There is a point in Year 11 when the question, “Have you thought about getting a tutor?” starts to sound like, “Have you thought about having more money?”
It is usually kindly meant. The recommendation arrives at parents’ evening, beside a disappointing mock result, or in a conversation with another parent whose child has apparently been doing three hours of additional maths a week since September.
For some families, tutoring is a manageable expense. For others, it means giving something up. For others still, the conversation might as well concern buying a small holiday home, as there is no spare money.
Skilled work – but only for some
I have no objection to tutoring. Good tutoring can be transformative. Sometimes a student needs someone to sit beside them, identify precisely where their understanding went wrong and explain it differently, without simultaneously managing 29 other children.
That is skilled work, and skilled people deserve to be paid. The difficulty is that the student’s need and the family’s ability to pay bear absolutely no useful relationship to each other.
Schools face their own version of this calculation. Additional support has to compete with staffing, special educational needs and disabilities provision and a roof that has begun providing an unsolicited water feature.
Student premium is already covering five other needs it was never designed for.
The National Tutoring Programme’s final academic year was 2023–24. Schools were then encouraged to continue tutoring through existing budgets – budgets that had already been introduced to the electricity bill.
The squeeze matters because tutoring buys more than additional subject teaching. At its best, it also buys someone who can explain the strange business of being examined.
Understanding how to revise
Consider the student who knows the science but writes, “It makes it go faster.” Somewhere in that sentence is a perfectly serviceable understanding, wearing a very poor disguise.
The examiner cannot know what “it” means, which process is faster or why. The student loses marks and concludes that they are bad at science.
Or take the English student who has learned 16 quotations and is determined that all 16 will have their moment – whether or not the question requires them.
These students need more than another instruction to revise. They need someone to show them how knowledge becomes an answer: how to identify what is being asked, select what matters and explain it clearly enough to receive credit.
A surprisingly large amount of school advice leaves this unfinished. “Develop your answer.” “Be more precise.” “Explain your point.” All reasonable instructions, provided the student understands how.
That is exam literacy and is something a good tutor can teach. It may be by showing a child where the explanation stops short, why one answer is better than another, spotting a misstep in a thinking process or a missed opportunity to demonstrate understanding.
Forgetting the help on results days
Some families can buy that conversation. Others receive a mock grade and a revision timetable.
This is where the class gap becomes particularly uncomfortable. We readily recognise that money buys resources, space and time. We are less willing to confront the possibility that it also buys a clearer understanding of what the system wants.
Of course, teachers explain assessment every day, and many do it exceptionally well. Affluent children can misunderstand questions. Disadvantaged children can be brilliant at answering them.
But money provides additional chances to have a misunderstanding noticed and corrected. Without it, a student may simply carry the same mistake into the next examination.
Come results day, though, this extra support tends to vanish from the story – we describe one student as naturally academic while the student who worked hard but misunderstood the task gets a conversation about resilience.
I would hesitate to call exam literacy the last accepted class advantage. There is still the small matter of who can arrange work experience through a friend at a top business. But paying to have the rules explained is most certainly an advantage.
The response has to begin in ordinary lessons. Students need to see teachers work through the decisions involved in answering a question. They need to compare responses, discuss what makes an explanation convincing and practise improving their own.
A mark scheme on a school website cannot do that work by itself. Neither can a revision evening attended by the parents who already know which questions to ask.
Use CPD to boost teachers' exam knowledge
Where schools buy additional expertise, it should help staff as well as students. A visiting specialist who leaves teachers with a sharper understanding of common errors offers something more durable than an afternoon of enthusiastic highlighting.
And those of us involved in providing support should be honest about what we offer. A student’s fear of failing is not an excuse for vague promises about potential.
Schools and families deserve to know what will be taught, why it is needed and how anyone will judge whether it helped.
Parents will continue to buy help when they can. I understand that entirely. If your child is struggling and you have the means, you are unlikely to postpone finding a tutor until the country has resolved educational inequality.
The responsibility sits with a system, which knows this happens and still allows understanding the examination to become an optional extra.
Before telling a student they should have revised harder, we ought to establish whether anyone properly taught them what to do with the knowledge they revised. That conversation should come with the education. It should not require another invoice.
Hannah Carter is an experienced headteacher
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