Balancing School, Tuition and Rest

Do the audit before you add anything

Almost every family that asks this question is already at capacity and has not written it down. A week holds 168 hours. Filling them in on paper takes ten minutes and settles arguments that otherwise run for months, because the decision stops being about whether the child is trying hard enough and becomes about what fits.

Fill it in in this order: sleep, school, travel, meals, and any fixed commitment — sport, madrasa, family obligations. Then look at what is left. That remainder, not the parent's ambition, is the budget from which homework, revision and tuition all have to be paid.

The number that shocks most parents is homework. School-set work is not optional and it comes first, so it has to be measured honestly for a fortnight rather than estimated. A child doing two hours a night is already carrying ten hours of academic work a week outside school before a single tutor is booked.

Sleep is a floor, not a variable

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine's consensus recommendations, arrived at after reviewing 864 published studies, are 9 to 12 hours a night for children aged 6 to 12 and 8 to 10 hours for those aged 13 to 18. These are not aspirational figures for well-organised families. They are the range associated with better attention, memory and emotional regulation.

The reason this belongs in a discussion about tuition is that the things sleep supports are precisely the things tuition is bought to improve. A tired child in a maths lesson is paying for content that will not consolidate. The hour is spent, the lesson happens, and very little of it is there a week later.

So sleep is entered on the timetable first and treated as immovable. If a session can only happen by cutting into it, the honest answer is that the session cannot happen.

• Ages 6-12: 9 to 12 hours per 24 hours
• Ages 13-18: 8 to 10 hours per 24 hours
• Count backwards from the alarm, not forwards from bedtime, to find the real figure

The fourth weekly session usually removes what made the first three work

Families rarely go from nothing to overload. They go from two sessions that are clearly working to three that are still working, and then add a fourth on the reasonable theory that more of a good thing is better. It is at that point that results often stop improving and sometimes slip.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Sessions three and four do not come out of idle time, because by then there is none. They come out of the gaps — the evening with no plan, the unhurried weekend morning, the hour of doing nothing much — and those gaps are where taught material gets rehearsed, consolidated and, occasionally, enjoyed.

We would rather a family ran three sessions with the recovery intact than four without it, and we say so when asked to add one. It is a strange thing for a tutoring institute to argue against selling an extra class, but a student who plateaus and then quits is worse for everyone than one who stays for two years.

Deciding what goes

When the audit shows the week does not fit, something has to be removed, and the choice is usually made badly — the thing cut is whatever has the least adult supervision attached, which is normally rest or the one activity the child actually likes.

A better test is to ask what each academic hour is producing. Solo revision that consists of rereading notes produces very little, and it is often the largest block on the timetable. Replacing three hours of that with one taught hour is a reduction in total time and an increase in what gets learned.

The other candidate is duplication. A child having tuition in a subject and also attending a school revision club and also doing a paid online course is being taught the same thing three times by people who are not talking to each other. Pick one.

What we actually recommend to families

For most students below the exam year, two sessions a week in one subject is the load that holds. It gives a lesson, a gap in which to attempt work, and a second lesson in which the attempt gets corrected — which is the cycle that actually moves a grade.

In the exam year we go to three, and occasionally four in the final term, on the explicit understanding that it is a sprint with a finish line. Our classes run 14:00-22:00 PKT on weekdays and 10:00-20:00 PKT at weekends, which usually means a slot exists that does not require displacing sleep. Where it does not, we say the timing does not work rather than booking it anyway.