How to choose a tutor

Choosing a tutor well starts before you contact anyone: work out whether the problem is missing content, lost confidence or poor organisation, because those need different people. Then ask five questions, and favour three sessions a week with a competent tutor over one with an impressive one.

First, diagnose the problem

"They are struggling in maths" is not yet a brief. There are at least four distinct problems hiding behind it, and the right tutor differs for each.

A content gap. Something earlier was never learned, and everything built on it is collapsing. Needs someone who will go back and find it, which means a tutor willing to spend the first sessions diagnosing rather than teaching.

A confidence problem. The student has concluded they are bad at this. More explanation makes it worse. Needs someone patient and relentlessly specific about what the student can already do.

An organisation problem. They understand it and cannot manage deadlines, revision or materials. Needs a coach, not a subject expert, and often costs less.

A pace problem. The class is moving faster than they can absorb. Needs regular, frequent, slightly-ahead work rather than remedial work.

A tutor who is excellent for one of these can be useless for another.

The five questions

1. How will you work out what they already know?

Listen for a real answer: a diagnostic conversation, some problems from earlier in the curriculum, having the student explain a topic. A tutor who plans to start teaching at the current chapter in session one is treating the symptom.

2. What will you do when they get something wrong?

You want to hear something like: find out what they were thinking, address the specific misconception, come back to it later. You do not want "I'll explain it again", which is what produces students who nod along for a year.

3. What qualifies you in this subject specifically?

Not teaching generally. This subject, at this level. The relevant evidence is encouraging about training: the 2024 meta-analysis of 89 randomised tutoring studies found larger effects for teachers and paraprofessionals than for volunteers.

4. How often do you recommend meeting, and why?

A tutor who says once a week without asking anything about the situation is describing their scheduling preference. The evidence favours three or more sessions a week, so a tutor who raises frequency unprompted is paying attention to something real.

5. What should be different in six weeks?

The most revealing question. A good answer is specific and falsifiable: "they should be able to set up these problems without help, even if the arithmetic is still slow". A vague answer means nobody will be able to tell whether this worked.

Warning signs

• The tutor does the work. Sessions end with a completed assignment and no new ability. This is the most common failure and it is popular with students, which is why it persists.
• No plan across sessions. Each session handles whatever the student brought. Reactive tutoring is expensive homework help.
• No contact with you. For a school-age child, a tutor who never reports anything is not accountable to anything.
• Resists being measured. Any discomfort with question five is informative.
• Too much reassurance. "They're doing great" every week, while the grades do not move.

The six-week review

Put it in the diary when you start. At six weeks, ask:

• Can the student explain something they could not explain before? Have them do it, in front of you.
• Are they attempting harder work unprompted?
• Are their questions better? Moving from "what do I do" to "why does this work" is real progress.
• Does the tutor's account match what you can observe?

If the answer is no on most of these, change the tutor rather than abandon tutoring. A poor match is extremely common.

What to do in the first three sessions

The early sessions tell you most of what you need to know, if you know what to watch for.

Session one should be mostly diagnosis. A good tutor spends it finding out what the student can already do, often by going back further than seems necessary. A tutor who begins teaching the current chapter has skipped the step that makes the rest work.

By session two there should be a plan. Not a syllabus, but a stated view: here is what I think is actually wrong, here is what we will do about it, in roughly this order.

By session three the student should be talking more than the tutor. This is the clearest observable signal available to a parent walking past the door. A tutor who talks for fifty minutes is lecturing, and lecturing one to one is the most expensive way to deliver a lecture.

Online or in person

For most secondary and university subjects, online is equivalent provided the tutor can write and draw in a shared space. What actually predicts success - frequency, the same tutor, structured content, a small ratio - has nothing to do with being in the room.

Prefer in person for: younger children, students who struggle to stay focused without physical presence, anything practical, and the first few sessions of a relationship that needs to be built.

Prefer online for: frequency and cost, specialist subjects where the right person is not local, and students who are comfortable on a screen anyway.

Red flags in the first conversation

• They quote a rate before asking anything about the student.
• They describe their method entirely in terms of their own qualifications.
• They are vague about what will be different in six weeks.
• They promise a grade.
• They cannot say what they would do if the student is still stuck after a month.

The thing most families get wrong

Choosing on price and availability, then hoping. Both matter, and neither predicts a result. The two decisions that do predict one are frequency and fit, and you can usually get both by paying less per hour for someone good rather than more per hour for someone impressive.

Where TruLearn fits

Three of the five questions above are things we built the product around: it diagnoses before it teaches, with a short spoken warm-up that places the student; when an answer is wrong it names the specific misconception and schedules it to return rather than re-explaining; and because a session does not cost an hour of a person's time, three or four a week is ordinary.

It is not the answer to question three for every subject - it teaches AP Biology and introductory college biology - and for a confidence problem a person is usually still the right call. How a session works, or what tutoring costs.