11 September 2026 · Updated 27 September 2026 · Hugo Harrabin
Usually, but not because of the certificate. What teacher training buys, where tutors without it go wrong, and what to ask any tutor before you book one.
You have two tutors on the shortlist. One is a university student who got an A* in the subject and charges less. The other is a qualified teacher and costs more. Does the teaching qualification make a difference, or are you paying for letters after a name?
Usually, the qualified teacher is better, but not because of the certificate. What makes the difference is the training it stands for: knowing how students go wrong, what order to teach things in, how long to spend on each topic, and how to check it has actually gone in. You can ask any tutor about that directly, whether they hold the certificate or not.
Key Takeaways
- A qualified teacher usually makes a better tutor, and the reason is the training behind the certificate: diagnosing misconceptions, sequencing a topic, and checking understanding instead of lecturing.
- The evidence doesn't say only teachers can tutor well. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) finds that tuition from teaching assistants or volunteers "may be less effective than those using experienced and specifically trained teachers", and advises training and a structured programme whenever non-teachers deliver it.
- What a PGCE and Qualified Teacher Status actually buy is assessed training in how pupils go wrong, a two-year induction, and years of working alongside colleagues who help each other improve.
- The bigger risk is a tutor working alone, with nobody checking their teaching. Unless a platform guarantees a qualified teacher, you often won't know which kind you have until you ask.
Three things above all: diagnosing where pupils go wrong, planning the order they learn things in, and checking all the time whether it has gone in. A PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) leading to Qualified Teacher Status is assessed training in how pupils learn a subject, where they go wrong, and how to plan so the error doesn't form in the first place.
That emphasis is written into the Department for Education's own Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework, which sets out what every new teacher in England is trained in from September 2025. Among much else, trainees learn about "identifying possible misconceptions and planning how to prevent these forming". After a year of training, new teachers complete a further two years of induction with a package of training and mentoring. After that, school-mandated professional development continues for the rest of their career.
The research on what makes teaching effective points the same way. The Great Teaching Toolkit evidence review (Coe and colleagues, 2020) lists knowledge of "common student strategies, misconceptions and sticking points" as one of the core elements of great teaching, separate from knowing the subject itself.
I taught in classrooms for six years before we started Tugo, and this is the part I'd stress. Teaching is not the same as lecturing. Someone without a teaching qualification may be able to explain a topic perfectly well. The trained part is knowing how to help students learn it, and spotting a misconception before it sets.
Take a classic from Chemistry, the subject I taught. Plenty of GCSE students believe that breaking chemical bonds releases energy. It's the wrong way round: breaking a bond takes energy in, and the energy a fuel gives out comes from new bonds forming. The idea survives even when the rule has been learned. A Royal Society of Chemistry article for teachers warns that "even students who know that 'bond breaking requires energy'" may still think the breaking itself "releases" far more. Someone who knows the subject can recite the right rule. A trained teacher expects the wrong idea, hears it in a student's phrasing, such as "the energy is stored in the bonds", and picks their own words carefully so they don't plant it in the first place.
The second is sequencing. A student can't learn a new idea securely until the ideas it rests on are in place, so a trained teacher plans the order of topics, checks the foundations first and judges how long to stay on something before moving on. The DfE framework puts it plainly: pupils learn new ideas by "linking those ideas to existing knowledge, organising this knowledge into increasingly complex mental models", and "carefully sequencing teaching to facilitate this process is important". A tutor without that training tends to teach whichever topic is in front of them that week, which can mean building on foundations that were never there.
Knowing when to move on matters just as much. A less experienced tutor may keep a grade 7 student on one topic until every question comes out perfect. An experienced teacher knows that student will usually cover more ground by moving to the next topic and coming back to the first one later, which also happens to be how memory works best.
The third is checking. Trained teachers ask questions all the way through a lesson, to find out what a student can already do, whether they've understood, and when to change course. The DfE framework calls questioning "an essential tool for teachers", used "to check pupils' prior knowledge, assess understanding and break down problems". A tutor without that training often ends up explaining for most of the session. The student nods along, the explanation feels clear, and nobody finds out what they can actually do on their own. Making a student pull an answer out of their own memory is also one of the best-evidenced ways to make it stick.
What the certificate doesn't do is guarantee results. It shows that someone has been trained and assessed in how to teach. It says nothing about whether they're still doing it well, or whether they plan their sessions. We come back to both below.
On average, tutors who have undergone training on how to educate effectively get better results, but the certificate isn't the only thing that counts. The evidence is clear that training matters. It's much less clear that only a qualified teacher can supply it.
