Guide for parents · September 2026
Primary School Tutor Alternative: What Parents Should Compare
Before paying for primary tutoring: the summer-born question, what the class teacher can tell you for free, and when extra help is the answer.
Primary is seven years, not one thing
A primary school in England and Wales takes children from Reception through to Year 6 — Key Stage 1 for the first two years, Key Stage 2 for the next four. A parent searching for a primary tutor might have a five-year-old learning to blend sounds or a ten-year-old stuck on long division, and almost nothing useful applies to both.
So the first question is not which tutor. It is which of two quite different situations you are in, because the right move for an infant-aged child is rarely the right move for a Year 6.
Before anything else: how old is your child within the year?
An English school year runs from September to August, and a class contains children born eleven months apart. In Year 1 that is a real difference in development, not a difference in ability, and an August-born child sitting next to a September-born one can look behind while being entirely where they should be.
This matters commercially. A significant amount of early primary tutoring is bought to fix something that was never a gap. If your child is young in the year and broadly keeping up, the honest advice is to wait and to watch, and to spend the money on books instead.
| Your child | What it usually means | Reasonable first move |
|---|---|---|
| Summer-born, slightly behind the class | Age within the year | Time, reading together, no purchase |
| Behind their own progress from last year | Something changed | Ask the teacher what they have noticed |
| Fine in class, falling apart at homework | Confidence or tiredness | Shorten the homework, tell the school |
| Consistently stuck on one thing for months | A specific gap | Find the gap precisely, then decide |
The free resource you are about to lose
Primary is the only phase in which one adult sees your child all day, in every subject, for a year. That teacher knows whether the problem is maths or reading, whether it is attention or understanding, whether it happens in the morning or after lunch, and how your child compares with thirty others they have taught all year.
That information is free and better than anything a first tutoring session will produce. Ask for ten minutes, ask what they would do in your position, and ask specifically whether they think there is a gap or a wobble. From Year 7 there will be no one person who can answer that.
It is also the phase where the school itself may act. Primary schools commonly run small-group catch-up in reading or number, and a request from a parent is sometimes all it takes to be considered for it.
Where paid help in primary genuinely earns its keep
Entrance tests for selective or independent schools, which have formats and time pressures that ordinary primary work does not prepare for. A child with an identified need working with somebody trained in it. And a household where homework has become a daily fight — outsourcing that fight to a calm adult protects your relationship with your child, which is worth more than the maths.
What rarely earns its keep is general tutoring bought because a friend's child has one, or because a report used the word working-towards.
What Pobbi covers, and what it does not
Pobbi's maths learning check begins at Year 5, which means it fits the last two years of primary and not the earlier ones. There is nothing for Reception, Key Stage 1 or Years 3 and 4, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.
For a Year 5 or Year 6 child it is twenty questions drawn from a bank of eighteen skills, about twelve minutes, free, no card asked for. It starts with place value and multiplication because those two determine how much attention the rest of the paper gets, and when an answer is wrong it tests what sits underneath rather than moving on — the lowest common multiple and equivalent fractions behind a failed fraction sum, for instance. Each skill is reported as secure, practising or still being learned.
It is not a tutor, there is nobody on the other end, and it does not promise to cover the national curriculum in full. The curriculum in England applies to maintained schools; academies organise it themselves, and the other UK nations have their own.
Questions primary parents ask
The report says working towards. How worried should I be?
It describes performance against an expectation on a particular date. Ask the teacher what specifically is behind it, because working towards in writing and working towards in number call for completely different responses.
Should I teach my child at home myself?
Reading together and talking about what you read is the single highest-value thing a parent can do, at any primary age, and it needs no expertise. Teaching methods is harder, because schools use methods you were not taught and a conflicting method confuses a child.
My child says they are the worst in the class.
Children this age read their position from the group they sit with. Ask the teacher whether the perception matches anything real, because often it does not, and where it does, the answer is usually one specific fixable thing.
Is it worth tutoring for the Year 6 assessments?
For most children, no. Secondary schools generally reassess on arrival, and the results shape school-level reporting more than your child's future.