What Should Happen in a First Tutoring Session?

The shape of a good first hour

The order matters more than the content. A first session that opens with the hardest thing the student cannot do produces a demoralised student and very little information, because a student who fails four questions in a row stops trying on the fifth and the tutor learns nothing from the silence.

What works is to start easy, descend to find the floor, then climb. Roughly:

• 0–5 minutes: names, which board and year, and what went wrong most recently — the last test, in the student's own words.
• 5–15: a question the student can definitely do. The session must open with a success, and the tutor needs to see what confident looks like on this particular face.
• 15–40: the diagnostic ladder — questions getting easier until the student is fluent, then harder until they are not.
• 40–55: teach one thing. Not the plan, one gap, closed.
• 55–60: say the plan aloud, set one short piece of practice, agree the next time.

What the diagnostic is actually hunting for

Not 'is this student weak at algebra'. That is a description, not a diagnosis, and it does not tell anybody what to teach on Thursday. The useful question is which earlier, smaller thing is failing underneath.

The patterns repeat more than parents expect. A GCSE student who cannot expand two brackets reliably very often has a negative-number problem rather than an algebra problem, and the moment you watch them write −3 × −4 you can see it. A student who gets fractions right in class and wrong in a test is usually fine on method and slow on times tables, so the arithmetic eats the time. A student who can solve equations but cannot start a worded question has a reading and translation problem sitting on top of intact mathematics.

Each of those needs a different four weeks. None of them is visible from a mark out of twenty, which is why a first session should be spent watching working rather than collecting scores.

What a parent should be holding at the end

Something written and specific. 'Needs to work on algebra' is not an output; it is what the school report already said. What you should have is closer to: negatives with brackets, index laws, and dividing by a decimal are the three gaps; we start with negatives because everything else in the list depends on it.

Alongside that, the level being taught at and why, an honest timescale with the hedge left in rather than removed, one piece of practice for this week, and the time of the next session.

• Named topics, not subject areas.
• The level the teaching will start at, and the reason.
• A target with a timescale, hedged honestly.
• One piece of practice before the next class.
• The date and time of the next session.

Four things a first session should not be

Sixty minutes of the tutor talking. A first session in which the student wrote nothing has assessed nothing, whatever it felt like.

A full past paper. That is a test, not a lesson. It is the right thing to do in week three; on day one it tells a struggling student that tutoring is more of what they already fear, and they will have learned nothing by the end of it.

A getting-to-know-you chat. Rapport is built by teaching somebody something, not by discussing their hobbies for twenty minutes.

A sales meeting. If more of the hour went on the programme, the payment plan and the results than on the student, you attended a pitch.

How our first session runs

The free demo class follows this shape, with one honest limitation: in a group demo the diagnostic is necessarily shorter, because four students are sharing the hour. We compensate by asking parents for the last report and most recent test paper beforehand, marks included, so the tutor arrives with a hypothesis rather than starting from nothing.

After the demo you get the gap list in writing. If the honest answer is that a student needs a different level or a different subject from the one you booked, we say that instead of enrolling them.