3 April 2026 · Updated 3 August 2026 · Hugo Harrabin
The EEF puts group tutoring at four additional months of progress a year and 1:1 at five. What sits behind that gap, and where each format earns its money.
Spend any time on Mumsnet or a school WhatsApp group and the same claim comes round: 1:1 tutoring beats group sessions. More tutor time, more attention, faster progress. The evidence doesn't agree, and it doesn't divide the way most parents expect.
Key Takeaways
- The Education Endowment Foundation puts small group tuition at four additional months of progress a year, and one-to-one tuition at five. Group teaching gets close at 80% as effective. The headline numbers don't put it ahead.
- Those averages cover every kind of delivery the EEF counts, from trained teaching assistants and academic mentors through to qualified teachers, and the EEF says professional development raises impact. In maths, small groups come out ahead at +3 against +2, a 50% edge. Across secondary schools as a whole the figures run the other way, +2 against +4. The EEF rates the evidence behind both formats as moderate.
- Peer tutoring carries the strongest evidence in this comparison at six additional months, rated high impact on extensive evidence. It is also the one mechanism a 1:1 session cannot offer.
- The EEF's own explanation for what makes effective tuition is the quality and quantity of feedback, not the headcount.
- 1:1 still wins in specific cases. We set out which ones below.
The Education Endowment Foundation is the independent charity that grades teaching approaches on impact, cost and evidence quality and it is what schools themselves use when deciding where to spend money. No tutoring company has a hand in what it says.
The EEF puts small group tuition at four additional months of progress over a year, and one-to-one tuition at five.
One month apart across a full academic year is a narrow gap, though, and the averages are worth unpicking before anyone draws conclusions from them.
Two things sit underneath those averages.
In secondary schools the gap widens. Small group tuition drops to two months while one-to-one holds at four. The EEF is candid about the reason: there are fewer secondary studies to draw on. The finding still stands, for now.
In maths, the order flips. Small group tuition comes out at three months and one-to-one at two. If your child is being tutored in maths, that is the slice of data that applies to them, and it favours the group as being 50% more effective.
It is worth knowing what "moderate evidence" means here. The EEF applies that rating to both formats, which is its way of saying the findings are useful but unsettled. Neither number is a promise.
A word on group size, because the EEF is specific about it and makes two points worth holding together. The first is a rule of thumb that smaller is better, with a noticeable reduction in effectiveness above six or seven pupils. The second is that the quality of the teaching may matter as much as the precise number, and that professional development for tutors raises impact. Tugo groups run at 6 to 8, but qualified teachers plan and run every session, and every student is supported by the Tugo Teaching Assistant. We set out how that works in why our groups have 6 to 8 students.
When the EEF looked at reducing class size directly, it didn't find that smaller was inherently better:
"The gains from smaller class sizes are likely to come from the increased flexibility for organising learners and the quality and quantity of feedback the pupils receive."
Education Endowment Foundation, Teaching and Learning Toolkit
The gains come from flexibility and feedback. Group size usually determines whether a teacher can deliver either, which is a long way from group size being the cause.
So the question to put to a tutoring provider isn't "how big is the group?" It is "how much feedback will my child get, and how quickly?" Seven students in a structured session with fast error correction will beat an unstructured hour of 1:1. There is more on how feedback behaves as a group grows in our piece on group size and feedback.
One number in this article beats all the others. The EEF puts peer tutoring at six additional months of progress, rated high impact for very low cost across 145 studies. Bigger figure, sturdier evidence base, than either tutoring format on its own.
It works in both directions. The EEF notes that the pupil doing the explaining gains about as much as the one being helped, roughly six months either way. Explaining something is one of the better ways to learn it.
No 1:1 session can offer this, however good the tutor. There is nobody else in the room. In practice, it looks like this:
We would rather say this plainly than have a family work it out after paying. There are cases where 1:1 is the better buy.
| What you're weighing up | Group tutoring | 1:1 tutoring |
|---|---|---|
| EEF months' progress, all ages | +4 | +5 |
| EEF months' progress, maths | +3 | +2 |
| EEF months' progress, peer tutoring | +6 | Absent |
| Pace set entirely by your child | No | Yes |
| Closing one narrow gap quickly | Slower | Faster |
| High SEND | Often unsuitable | Better fit |
| UK cost for a qualified teacher | £20 to £25 | £45 to £80 |
If your child needs the session to move entirely at their speed, or has one specific topic to fix before an exam, a handful of 1:1 sessions will get there faster. We go through the cases where a group is the wrong choice in more detail, and it is worth reading before you commit either way.
For a full GCSE or A-Level course in mainstream education, the evidence doesn't justify paying more than double. Put the harder questions to the provider about how the session is run.
We built around the EEF's finding on feedback. Every session runs with the Tugo Teaching Assistant working alongside the tutor, checking student work as it is produced and flagging errors in real time. The aim is a second source of feedback, so that a group of seven isn't a seventh of a tutor. We set out the reasoning, and its limits, in why our groups have 6 to 8 students.
Sessions also follow a fixed structure planned by a qualified teacher, rather than improvising, built on three techniques with their own research base:
More on how these fit together in the Tugo method. If you are comparing providers, our nine questions to ask before you book covers what to look for.
It can get close, but the research doesn't say it is better. The Education Endowment Foundation puts small group tuition at four additional months of progress a year and one-to-one tuition at five. The picture shifts by subject and age: in secondary schools small groups drop to two months against four for one-to-one, while in maths small groups come out ahead at three months against two. The EEF rates the evidence behind both formats as moderate, so neither figure is a guarantee. The biggest factor is the speed and frequency of feedback.
The EEF rates small group tuition as moderate impact for low cost, based on moderate evidence, with an average of four additional months of progress a year. It defines small group tuition as one teacher, trained teaching assistant or tutor working with two to five pupils. Impact is stronger in maths with group adding three months and 1-to-1 only two months.
When your child needs the session to run entirely at their own pace, when there is one narrow topic to fix quickly before an exam, or they have more severe SEND. In those situations the individual attention is the point and you should pay for it. For a full GCSE or A-Level course in mainstream education, the evidence doesn't support roughly doubling the cost.
Private 1:1 GCSE tutors in the UK charge roughly £25 to £80 per hour depending on location and qualifications, and online 1:1 averages around £40. Tugo GCSE group sessions are £22.50 per session, about 45% less than the UK average 1:1 rate at the same weekly frequency, or roughly £1,400 a year for a family tutoring twice a week. Our full breakdown of GCSE tutor costs sets out the working behind those figures.
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