Finding the right tutor can feel overwhelming
If you’ve reached this page, there’s a good chance you’ve already spent time searching online, reading tutor profiles, asking friends for recommendations, or wondering whether tutoring might help your child.
For many parents, finding the right tutor can feel like a job in itself. There are hundreds of tutors available, countless websites to browse, and often very little guidance on how to decide who might actually suit your child.
At Up Your Grade, we believe the process should be much simpler than that.
Rather than asking families to search through endless profiles, we start with a proper conversation. Our role is to understand your child, your goals, and what support is likely to work best before recommending a tutor.
Start the process of finding the right tutor.
Every child is different
One of the reasons we spend time speaking with parents before recommending a tutor is because students often need very different things, even when they are studying exactly the same subject.
Over the last few months alone, Andy has spoken with parents whose children:
- Understand the content but panic in exams.
- Have excellent verbal skills but struggle to express ideas in writing.
- Are capable of top grades but lack confidence.
- Have become disengaged from a subject after a series of lower than expected marks.
- Simply want somebody independent to explain things differently.
The challenge is rarely just “finding a Maths tutor” or “finding an English tutor”. The challenge is finding the right tutor for that particular student.
The initial consultation
After completing our enquiry form, most families arrange a short consultation call with Andy Gardner, Tutor Director at Up Your Grade.
These conversations typically last around 15 to 20 minutes and are designed to help us understand what support is needed.
Parents are often surprised by some of the questions we ask. Of course we want to know the basics such as school, year group, exam board and current attainment. However, we are equally interested in things such as:
- How does your child feel about the subject?
- What feedback have teachers given?
- What are they finding difficult?
- What subjects do they enjoy?
- How do they learn best?
- What would success look like six months from now?
- What is happening outside school?
- Those details often tell us more than a grade ever could.
We regularly find that students who appear to have similar academic profiles need completely different approaches at GCSE and A-level.
Matching students with tutors
Once we understand what support is required, we begin the matching process.
Andy works closely with Bliss, our Tuition Co-ordinator, who helps identify suitable availability and ensures families are connected with tutors efficiently. We understand that when a parent has made the decision to seek support, they usually want to get moving fairly quickly. Bliss helps keep the process organised and ensures that suitable tutors are contacted promptly. Behind the scenes, Clare supports our tutor recruitment and interview process.
Every tutor we recommend has been interviewed, vetted and assessed before joining Up Your Grade. We look at far more than qualifications. Teaching experience, subject knowledge, communication skills, reliability and personality all matter.
In many cases we already know which tutors are best suited to nervous or high-achieving learners, as well as those who need confidence-building or more structured support.
Why we encourage an introduction first
Before lessons begin, we usually encourage the family and tutor to have a conversation. This may be over the phone, online or face to face depending on how the tuition will be delivered.
One phrase Andy often uses is:
“It is usually the parent who decides to seek help, but it is the child who decides whether tutoring continues.”
Most students spend years being allocated teachers at school. Tutoring gives them a rare opportunity to have some input into who supports them. The introduction helps everyone decide whether the relationship feels like a good fit before moving forward.
For online tuition, this also provides an opportunity to check microphones, cameras, internet connections and the lesson delivery platform before the first session. It sounds obvious, but reliable technology underpins everything when learning online.
Getting the most from the first session
Parents often ask what they should prepare before the first lesson. The good news is that tutors are very used to starting from different places.
If available, it is helpful to provide:
- Recent marked work.
- Mock papers.
- Assessment results.
- School reports.
- Examples of homework.
- Which exam board they are studying.
We also encourage students to think about what they feel they need help with. Interestingly, many students find this surprisingly difficult to answer. That is completely normal. A large part of a tutor’s role is helping identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.
What actually happens during the first lesson?
Many people imagine the tutor immediately diving into content and teaching from the moment the session starts. In reality, the most successful tutoring relationships often begin with something much simpler.
Getting to know the student.
A good tutor will spend time finding out about school, hobbies, interests, sporting activities, future ambitions and how the student feels about learning. Building rapport is not separate from learning. It is part of learning.
Alongside these conversations, tutors will begin asking questions to assess understanding, identify misconceptions and establish confidence levels. Often they are already looking for quick wins that can help the student feel successful early on. Confidence is frequently the foundation on which everything else is built.
What happens next?
Following each lesson, tutors provide a report outlining what has been covered and any suggested next steps. Families pay on a session by session basis through TutorCruncher and there is no requirement to commit to a fixed number of lessons.
Some students only need support for a few weeks or months Others continue working with a tutor throughout GCSEs, A -levels or even across several school years.
Whatever the timescale, our aim remains the same: to find the right tutor, make the process straightforward and help students make meaningful progress.
If you would like to discuss support for your child, the first step is simply arranging a consultation call with Andy.
Andy Gardner is a former science teacher. He founded Up Your Grade to offer primary, GCSE and A-level tuition, online and across Yorkshire.
Registered GCSE and A-level tutors include those covering Maths, English, Science, languages and more.