How to Choose a Maths or Science Tutor in the UK: 9 Questions Worth AskingHow to Choose a Maths or Science Tutor in the UK: 9 Questions Worth Asking

Tutoring in the UK is unregulated. Anyone can advertise as a tutor, set any rate, and claim any result. That is not a reason to avoid it, but it does mean the burden of assessment falls on you, usually at a moment when you are worried about an exam and short of time.

These are the questions that separate a good tutor from an expensive one, in roughly the order worth asking them.

1. "What will you do in the first session?"

This is the most revealing question you can ask, and the answer is almost always diagnostic.

A weak answer is "we'll go over what they're covering in class". That is a tutor planning to re-teach the school's lesson more slowly, which helps a little and fixes nothing.

A strong answer involves finding out where understanding actually broke down. Most students who are struggling with a Year 11 topic are not struggling with that topic. They are struggling with something from Year 9 that the topic quietly rests on, and no amount of repeating the Year 11 content will help until that is found.

2. "What are your qualifications, and have you taught in a classroom?"

A degree in the subject matters less than people assume. Plenty of people with excellent maths degrees are poor teachers, because knowing something and knowing how someone else fails to know it are different skills.

What correlates well with results is classroom teaching experience. A qualified teacher has watched several hundred students misunderstand the same topic in several dozen different ways, and has learned which explanations land. Examining experience is even better: a tutor who has marked the paper knows exactly where the marks are.

3. "Which exam board, and have you taught this specification?"

AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC cover similar content but ask about it differently, weight topics differently and use command words differently. A tutor who knows the specific specification saves time and catches details that generic teaching misses.

If the tutor does not ask you which board the student is on, that tells you something.

4. "Can I see an enhanced DBS certificate?"

Private tutors are not legally required to hold one. Ask anyway. A tutor who works with children regularly and takes safeguarding seriously will have one and will offer it before you ask.

5. "How will we know if it is working?"

Good tutoring produces evidence. That might be a baseline assessment and a repeat later, a running record of topics covered and secured, or simply marks on school assessments moving. Vague reassurance that the student is "doing much better" is not evidence.

Agree at the start what a good outcome looks like in eight weeks. It makes the conversation at week eight much easier for everybody.

6. "Do you teach a method, or do you teach why it works?"

Both have a place, but a tutor who only teaches procedures produces a student who can answer questions that look like the ones they practised. The moment the exam phrases something unfamiliarly, that student has nothing to fall back on.

The test of genuine understanding is whether the student can explain the idea to someone else. Ask the tutor how they check that.

7. "One-to-one or small group?"

One-to-one is not automatically better. It is better when a student has specific gaps, needs the pace controlled tightly, or lacks the confidence to speak up in a group.

Small groups work well when students are at a similar level and the gain is partly motivational. Hearing another student ask the question you were embarrassed to ask is genuinely valuable, and groups are considerably cheaper per hour.

We explain the trade-offs between our one-to-one, small-group and online formats in full, including who each one suits.

8. "Online or in person?"

For maths and sciences, well-run online tutoring is close to equivalent, provided there is a shared digital whiteboard and the tutor can see the student's working. Where online genuinely loses something is with younger students who need the accountability of a person in the room.

The practical advantages of online are real: no travel, easier scheduling, and access to the right specialist rather than the nearest one. We cover this in more depth in our article on online versus in-person tutoring.

9. "What happens between sessions?"

An hour a week is about three per cent of a student's waking week. Tutoring that only exists inside that hour is capped in what it can achieve. Ask what the student is expected to do in between, and how that gets checked.

Warning signs

• Guaranteed grades. Nobody can guarantee an exam result.
• Large blocks of sessions paid up front before any teaching has happened.
• No willingness to speak to you before the first paid session.
• Reluctance to discuss the student's actual weaknesses with you honestly.
• Doing the student's homework rather than teaching them to do it.

What we do

PI Tutors is two qualified teachers rather than an agency: Dr Muhammad Taimur Khan in Rotherham, a mathematics teacher and former Associate Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam, and Muhammad Mukarram in Birmingham, a physics and mathematics teacher and IGCSE Physics examiner. We teach KS3 to A-Level mathematics and physics, and KS3 to GCSE chemistry and biology, in person and online.

If you want an honest read on where a student actually is before committing to anything, tell us what is going wrong and we will tell you what we would do about it.