When to Change Tutors

Marks are a lagging and noisy signal

School assessments are weeks apart, land on whatever topic the class has just finished, and move for reasons that have nothing to do with tutoring. Six weeks of good teaching can produce a lower test mark if the test falls on a topic the sessions have not reached yet, and a mediocre tutor looks excellent during an easy unit.

Judging on marks alone therefore does two things reliably: it makes you drop a good tutor at the worst moment, and it makes you keep a poor one through a forgiving term. Better evidence exists and it takes about fifteen minutes to collect.

Four pieces of evidence you can collect this week

None of these requires you to understand the mathematics. All four are about whether teaching is happening, which is a separate question from whether the subject is hard.

• Ask the tutor, without warning, to name the three topics your child is weakest on. Someone who has been diagnosing rather than covering answers in a sentence.
• Open the exercise book from the last two sessions. Look for working rather than answers, and for corrections written by the child rather than by the tutor.
• Ask your child what they did last session. 'We went over stuff', after eight weeks, is a finding rather than a mood.
• Set one question from six weeks ago, cold. If it has gone, the sessions are producing understanding in the room and nothing that survives the week.

Telling a hard phase from a bad fit

A hard phase looks like this: the topic is genuinely difficult — algebraic fractions, vectors, formal proof — the tutor named the difficulty before you asked about it, there is a plan with a date attached, and your child can explain the method even when the answer comes out wrong. Marks may be flat or dipping. That is a student mid-climb.

A bad fit looks different in ways you can see without knowing any maths. Nobody has named a weakness. Sessions repeat rather than progress. The tutor is holding the pen. The child is silent for most of the hour. Homework is never set, or is set and never looked at again.

And one uncomfortable case: a tutor your child adores can still be a bad fit. Warmth is not teaching, and it makes the change much harder to justify to a child who will experience it as a punishment. Say plainly that the tutor is kind and that the maths needs to move.

The handover that stops a change costing a month

The usual cost of switching is three or four sessions of a new tutor working out where the student is — which is a month of paid time spent rediscovering things somebody already knew. A single page removes most of it, and you can write it yourself if the outgoing tutor will not.

• Exam board, specification code and tier, where there is one.
• Topics covered, in order, with approximate dates.
• Topics still weak, named individually rather than as a subject area.
• The book, workbook or paper series in use, and how far through it they are.
• The last three marked papers or tests, with marks, ideally the papers themselves.

Sometimes the answer is a different tutor at the same place

We move students between our own tutors when the fit is wrong, and we would rather do that than watch a family spend a term on a mismatch or leave without saying why. A tutor who is right for a Higher tier candidate with a target of grade 8 is not automatically right for a nervous Year 7 who has decided they cannot do maths.

If you are considering a change, that is worth asking for before you go elsewhere. It is a shorter conversation than most parents expect, and the handover cost is close to zero when both tutors work from the same records.