Our Group Sessions vs 1-on-1 Tutoring: An Honest Comparison

When parents start looking for tutoring, the default assumption is that one-on-one is the gold standard and everything else is a compromise. I understand why — and I used to tutor one-on-one myself, at premium rates. But I deliberately moved away from that model, and I want to explain why.

Before we compare anything, though, I need to show you what our sessions actually are — because "group tutoring" probably makes you picture something we don't do.

What actually happens in a session

Our sessions run for two hours, once a week, in small groups of up to five high school students. There is no lesson plan being delivered from the front of the room, because the students aren't all studying the same thing. One might be working on Year 12 Maths, another on a history essay, another on Year 10 Science. Each student works on their own material — the work their school has actually set them — and I move between them as a guide.

Every session is split into two blocks with a break in the middle, and every student has a personal record that we fill in together. It has three parts:

1. The plan. What did you say last week you'd have done by today? Did you do it?
2. The work. For each block, we record when we started, what the student is working on, and when we stopped.
3. The reflection. At the end of each block, I ask the student to assess their own study: Did you know what you were doing? Were you focused? Was it hard or easy? Were you distracted?

That reflection isn't paperwork. It's a ritual, repeated every week, that trains students to notice how they study — not just what they studied. It builds self-awareness, accountability, and a growth mindset. And as a parent, it means you have an auditable record of exactly what your child did all term, in their own words.

Why not just explain things?

Here's a belief I hold strongly after many years of tutoring: most tutors think their job is to know the answers and explain them. That's a mistake.

A struggling student doesn't need more explanation. They need more practice, with just enough explanation to get started — and not so much that it delays the practice. When a private tutor spends an hour patiently explaining, the session can feel productive while the student quietly becomes a passenger. They wait to be taught. The tutor ends up doing the student's thinking for them.

Our structure makes that impossible. The student has to do the work, in the room, every week. My job is to watch closely, notice the moment they get stuck, and intervene with the minimum necessary — a question, a nudge, a two-minute demonstration — and then get out of the way again. The goal is a student realising their own capacity, not a student following a recipe they've been spoon-fed.

(I've written more about this philosophy in The Tutor's Real Job.)

What the group adds

Some things genuinely only happen with other students in the room.

Questions become revision. When one student asks me how to factorise a quadratic, and I know another student at the table covered that last term, I don't answer it myself. I ask them to explain it. The first student gets their answer, the second gets powerful revision, and I get to check that they really understand. In one-on-one tutoring, that move doesn't exist.

Adjacency creates perspective. In one session, three students happened to be studying history — one on World War I, one on World War II, one on Vietnam. The conversation that emerged around that table gave each of them a broader view of their own topic than they'd ever have found sitting alone with their notes.

Quiet peer pressure works. When a student looks up and sees everyone else working, they work. I'll be honest about the flip side: teenagers chat, and the first twenty or thirty minutes of a session can be social before the room settles. I've stopped fighting that — because that bit of fun is often the reason a student keeps showing up week after week, and showing up consistently for months is worth more than any single perfect hour. One of my students scores in the high 90s and barely needs help at all; he comes because he likes the other kids. His mum understands exactly what she's paying for.

Why two hours?

Three reasons. First, HSC students sit three-hour exams, and stamina has to be trained like anything else. Second, in my experience the first hour of any study session is partly spent getting organised — finding the right chapter, digging out class notes, working a warm-up example — and the second hour is where the deep work happens. A one-hour session ends right when it's getting good. Third, the break in the middle resets the room, and the second block is reliably the most productive part of the week.

The honest comparison with one-on-one

So when is private tutoring the right call?

If a student has acute self-regulation challenges — the kind of severe ADHD where they need constant, undivided redirection — one-on-one may genuinely serve them better. I've worked with students like this privately, and I know how much sustained individual attention it can take. (I'll also say: I currently work with several students with ADHD and ASD in my groups, and it works. It's case by case.)

But here's one reason I want to push back on, because I hear it a lot: "My child is too shy to ask questions in front of others." Of course they are — they're a teenager. Social anxiety is a universal feature of adolescence, not a diagnosis that requires private tutoring. If you buy your child privacy to avoid the mild discomfort of learning alongside peers, you're paying a premium to keep them inside their comfort zone. In our sessions, a shy student never has to perform. I can see when they're stuck, kneel next to them, and answer a question quietly. They get the support and the healthy stretch of working in a room with others.

What it costs

I've left price until last deliberately, because I don't want you to choose us for the price. I want you to choose us because the model is better.

But here are the numbers. A full term is $800 for ten two-hour sessions — twenty hours of tutoring, or $40 per hour. A casual single session is $100. For comparison, private tutors in Sydney commonly charge $70–$120+ per hour (I charged $120 myself when I tutored one-on-one), and a typical tutoring class runs around $700 a term for half the contact hours.

The price is low not because the tutoring is amateur, but because the model is efficient: one experienced tutor guiding a small room of students doing their own work. Frankly, I built it this way because at $120 an hour I could only ever help families who were already well off. I wanted to build something excellent that ordinary families could actually sustain for a whole term — and then another, and then another. Because that's the real secret: consistency over months beats intensity in bursts, every time.

Nearly every in-person student who has started with us has stayed.

Come and see it

These sessions run in person (we also offer an online delivery of the same model — more on that here). The best way to understand it is to sit in one.

Book a free trial session. The first session is always free.