Can Online Tutoring Replace School?

What tutoring genuinely does better

Pace. A tutored student moves at the speed they learn rather than at the speed of a syllabus written for a room. Nothing is repeated for the benefit of others and nothing is skipped because the class has to move on, which for a student who is either ahead or behind is the whole of the problem with school.

Correction speed. In a class, an error made on Monday is corrected when the books come back on Thursday, by which time it has been practised wrongly for three days. In tutoring it is corrected inside the same sentence, which is the difference between never forming a habit and having to unlearn one.

And gap repair. A school year cannot go back to Year 6 fractions in March. A tutor can, and usually should.

What only a school supplies

Exam entry is the concrete one and it catches families late. Schools are registered examination centres; a student outside one sits as a private candidate at a centre willing to accept them, in their own country, registered months ahead of the series. Cambridge International publishes a private candidate route and the entry deadlines are firm.

The record is the second. Transcripts, predicted grades, and the school reference a university application expects. A letter from a tutor is not a school reference and admissions offices do not read it as one.

Then the two nobody costs properly. Subjects with centre-assessed components — non-exam assessment, practical endorsements, coursework — are difficult or impossible to sit privately. And the social curriculum: working with people you did not choose, meeting a deadline set by someone who is not your parent, being one of thirty rather than the only one. That is not a soft extra, it is a large part of what school is for.

• Registration as an examination centre, and therefore exam entry.
• Transcripts, predicted grades and references.
• Subjects with coursework or assessed practical work.
• Breadth: laboratory science, art, music, sport.
• The experience of being one of many.

The legal question comes before the educational one

In England, a parent must make sure a child receives a full-time education from the age of 5, and home education is a lawful way of doing that; there is no requirement to follow the national curriculum, and the local council may make informal enquiries about whether the education is suitable. Tutoring can be part of how that duty is met. It does not discharge it by itself, and no tutoring provider can tell a council that it has.

Elsewhere the answer differs sharply, and some countries treat non-attendance rather than non-education as the offence. We are not able to advise on any particular jurisdiction and we do not try. Ask your education authority in writing before withdrawing a child from a school roll, not after.

Where it has already replaced school, and honestly should

Some students are not choosing between tutoring and school. A student out for a term with illness. A family that moved countries in February and cannot get a place until September. A student whose school offers no maths teacher this year, which is a real situation in more places than anyone likes to state. A student who has been excluded.

For all of them the comparison is tutoring against nothing, and tutoring wins that comparison so easily that the rest of this page does not apply. The mistake is not using tutoring in those cases; it is treating a temporary arrangement as permanent without ever answering the entry and record questions above.

Answer them early. They take months, and they are the part that cannot be improvised in April.

Where we sit

We are a supplement, and we say so. We teach mathematics, science, English, history, geography and Quran for grades 1 to 10, plus GCSE and IGCSE Mathematics and Digital SAT preparation. That is a wide set of subjects and it is not a school timetable, and we are not an accredited school.

Home-educating families do enrol with us, and it works. What we do is the subject teaching and the assessment; what the family does is find the examination centre and hold the record. We agree that split before enrolment rather than discovering it in the term the entries are due.