What Are the Real Advantages of Private Tuition?

The greatest advantage of private tuition may not be more teaching — it may be teaching that changes direction the moment the student needs it to.

When parents first contact me about private tuition, there is often an understandable assumption about what tuition will involve.

Perhaps the student needs another explanation of algebra. Perhaps they need more practice with GCSE Chemistry. Perhaps an A-level Physics student needs help with mechanics. The obvious solution appears to be simply to give them more teaching.

But I don't think that is where the greatest value of private tuition lies.

A student already spends many hours being taught at school. Simply reproducing another classroom lesson for an additional hour each week may achieve surprisingly little.

Good private tuition should be different.

It should respond to the individual student. It should discover what they actually understand, identify what they only think they understand, find the gaps that have accumulated over several years and change direction whenever necessary.

That flexibility can make one-to-one tuition enormously powerful.

A Classroom Teacher Has a Very Different Job

Consider the challenge facing a classroom teacher.

There may be 25 or 30 students in the room. They will not all have identical abilities, knowledge or confidence. Some will have understood yesterday's lesson immediately. Others may still be struggling with something taught two years earlier.

Nevertheless, the teacher has a syllabus to cover and a whole class to teach.

If three students do not understand a particular step, the teacher cannot necessarily spend another 30 minutes on it. Equally, if three students understand everything immediately, the teacher cannot abandon the rest of the class and move those students several stages ahead.

That is not a criticism of classroom teaching. It is simply the reality of teaching a group.

Private tuition changes the problem completely.

There is no average student in the room.

There is just one student.

The Lesson Can Change Direction in Seconds

This is perhaps the biggest advantage of one-to-one tuition.

Imagine we are working on a GCSE Maths question involving the area of a circle.

The question initially appears straightforward.

The student gets it wrong.

It would be very easy simply to correct the calculation and move on.

But why was it wrong?

Perhaps the student:

• confused radius and diameter;

• cannot remember the formula;

• knows the formula but cannot substitute correctly;

• struggles with squaring numbers;

• entered the calculation incorrectly into the calculator;

• misunderstood what the question was asking;

• or actually understands circles perfectly well but made a simple arithmetic mistake.

Those are seven very different problems.

They should not receive the same teaching response.

With individual tuition, I can stop immediately and investigate.

The planned lesson might have been about circles. Five minutes later we may be revisiting powers, calculator technique or interpreting diagrams.

That isn't the lesson going wrong.

That is the tuition doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

Finding the Misconception Behind the Wrong Answer

Wrong answers are extremely useful.

I am often less interested initially in whether an answer is wrong than in why it is wrong.

Suppose an A-level Physics student writes:

F = mv

instead of:

F = ma

Simply saying, "No, the equation is F = ma," fixes the answer but may not fix the understanding.

Why did the student choose mv?

Are they confusing force with momentum?

Do they understand what acceleration actually represents?

Can they explain Newton's second law without using an equation?

Can they recognise the correct relationship when the problem is presented graphically rather than algebraically?

One wrong equation may reveal a much larger conceptual problem.

In a one-to-one lesson, we have time to investigate it.

I can ask another question.

Then another.

I can draw a diagram, demonstrate something experimentally, use a simulation or change the numbers.

The objective isn't simply to obtain the correct answer.

It is to discover the thinking that produced the incorrect one.

Students Can Work at Their Own Pace

One student may need 20 minutes to understand something that another student grasps in two.

That shouldn't be embarrassing.

Learning is not a race in which everyone must reach each checkpoint simultaneously.

One of the freedoms private tuition provides is the ability to say:

"We are staying with this until it makes sense."

There is no need to move on because the rest of the class is waiting.

Conversely, there is no need to spend an hour practising something the student already understands.

If a student demonstrates confidently that they can solve a particular type of problem, we can increase the difficulty immediately.

This makes tuition useful at both ends of the ability range.

It can support a student who is struggling, but it can equally challenge an able student who needs to go further.

Immediate Feedback Changes Learning

There is a considerable difference between receiving feedback on a piece of work several days later and receiving feedback while you are actually thinking about the problem.

During tuition, feedback can be almost instantaneous.

A student writes the first line of an algebraic solution.

I can already see whether the method is heading in the right direction.

That does not mean I immediately tell them what to do.

Often the most useful response is another question:

"Why did you do that?"

Or:

"What are you trying to find?"

Or simply:

"Are you happy with that step?"

That allows the student to identify the problem themselves.

Over time, the aim is for my questions to become the questions the student learns to ask internally.

That is when tuition starts developing independence rather than dependence.

Confidence Often Improves Because It Is Safe to Be Wrong

There is another important difference between a classroom and an individual lesson.

Students can be reluctant to reveal uncertainty in front of their classmates.

A student may nod when the teacher asks, "Does everybody understand?"

They may copy the worked example.

Their exercise book may look perfectly respectable.

But underneath all of that may be a considerable gap in understanding.

In a private lesson, there is no audience.

A student can say:

"I don't understand any of that."

That can be one of the most productive sentences in education.

It gives us somewhere to start.

Good tuition should create an environment where getting something wrong is not a failure. It is information.

Examination Practice Can Become Highly Targeted

Past-paper practice is obviously important for GCSE and A-level students.

But simply completing endless examination papers is not necessarily the most efficient approach.

