Réponse

Term Time or Holidays: When Tutoring Does Its Work

Term-time tutoring keeps pace with the class. Holidays are the only window where you can go backwards and repair a foundation. How to use each one properly.

Réponse courte

Is holiday tutoring better than term-time tutoring?

They do different jobs. Term-time tutoring keeps pace with what the class is teaching; the holidays are the only window in which you can go back and repair a foundation, because nothing new is arriving.

La réponse en bref
Neither is better, because they do different jobs. In term time the school sets the topic order, so tutoring is mostly defensive — keeping pace and repairing this week's lesson. In the holidays nothing new arrives, which makes it the only window in which you can go backwards without falling further behind.

Ce qui change la réponse

A student who is broadly on track needs term-time support and can skip holiday work entirely; a holiday intensive for a child who is coping is an expensive way to buy nothing.
If the gap is two or more years old, the holidays are not optional, because term-time sessions will always be pulled towards this week's homework deadline.
'The holidays' is not one window across our student base — Punjab announces school vacation dates each year rather than fixing them, UK schools break in late July and Gulf schools break earlier — so the block has to be built around a specific family's dates.
In the years Ramadan falls across the spring exam run-up it moves the usable window, and the plan has to be built around it rather than adjusted afterwards.

Two different jobs, not two speeds

Term-time tutoring keeps a student in contact with a class that is moving. Its content is decided by the school's scheme of work, its rhythm by homework deadlines, and its success measured by whether the student can follow next week's lesson.

Holiday tutoring answers to nobody's timetable. Its content is chosen, its rhythm is set by the tutor, and its success is measured months later by whether something that used to break has stopped breaking. Treating them as the same product bought at different times of year is how families end up paying for the wrong one.

What term-time tutoring cannot do

It cannot choose its own topic. If the class is on trigonometry this fortnight, that is what the family wants covered, and a tutor who insists on going back to fractions will be overruled by Thursday's homework. That is not a failure of will; it is the constraint the format sits inside.

So term-time tutoring is a good instrument for keeping a student with their class and a poor one for repairing something three years old. Families who expect it to do the second are usually disappointed at exactly the point they were told to expect results.

The only window where you can go backwards

Because nothing new is arriving in the holidays, the topic order belongs to you. That argues strongly against spending the block on next term's syllabus. Next term's syllabus will be taught by the school in any case; the fractions will not.

The content that belongs in an intensive is the material that sits inside other topics rather than appearing as a topic on a paper. It is invisible on a report card and it costs marks everywhere.

Place value and number sense, including decimals
Fractions, decimals and percentages treated as one system rather than three chapters
Negative numbers, including subtraction and multiplication rules
Algebraic manipulation: collecting terms, expanding, factorising, rearranging
Ratio and proportion, including the difference between sharing and scaling
Times-table fluency, if it is still slow

The intensive that survives September

Twenty hours in a fortnight followed by nothing evaporates, and everyone who has bought a summer course knows the feeling. The reason is mechanical: nothing retrieves the material afterwards, so the whole block decays together.

The structure that survives has two parts. Front-load the block, then keep one weekly session through the first six weeks of term whose only job is to retest what the intensive covered — not to help with current homework, which will otherwise eat it within a fortnight. Second, end the intensive with a written one-page list of what was covered and what is still shaky, so a school teacher or a later tutor can retest it without starting from scratch.

It also helps not to fill the whole holiday. A fortnight of daily sessions followed by four free weeks does more than six weeks of twice-weekly, partly because the child comes back to school rested and partly because the gap is itself doing work.

Exam years break the rule

For a candidate in their final GCSE or IGCSE year, February half term and the Easter break are not repair windows. They are the two places where full timed papers fit without losing school time, and with the written series beginning in May, Easter is the last usable block of any size.

The content changes accordingly. Holiday sessions in an exam year should be whole papers and mark-throughs, not foundation work — by that point a foundation gap has to be worked around rather than fixed, and pretending otherwise costs a student the paper practice they needed.

Questions fréquentes

Should my child have tutoring over the summer?

Only if there is something specific to repair, or if they demonstrably lose arithmetic fluency over long breaks — some children do. Otherwise a short block near the end of the holiday, close to the restart, is worth more than the same hours at the beginning of it.

Do you run holiday intensives?

Yes, built around a family's own dates rather than a fixed course calendar, because our students' holidays fall in different months of the year. Weekend hours are 10:00–20:00 PKT, which is where most intensive blocks sit, and weekday hours are 14:00–22:00 PKT. We would rather build a fortnight around your dates than sell you a term you cannot attend.

Is it worth tutoring during the exam season itself?

Yes, but the session changes character: it becomes paper review rather than teaching. Introducing new content in the last three weeks is rarely a good trade, because the time it takes comes out of the practice that turns existing knowledge into marks.

How do we stop the summer work being forgotten by October?

Retest it. One session in each of the first six weeks of term, spent on the intensive's content rather than on the current homework, and a written list from the intensive to retest against. Without that, the block behaves like a holiday and gets remembered as one, which is exactly what the whole thing was supposed to avoid.

Dernière mise à jour 21 août 2026