Eight Questions Worth Asking Before You Book a Tutor

Choosing a tutor is hard because almost every signal available to you is unreliable. Reviews can be bought. Qualifications do not predict teaching. Hourly rates vary by a factor of three for reasons nobody explains. And the one thing you actually want to know (will this person be good at teaching this subject to my child) is not visible from outside.

These eight questions get closer to it than anything else I know. They apply to us as much as to anyone else; if our answers were weak you should hear that from the questions rather than from me.

1. Which syllabus code will you be teaching to?

If the answer is a subject name rather than a four-digit code, that is worth noticing. It does not necessarily mean the tutor is weak, but it means they have not yet asked the question that determines everything else: and it should be the first question asked.

A good follow-up: which specification version? Cambridge revises on a three-year cycle and the paper structures genuinely change.

2. Will the same person teach every week?

At some agencies the answer is no, and it is buried. Continuity is most of what makes tutoring work: a tutor who has watched your child attempt four papers knows things about how they think that cannot be written into a handover note.

If the answer is "usually," ask what happens when it is not.

3. Is work set between lessons, and who marks it?

An hour a week with nothing in between produces the feeling of progress and not much progress. The work matters more than the lesson does, and marking matters more than setting.

Ask specifically whether the tutor marks it or the student self-checks. Self-checking has its place, but a student who is losing marks on technique is by definition not able to see where their technique is failing.

4. What will I get after each lesson?

You want to know what was taught, how it went, and what needs to happen next. A paragraph from the person who taught it is worth more than a dashboard with a progress bar on it. Automated reporting is easy to build and tells you very little.

5. Have you taught this specific paper, recently?

Not the subject: the paper. Somebody may be an excellent Computer Science teacher and still never have prepared a candidate for 9618 Paper 4, which has its own requirements around evidence of testing that catch out capable programmers.

Recency matters too, for the same reason specification versions matter.

6. What do you do if it is not working?

The answer you want involves noticing early and saying so. Listen for whether there is any mechanism at all: a check-in point, a willingness to change tutor, a willingness to say "you do not need us any more."

Anyone whose answer is only "we'd do more sessions" is answering a different question.

7. What are you not good at?

Genuinely the most useful question on this list, and the one that produces the widest range of answers. Somebody who claims to cover every subject from Year 7 to A Level is either running a large agency or not being straight with you.

For what it is worth, our answer: we teach Cambridge Computer Science and ICT. We do not teach Mathematics or Physics, we do not do university admissions consulting, and we are not the right choice for a student who needs general study-skills support rather than subject teaching.

8. Can I see the price before I enquire?

A tutoring service that will not publish rates has decided your time is worth less than their negotiating position. There are reasons a rate varies (level, intensity, notice) and all of them can be published as a range.

Ours are on the pricing page. You should be able to find anyone else's just as easily, and it is reasonable to be suspicious when you cannot.

On reviews

Two things worth knowing. First, a wall of five-star reviews with no detail tells you nothing; a handful of specific ones naming what changed tells you a lot. Second, structured review data is trivially easy to fabricate, and a site displaying hundreds of testimonials should be able to tell you how they were verified.

We do not publish testimonials we cannot verify, which currently means we do not publish any. That is a weaker-looking page and an honest one, and it seemed the better trade.

And then trust the first lesson

No amount of asking replaces watching. A good introductory session will tell you more than an hour of questions: does the tutor diagnose or just deliver? Do they ask your child to attempt things, or perform at them? Does your child talk afterwards about what they understood, or about whether the tutor was nice?

If you want to try ours, the trial class is free and the introductory call comes before anything is booked.