No Kid Needs a Tutor
I tutor high school students for a living, so understand what it costs me to say this plainly: no kid needs a tutor.
Not yours. Not anyone's. I stand by that completely, and by the end of this article I hope you'll understand why I can say it and still believe in what I do every week.
There has never been less need for someone to explain things
Think about what a tutor traditionally sells: a person who knows the subject and explains it to your child.
Now think about what your child already has access to. Every topic in the HSC syllabus has been explained online, for free, hundreds of times over — in videos, in worked examples, in interactive exercises, pitched at every level and every learning style. There is no shortage of practice material. And now there's AI, which will patiently teach your child literally anything, at any hour, as many times as it takes, without ever sighing or checking its watch.
If your child needs to know how to factorise a quadratic, the explanation is thirty seconds away and costs nothing. If tutoring were information delivery, it would already be obsolete — and any tutor selling you explanations is selling you something you already own.
So why do parents keep calling me?
Because when I look at what actually brings families to my door, it's never an information problem.
It's a bad mark, and a kid who shrugs. It's "I hate maths, my teacher doesn't explain anything" — which sounds like an information problem right up until you hand the kid a perfect explanation and nothing changes. It's a teacher at a parent-teacher night saying "he moved schools this year and missed a topic the others covered; he'll need help to keep up."
In every one of those cases, the missing ingredient isn't knowledge sitting behind a paywall. It's the stuff around the knowledge: sitting down when you'd rather not. Keeping going when it's boring. Knowing where to start, how to tell what you don't understand, what to do about it, and how to check whether it worked. Consistency. Self-regulation. Learning how to learn.
Nobody's phone can give your child that. That was never the tutor's real product either — or at least, it shouldn't have been.
Your kid doesn't need a tutor. Your kid might need a coach.
Here's the distinction that matters. Anyone can learn to shoot a basketball from YouTube. The technique is not a secret. But nobody gets good from YouTube — because getting good isn't a knowledge problem. It's showing up, repetition, someone watching your form, someone adjusting one thing at a time, someone making sure this week's practice actually happens.
That's a coach. And plenty of kids genuinely benefit from one — not because they're incapable of learning alone, but for the same reason talented athletes still have coaches.
And here's the part I wish more parents worried about, because in my experience they don't worry about it nearly enough: a tutor who just explains things doesn't merely fail to build these skills — he actively erodes them. The student stops attempting problems, because answers arrive on demand. They ask for help earlier and earlier in their own thinking. The better the explainer, the faster the dependence forms. You can pay good money to make your child worse at learning independently.
A coach works in the opposite direction. The whole job is minimal intervention — a question instead of an answer, a first step instead of a worked solution — so that the student does the actual work and, week by week, needs the coach less. I've written more about that philosophy in The Tutor's Real Job. The short version: the only outcome of tutoring that lasts is a student who can teach themselves.
The free-throw competition
One more thing, and it's especially for parents watching the budget.
Imagine you knew that one year from today, your child would compete in a free-throw competition. What's the winning preparation? Obviously: a modest number of free throws, every day, for a year. What's the losing preparation? Waiting until the final week and attempting a thousand a day.
Yet that losing strategy is exactly how many families buy tutoring. To keep costs down, they book fewer sessions and bunch them up right before exams and assignments — cramming, with a professional in the room. I understand the reasoning completely, and I have to be honest with you: it's the least effective way to spend the money. Skills are built the way free throws are built. A regular rhythm of sessions across the term beats a blitz before the exam, even if the total hours are the same.
Consistency isn't a nice-to-have in this model. It's the entire product.
What I actually offer
So no — your kid doesn't need a tutor. If what they needed were explanations, I'd send you a YouTube link and save you the money, sincerely.
What I offer is the structure: a regular time each week that makes study non-negotiable, a room where working is what everyone is doing, a coach who guides with the lightest touch that works, and a written record of every session so you always know where things stand.
If that sounds like the thing your child is actually missing, come and see it. The first session is free — in person if you're local, online if you're not.