Guide for parents · September 2026
What an in-person tutor hour actually buys
Thinking about a private tutor at home? What the one-to-one hour actually buys, when it is worth it, and what to sort out before you book one.
What you are actually buying when you book one
A private tutor, in the sense most UK parents mean it, is an adult who comes to your house or receives your child at theirs, once a week, for an hour, face to face. That format carries costs and benefits that have nothing to do with teaching quality. You are paying partly for travel, partly for a slot in somebody's evening, and partly for the fact that they live near enough to reach you.
Those constraints decide more than parents expect. A travel radius limits who you can choose from, which means a family in a market town is picking from a handful of people while a family in a city is picking from hundreds. It also means the hour is fixed: Tuesday at six, whether or not Tuesday at six is when your child is capable of concentrating.
The failure mode nobody warns you about
The commonest way a good one-to-one arrangement goes to waste is quiet. The tutor arrives, asks what is due this week, and the two of them work through it together. The homework gets done, it gets done well, and the parent sees a finished book and a calmer evening. Nothing about the thing that made the homework hard has changed.
This is not a bad tutor. It is what happens when nobody has defined the job. An hour is short, the homework is in front of both of them, and finishing it is the path of least resistance for everyone in the room. Unless somebody has said what the hour is for, the homework will fill it.
Three problems that look identical from the kitchen table
| What you see | What it probably is | Does a weekly hour fix it |
|---|---|---|
| Stuck on new topics, fine on old ones | A missing earlier skill | Only if the tutor works backwards, not forwards |
| Understands in the room, forgets by Thursday | Not enough spaced practice | No — the gap between sessions is the problem |
| Will not start at all | Avoidance and lost confidence | Often yes, and better than anything else |
| Slow and effortful on things they know | Fluency and working memory | Partly, but daily repetition matters more |
Only the first and third rows are good reasons to start with a private tutor. The second and fourth are volume problems, and volume is the one thing a weekly appointment cannot supply.
What to sort out before you pay anybody
Work out what is missing first. Not the topic your child is failing at now, but the earlier thing it stands on. That is a twenty-minute job, and it changes what you ask for: instead of "she is struggling with ratio", you can say "she is struggling with ratio and she cannot yet add fractions with different denominators, so please start there."
Pobbi exists for that twenty minutes. The maths learning check is twenty questions drawn from a bank covering eighteen skills, from place value up to solving a simple equation, aimed at Year 5 to Year 9. It takes about twelve minutes, it is free, and it does not ask for a card. When a child gets a question wrong, the check goes backwards rather than on: miss the sum of one third and one quarter and it goes looking at lowest common multiples, equivalent fractions, and adding fractions that already share a denominator.
Each skill comes back in one of three states — secure at eighty per cent or above, still being practised between fifty and seventy-nine, still being learned below that. That is the list to hand a tutor in the first five minutes, and it is the difference between paying for diagnosis and paying for teaching.
When the person in the room is the right answer
Say it plainly: there are children for whom nothing at home will do, and no honest comparison pretends otherwise.
If your child has stopped trying — refuses to open the book, says they are stupid, gets upset before the first question — that is not a knowledge problem and a screen will not fix it. What repairs it is an adult who is not their parent, who is patient, and who is there in person often enough for the child to trust them. If there is a diagnosed need, if a GCSE is in the near distance and the issue is exam technique rather than foundations, or if your child simply learns by talking to somebody, book the tutor. Pobbi's honest role in those cases is to make the first hour land somewhere useful.
Questions parents ask before booking
Is it wrong to try an app first?
No, provided you set a limit. Give it a few weeks, decide in advance what improvement would look like, and if it is not there, book the tutor with the evidence you have collected. Deciding by drift is the expensive option.
Should the tutor be a qualified teacher?
It depends what you need. For untangling foundations, someone who understands how the skills stack matters more than a teaching qualification. For exam preparation, someone who has marked or taught the specification is worth a lot.
Can we do both?
That is often the best arrangement and the cheapest version of serious help. Short practice on most days, a person once a week to explain and to hold your child to it. The two do different jobs and neither replaces the other.
How do I stop the hour turning into homework club?
Say so at the start, and give the tutor something specific to work on. Tutors generally prefer this. The drift into supervision usually happens because nobody in the room has been given a better instruction.