the method is in place mostly teaches a student to repeat what they already do.
Then his family did something a lot of families do. Worried by his doubts, they brought in a second tutor, a good one with real examining experience, who advised him to stop using the approach we had taught him.
He came very close to switching. In the end he decided to stay with the method, worked it properly, and walked out of the summer with two grade 9s.
We are pleased for him. But the honest thing to say is that it could have gone the other way, and the risk he took was much larger than he realised. We have seen the other version of this story: a student changes technique close to the exam, and afterwards we are explaining to a parent that their child did not use what they were taught.
Why two methods is the worst of both
Here is the part that is not obvious.
If a student learns method A properly, they do well. If they learn method B properly, they will probably also do well — there is more than one respectable way to write an essay.
What fails is half of each.
A method for writing an essay is a structure, not a set of tips. It has to be practised until it runs without conscious thought, so that in the exam the student’s attention is free for the actual thinking. Research on how people learn complex skills is consistent on this: learners who do not yet have expertise in a subject need explicit, consistent guidance while they build it, because they do not yet have the mental map that tells them what matters.[1] That map is what is under construction. Switching approaches halfway does not add a second map. It damages the first one.
There is a related finding worth knowing, because it explains something that otherwise looks strange. Guidance that helps a beginner can actively hurt someone who is already skilled, and advice pitched at an expert can be useless to a beginner.[2] A very experienced person can give perfectly correct advice that is wrong for the learner in front of them, because it assumes knowledge that learner does not yet have.
So when two capable people give a student different instructions, the student does not receive twice the help. They are being asked to hold two incomplete systems at once and to arbitrate between them, which is exactly the judgement they do not yet have. Most students respond by doing a bit of both, which produces an answer with the shape of neither.
The evidence for coherence
There is no study that tests “hiring a second tutor for the same subject”, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What there is, is a large body of work on what happens when teaching pulls in one direction rather than several.
The clearest example comes from a study of Chicago schools, which measured how coherent each school’s instructional programme was: whether staff worked to a common framework, sustained over time, rather than running many unconnected initiatives. Schools with stronger coherence made higher gains in student achievement.[3]
That is a finding about schools, not about tutors, and we should be careful about stretching it. But the mechanism is the same one, and it points the same way: learning improves when the instruction a child receives connects up, and suffers when it competes.
Researchers on private tutoring have made the narrower point directly — that supplementary tutoring does not automatically add value, and that where its approach conflicts with the child’s main teaching, it can work against it.[4]
This is not an argument against second opinions
We want to be precise here, because there is a self-serving version of this argument and it is not the one we are making.
If you are unsure whether your child’s tuition is working, you should absolutely say so, ask what the method is meant to achieve, and ask what evidence there is that it works. A tutor who cannot answer that is a problem.
We can answer it. Our programme is built on educational research, the techniques are designed to hit the criteria examiners actually mark against, and we have years of results from students who arrived on 3s and 4s. That is the basis on which we ask a family to commit to it — not because we say so, but because the method has been tested and the evidence is there to look at.
What causes damage is not a second opinion. It is running two competing methods at the same time, in the same subject, for the same exam. One of them is always being half-abandoned.
If you are thinking about a second tutor
Four questions worth asking first:
1. Is the problem the method, or the time spent on it? A method judged after two weeks has not been judged. It has been sampled. 2. Will the new tutor teach the same approach, or a different one? Ask directly. If the answer is a different one, you are choosing between methods, not adding to one. 3. Have you told each of them about the other? Most of the harm we see comes from a student privately trying to satisfy two sets of instructions that were never reconciled, because neither adult knew the other existed. 4. What does the marked work say? Not how confident the child feels, and not how the lesson felt. Marks on written work, over a few weeks, against the examiner’s criteria.
Trust the process — and check it
Our own footer has said the same thing for a long time: trust the process, ace the exam. It is easy to read that as “do as you are told”. It means something more specific.
A method is a bet that a particular sequence, practised properly, produces the marks. The only way to find out is to run it — properly, for long enough, with the work marked and corrected along the way. A student who works it for a term has real evidence about whether it is working. A student who keeps half-leaving it for something else has no evidence at all, and has spent the term anyway.
The students who transform their grades are almost never the ones who found a better method. They are the ones who picked a good one and stopped negotiating with it.
