How to tell if a tutor is actually helping — or just occupying time
Three questions to ask after every session.
Parents hear it constantly: if a child is struggling, they should simply do more. More practice papers, more reading, more hours at the desk. It sounds reasonable, and it is almost always wrong.
Volume without direction rarely moves marks. A child who consistently misreads two-part questions will misread them a hundred more times if nobody names the habit first. That is the difference between activity and progress.
Our approach starts somewhere less comfortable: we find out why the marks are being lost before we prescribe anything. Is it a knowledge gap, a technique gap, or a timing problem? Each has a completely different fix, and treating one as another wastes the summer.
Only once we can point to the actual cause do we build a plan. Sometimes that plan is smaller than parents expect — a handful of targeted habits rather than a mountain of worksheets. That is the point. Precision beats volume every time.