Suppose a student consistently loses marks on questions involving graphs.

Doing another complete two-hour paper may provide only two more graph questions.

Instead, I can select or create a sequence of questions concentrating specifically on that weakness.

We might work through:

1. reading a value directly from a graph;

2. identifying a trend;

3. calculating a gradient;

4. interpreting what the gradient means;

5. comparing two datasets;

6. explaining anomalous results;

7. evaluating conclusions drawn from graphical evidence.

The questions can gradually become more difficult.

Once the underlying skill improves, we can put it back into complete examination papers.

That is much more targeted than simply saying, "Do more past papers."

Tuition Can Go Backwards Before It Goes Forwards

Sometimes the problem is not the topic currently being taught at school.

A student may be struggling with A-level Mechanics because their algebra is weak.

A GCSE Chemistry problem may actually be caused by difficulty manipulating ratios.

An A-level Biology student may understand the biological concept but struggle to interpret the wording of an extended-response question.

The immediate topic may therefore be only the symptom.

Private tuition provides the freedom to go backwards.

Sometimes we need to revisit something from Year 8, Year 9 or Year 10 before today's work will make sense.

That can be difficult to accommodate in normal classroom teaching because the class has to continue progressing through the specification.

One-to-one tuition can fill those foundations.

We Can Also Go Beyond the Syllabus

There is another side to individual pacing.

Sometimes the student isn't struggling at all.

They are fascinated.

A Physics question about circular motion might lead to satellites and orbital mechanics.

A Biology lesson about genetics might lead to DNA sequencing.

A Maths lesson might lead from iteration into chaos and the logistic map.

I think these diversions can be extremely valuable.

They remind students that Maths and Science are not merely collections of examination questions.

The syllabus tells us what students are required to learn.

It does not have to define the limits of what they are allowed to discover.

And quite often, exploring the bigger idea makes the syllabus material easier to understand.

Practical Work Can Become Part of the Explanation

This is particularly important in the way I teach Science.

If we are discussing acceleration, why restrict ourselves to a diagram when we can measure acceleration?

If we are studying electricity, we can build the circuit.

If we are investigating forces, we can collect actual force data.

If we are discussing microscopy, we can examine a specimen.

If an experiment produces unexpected results, that can be even more educational than obtaining the textbook answer.

Practical work turns abstract ideas into observable events.

It also gives me another way of explaining a difficult concept.

Some students understand something immediately when they see it happen.

The Student Gets My Complete Attention

There is an obvious advantage of one-to-one tuition that is easy to overlook.

For that hour, I am watching one student's work.

I can notice hesitation.

I can see when they repeatedly reach for the formula sheet.

I can notice that they understand short questions but become lost when there is a paragraph of information.

I can spot that they always make the same sign error.

I can notice that they know the answer verbally but struggle to write it in the form required by the examination.

These small observations matter.

Individually, they may appear insignificant.

Collectively, they can explain why a student who seems to understand a subject is not achieving the marks expected.

Private Tuition Should Eventually Make the Tutor Less Necessary

There is an important danger with private tuition.

A tutor can become too helpful.

If I explain every question, provide every formula, correct every mistake immediately and guide the student through every difficult step, the lesson may feel very successful.

But what happens in the examination when I am not sitting beside them?

The objective should therefore not be to create a student who is excellent at solving problems with their tutor.

The objective is to create a student who can solve them independently.

As confidence develops, I should gradually do less.

The student should increasingly choose the method, check the result, recognise mistakes and decide what to do when they become stuck.

Eventually, one of the best signs that tuition has succeeded may be that the student needs less of it.

Is One Hour of Private Tuition Enough?

Sometimes it can make a remarkable difference.

But an hour of tuition cannot magically replace everything that happens during the other 167 hours of the week.

Its value depends partly on what happens between lessons.

If a misconception is identified on Tuesday and the student practises the corrected method several times before the next lesson, progress can be rapid.

If nothing happens until the following Tuesday, we may spend part of the next lesson relearning the same idea.

That is why I increasingly see private tuition as part of a wider learning system.

The lesson identifies problems, develops understanding and sets direction.

Independent work consolidates it.

School provides breadth, curriculum structure and the wider educational environment.

The strongest results usually come when those elements complement rather than compete with one another.

So What Is the Real Advantage of Private Tuition?

It isn't simply another hour of education.

It isn't automatically better teaching than a student receives at school.

And it certainly shouldn't be an hour spent mechanically repeating the same material in the same way.

Its great advantage is adaptability.

A private lesson can slow down.

It can speed up.

It can go backwards.

It can jump forwards.

It can abandon the planned exercise because a more important misconception has suddenly appeared.

It can spend 20 minutes investigating one incorrect answer.

It can replace an explanation with an experiment.

It can concentrate an entire lesson on one examination weakness.

And it can sometimes ignore the examination completely for a few minutes because a student has asked a genuinely interesting question.

In a classroom of 30 students, the teacher must continually consider the needs of the whole class.

In private tuition, the lesson can continually ask just one question:

"What does this student need next?"

That, for me, is the real advantage of private tuition.

Philip M Russell Ltd / Hemel Private Tuition
GCSE and A-level tuition in Maths, Sciences and a wide range of academic subjects, with online and face-to-face teaching and practical laboratory work.

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