How to choose a tutor — a UK parent’s guide for 2026

What to look for in a UK tutor

Two things matter more than any badge on a profile: subject specialism and recent exam-board experience. A tutor who took the AQA GCSE Maths paper themselves in 2021 and has tutored five students through it since will almost always be more useful than a generalist with twenty years in a classroom and no recent paper exposure.

Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) is worth something — it tells you the tutor can plan, pace and pitch a lesson — but it is not the whole story. A QTS Year 6 teacher is not automatically the right fit for an 11+ candidate aiming at a London selective. The exam is the entity, not the qualification.

Ask which board your child sits and find a tutor who has taught it within the last two years. AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC and CIE differ in marking style, mark-scheme phrasing and topic emphasis. A tutor who keeps mixing up command words from the wrong board is a tutor who hasn’t marked enough recent papers.

For sciences and maths, check whether the tutor has actually done the practical or non-calculator paper your child will sit. For essay subjects, ask to see one piece of feedback they gave a recent student. Specifics beat reputation.

Eight questions to ask before booking

You don’t need a long interview. You need eight questions that surface whether the tutor thinks like a teacher or like a salesperson.

1. Which exam board has this student been entered for? If the tutor doesn’t ask this in the first two minutes of the trial, they aren’t calibrating. Walk away.

2. When did you last teach this exact specification? “Years ago” is a soft no. “Two students last term” is what you want.

3. How will the first lesson be structured? A good answer mentions diagnostic — they will find gaps, not lecture for an hour.

4. What homework do you set between sessions? If the answer is “none” or “whatever they want to do”, lessons won’t compound. You’re paying for the practice in between, not just the hour on Zoom.

5. How do you measure progress? Mock papers every six weeks is a common honest answer. “You’ll see it in their confidence” is not.

6. Can I sit in on the first lesson? A confident tutor says yes for younger children and politely no for teenagers (rapport breaks if a parent hovers). Both are fine answers. Defensive is not.

7. What happens if my child needs to cancel? Clear, written, off the top of their head — good. Vague or improvised — bad. Our /how-it-works/ page covers our 12-hour rule.

8. Why do you tutor? The answers that correlate with good tutors are usually unromantic — “I like exam prep”, “I’m good at it”, “flexible work alongside my degree”. Anything that sounds rehearsed should make you slow down.

Red flags

The single most reliable red flag is a tutor who tries to sell you a package before they have met your child. A 20-lesson bundle “at a discount” on day one means the tutor is optimising for cash, not outcomes. A good tutor wants to do a trial, then four sessions, then reassess.

Grade guarantees are a second clear no. No tutor — not at Eton, not at Oxbridge admissions consultancies, not anywhere — can guarantee a grade. Anyone who does is either misleading you or planning to refund three families a year and pocket the rest.

Be cautious of any tutor who suggests moving payment off-platform after the first lesson. The reasons are always “cheaper for both of us”. The actual reason is they’re avoiding accountability — no record of lessons, no refund route, no recourse if something goes wrong. A 5% fee buys you a paper trail, which matters the day something goes wrong.

Vague qualifications (“BSc, distinction” without a university), unverifiable school names, and trial lessons that turn into a sales pitch for a higher tier are all worth walking away from. Trust your reaction. If you wouldn’t want this person at your kitchen table for an hour, your child won’t learn from them either.

What a free trial should tell you

The 30-minute trial isn’t a free lesson. It’s a diagnostic. By minute thirty you should know three things: what your child can already do, what they can’t, and which specific topic the tutor would tackle first. If the trial finishes and you don’t know all three, the tutor didn’t do their job.

Watch for what the tutor asks your child to do, not what they explain. Asking a Year 11 to sketch a quadratic, or a Year 9 to translate two French sentences without a dictionary, is the kind of micro-task that surfaces gaps. A tutor who fills thirty minutes with introductions and “what are you finding hard?” is reading from a script.

Afterwards, ask your child one question: “What’s one thing you learned?” If they can name something specific — a technique, a fact, a mistake they’d been making — book the paid block. If they shrug, try a second trial with a different tutor. Both are free on TheTutorLink, and the two-trial method beats agonising over profiles.

Online vs in-person — which fits your child

The honest answer in 2026 is that online suits most secondary students, and in-person still wins at the younger end. Children from Year 7 upwards usually do as well online as in person — the research has settled this, and most of our higher-rated tutors run their entire practice on Zoom or our built-in video room.

Year 6 and below is a different story. Younger children fidget, lose focus, and benefit from a tutor who can physically point at a worksheet. If your child is preparing for the 11+ and is nine or ten years old, in-person at home or at the tutor’s house tends to compound faster.

Special educational needs sit on a case-by-case basis. Children with ADHD often do better online (shorter sessions, fewer environmental triggers, screen-share keeps the eye anchored). Children with dyslexia often do better in person, where coloured overlays and physical text manipulation help. We’ve written a longer comparison at /online-vs-in-person-tutoring/.

Cost ranges in the UK 2026

UK private tutoring rates in 2026 break down cleanly by stage. KS3 (Years 7–9) sits at £20–£30/hr. GCSE rates run £25–£35/hr. A-Level pricing is typically £30–£45/hr. Specialist work — 11+ for selective grammar schools, Oxbridge admissions tests, medical school interviews — sits at £40–£70/hr, occasionally higher for ex-examiners.

London adds roughly £5–£10/hr across every stage. Online tutors working from outside the M25 often charge London-adjacent rates if they have a London track record. Recent graduates and undergraduates sit at the lower end of each band; QTS teachers and specialists at the upper end.

Two anti-patterns to watch for. First, anyone charging significantly under the band — £15/hr for GCSE — is almost always inexperienced and won’t structure homework. Cheaper now, more expensive in lessons that don’t compound. Second, anyone charging £100/hr+ without a specific specialism (examiner status, named-school admissions success, demonstrable Oxbridge results) is charging for confidence, not outcomes.

Our /pricing/ page explains how the 5% platform fee works — it comes out of the tutor’s payout, not on top of your bill. The rate the tutor lists is the rate you pay.

A short note on whether you need a tutor at all

If you’re reading this and not yet sure tutoring is the answer, our companion piece on /signs-your-child-needs-a-tutor/ is a better starting point. Tutoring helps most when there’s a specific gap, an upcoming exam, or a confidence dip the school can’t address one-to-one. It helps least when a child is broadly fine and the parent is broadly anxious. There’s no shame in a calm answer of “not yet”.

And if you’ve been tutoring yourself and wondering whether to do it professionally, /become-a-tutor/ has the honest version of what listing on TheTutorLink looks like. We charge tutors 5%, the lowest fee in UK tutoring, because we think the platform should serve the people doing the actual teaching.