The EEF's one-to-one tuition summary puts tuition at around five additional months of progress over a year, fewer in secondary schools and in maths. On who delivers it, the EEF says programmes using teaching assistants or volunteers "can have a valuable impact, but may be less effective than those using experienced and specifically trained teachers". Where non-teachers deliver it, "training and the use of a structured programme is advisable". Its small group tuition summary adds that training the staff who deliver it "is likely to increase impact".
A 2024 meta-analysis of randomised tutoring trials by Nickow, Oreopoulos and Quan, published in the American Educational Research Journal, reached a similar conclusion. Effects were largest for programmes that used teachers or paraprofessionals as tutors, rather than volunteers or parents.
What about tutors who aren't teachers? The EEF's trial of the Tutor Trust, run in 105 primary schools with 1,201 pupils, used trained university students as tutors. Pupils tutored in groups of three made around three months' more progress in KS2 maths than similar pupils who weren't tutored. That gain was too small for the researchers to rule out chance, but they rated the trial itself as well run, so the result is worth taking seriously.
The trial compared tutoring with no tutoring, not students with qualified teachers. It shows that trained student tutors can help, not that they match a teacher. And those students weren't working alone. The Tutor Trust recruits and trains them, and the evaluators said the key to delivery was continuity with the class teacher, "particularly regarding specific vocabulary and methods of teaching key mathematical concepts". Even so, they flagged "some weaknesses in tutors' subject knowledge", which they thought further training could fix.
So a student tutor can do real good when three things are behind them: training, an organisation that recruited and supported the tutors, and a direct line to the child's teacher. A student advertising on a tutoring marketplace usually has none of the three. That difference, far more than the certificate, is what parents should be looking at. The EEF's headline tutoring figures blur the same difference. They average every kind of tutor together, from teaching assistants to qualified teachers, and the EEF notes that training the people who deliver tuition raises its impact. We unpick those averages in our article on group vs one-to-one tutoring.
A teacher in a school works inside a system that helps them improve. Colleagues observe their lessons. Heads of department moderate their marking. Someone down the corridor says "that isn't how you'd teach that" before a habit sets. The DfE framework points the same way: "working closely with colleagues to develop an understanding of likely misconceptions is valuable."
A private tutor usually has none of it, however capable they are. Many start at university, find they're good at it and carry on after graduating, with no observation, no moderation and no professional development since. Nobody tells them when an explanation is confusing, or that the school teaches a method they've never used. Their mistakes don't get caught, because nobody is looking.
A classroom also teaches something no single pupil can. A teacher sees many different students go wrong in many different ways, year after year. A one-to-one tutor sees one child's thinking in fine detail, but over a narrower range. If you want the tutor with the best chance of knowing how to help your child, look for one who has watched hundreds of students get the same topic wrong in different ways, and has built up the catalogue of misconceptions that training starts and experience fills in.
The tutoring market makes this hard to see. When we checked 13 UK tutoring platforms, only three promised a qualified teacher: Kip McGrath, Tute and Tugo. The rest don't make that promise. Some mix qualified teachers with students and graduates and publish the share and a few say outright that no teaching qualification is needed.
Others set the bar at the tutor's own exam results. Study Mind asks for grade 9s, and Explore Learning for "great personal success in their own education". A grade 9 is a fine qualification if you want the tutor to sit the exam, assuming they still remember it all years later. It tells you much less about whether they can get another student there. Getting a 9 yourself and working out why a 15-year-old keeps dropping marks on the same kind of question are different skills. A tutor is there to do the second.
So unless a platform guarantees a qualified teacher, you often won't know whether your child's tutor is one until you ask.
In our view, a qualified teacher improvising does less than a trained tutor with a plan. A qualified teacher who turns up and asks "what do you want to do today?" is wasting most of what that training taught them. A trained tutor working through a sequence a teacher designed, starting from where the child actually is, puts that training to work every session.
The EEF is specific about what makes tuition work. It should be "additional to and explicitly linked with normal lessons", and schools should use their understanding of "the learning gaps of the pupils" to choose what gets taught. Doing that means finding out what the child doesn't know, putting the gaps in order and checking each session against them.
So a PGCE isn't enough on its own. It's the easiest way to check that someone has been trained to diagnose, but the real test is whether they plan each session around what the child can't yet do.
If your child's tutor isn't a trained teacher, there's a simple way for them to start well. Go through a recent school test together, question by question, work out what went wrong on each one, then make up similar questions to see whether your child can now get them right. The school has already decided what to teach and in what order, so the tutor is following that plan without needing to design one. The approach has limits, though. It only plans the next one or two sessions, and without training a tutor can spend too long on the wrong things, drilling a question your child got wrong through a slip while missing the misunderstanding behind another.
A tutor without teacher training can give genuinely good support. The risk is that they won't always know what not to do.
Homework is the clearest case. A tutor who helps a student through their actual homework, question by question, sends back work that looks secure. The class teacher sees correct answers, assumes the topic has landed and moves on, and the student loses the extra support they needed at school. The EEF's advice is that tuition should be "additional to and explicitly linked with normal lessons", not a way of getting the school's work done.
Good tutoring sits alongside homework, not inside it. A trained tutor will show the student how to do a similar question, then coach them through another one, and only then leave them to do the homework on their own. The teacher gets an honest picture, and the student gets the practice.
Getting ahead of the class can backfire too. I saw it in my own classroom: students would arrive having already covered the lesson's content with their tutor, without having really learned it. Because it sounded familiar, they thought they knew it, so they only half listened. In the end-of-lesson quiz, they often did the worst in the class. Recognising something isn't the same as being able to do it. A tutor who explains without checking can send a student into a lesson feeling ready for work they can't yet do.
The words a tutor uses matter too. Plenty of tutors explain bonding by saying an atom "wants" a full outer shell. It sounds harmless, but chemistry education researcher Keith Taber has found that students who talk this way often come to believe it literally, and explain bonding as atoms getting what they want rather than as electrical forces between charged particles. It's a well-known trap in chemistry teaching, and one the Royal Society of Chemistry runs teacher training on. A tutor working alone has often picked the phrase up in their own school days and never been told otherwise.
Ask about the training and the system around the tutor, not just the certificate. These five questions work whatever the tutor's background:
These sit alongside the nine questions to ask any online tutor, which also cover safeguarding, progress tracking and cancellation terms.
Every tutor who teaches for Tugo holds a PGCE, and every one is trained in the method we designed. So the certificate is there, and so is the part the certificate can't provide on its own: a shared method to teach to, and a way of catching errors as they happen.
Each session also runs with the Tugo Teaching Assistant, our software that works alongside the teacher. It checks student work as it's produced, flags errors in real time and tracks where each student keeps going wrong. The teacher arrives at each session already knowing who needs what, which is how every student in a group of six to eight gets as much feedback as they would one-to-one. The full approach is on the Tugo method page.
No. There is no licence, minimum qualification or regulator for private tutors in the UK. Qualified Teacher Status is the professional standard for teachers in England. Nothing equivalent applies to private tutoring.
It can be, with the right support. In the EEF's Tutor Trust trial, a charity recruited and trained university students to tutor in schools, working closely with each class teacher. Their pupils made around three months' more progress in maths than pupils who weren't tutored. The trial didn't compare the students with qualified teachers, though, and the gain was small enough that it could have been chance. A student tutoring alone without training, structure or contact with the school is a different product.
Usually, when you hire one privately: qualified teachers typically charge £45 to £80 an hour, against £25 to £40 for student tutors. The hourly rate is the wrong number to compare, though. What you're paying for is progress, and a tutor who moves your child's grade further in each hour can cost less overall for the same improvement, even at a higher rate.
A small group changes the sums again. When six to eight students share a qualified teacher, each family pays for a share of the teacher's time instead of all of it. A Tugo session with a PGCE-qualified teacher costs £25 on the weekly plan. The group also adds things one-to-one can't: students hear each other's methods, explain their own reasoning out loud, and see classmates find the same question hard, which makes struggling feel normal rather than like failing. The EEF puts small-group tuition close to one-to-one on progress, and ahead of it in maths.
A platform's price doesn't tell you who teaches, either. In our comparison of 13 UK tutoring platforms, only three guarantee a qualified teacher, and none of the four most expensive do. For a wider view of what tutoring costs, see our guide to GCSE tutor costs.
Qualified Teacher Status is the professional standard for teachers in England, expected in state schools. It's awarded after teacher training and followed by a two-year induction with a mentor and a programme of training.
Usually, yes. A qualified teacher has been trained to diagnose misconceptions and sequence a topic, and has worked alongside colleagues who help each other improve. That training is what makes the difference, not the certificate itself, so whoever you choose, ask about it.
If you want to see what a planned session with a PGCE-qualified teacher looks like, the first one with us is free.
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