Does My Child
Really Need a Tutor?

First, the case for tutoring is real

The strongest evidence we have is a systematic review of 89 randomised controlled trials of tutoring across PreK–12, published in the American Educational Research Journal in 2024. Pooling all of them, tutoring produced an average gain of 0.288 standard deviations in learning. In education research, that is a large, consistent effect. Very few things schools or parents can buy perform that well.

Worth knowing: an earlier version of that same review, circulated in 2020 before peer review, reported 0.37 SD across 96 studies. The number you see quoted in tutoring advertisements is almost always the bigger, earlier one. Under peer review the estimate fell by roughly a quarter. It is still a good result. It is just a smaller good result than the marketing suggests.

Now the part nobody selling tutoring mentions

That review also identified which tutoring produced those gains. Effects were largest for programmes that used teachers or trained paraprofessionals as tutors, were held in earlier grades, ran at least three days a week, and happened during the school day.

Compare that to what a family typically buys: one session a week, ninety minutes, after school, on top of an already full day, with a tutor who is often a bright undergraduate. That is not the intervention that was tested. It may still help. But you should know you are buying something different from the thing with the impressive number attached to it.

The UK's Education Endowment Foundation, which pools trial evidence across 123 studies of one-to-one tuition, reaches the same conclusion from the other direction. Its verdict on dosage: “Short, regular sessions (about 30 minutes, three to five times a week) over a set period of time (up to ten weeks) appear to result in optimum impact.” Short and frequent, then stop. Not long and weekly, indefinitely.

And the evidence is thinnest exactly where your child is

This matters most for families of middle and high schoolers. Reporting on that body of trials, the authors found only 7% of the tutoring programmes involved students in sixth grade or above, and were direct about what that means: there were not enough studies to produce reliable estimates for sixth grade through high school — not even enough, they wrote, to calculate a trustworthy margin of error for that group.

The EEF's numbers point the same way. One-to-one tuition averages +5 months of additional progress overall, but +6 months in primary schools against +4 in secondary.

One honest complication, because we would rather give you the messy version than the tidy one: the two evidence bases disagree about maths. The EEF finds one-to-one maths tuition unusually weak (+2 months, against +6 for literacy), while the trial review finds the opposite pattern by age — reading tutoring works best in the early grades, maths tutoring works better in later ones. If your child is genuinely lost in Algebra II or chemistry, a subject tutor remains a defensible choice. Nobody should tell you the evidence is cleaner than it is.

If it is not the subject, what does the evidence support?

Two things, both unusually well evidenced.

1. Teaching students to manage their own learning

The EEF rates metacognition and self-regulation — teaching students to plan their approach, monitor whether it is working, and adjust — at +8 months of additional progress, drawn from 355 studies. Its own summary calls this “high impact for very low cost based on extensive evidence.” Crucially, and unlike tutoring: “The impact is similar across all age groups.” It does not fade for teenagers.

In fairness, the EEF flags that this strand lost a point of evidence security because many of its studies were not independently evaluated, and evaluations run by the people selling the approach tend to report larger effects. Treat +8 months as optimistic. Even discounted, it outperforms one-to-one tuition at secondary level.

2. Changing how your child studies, not how long

A landmark review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest assessed ten common study techniques against the experimental evidence. Only two earned a high utility rating: practice testing (quizzing yourself rather than reviewing) and distributed practice (spreading study across days instead of massing it the night before).

Five were rated low utility, and you will recognise them: summarising, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, forming mental images, and rereading.

Which is a problem, because rereading is what students reach for first. Asked to list their study strategies unprompted, 83.6% of students in one survey named rereading their notes or textbook, and 54.8% named it as their number one strategy. Self-testing was named first by 1.1%.

So a student can study for three hours, feel they have worked hard, and retain very little — not from lack of effort, but because rereading produces a convincing feeling of familiarity that is easily mistaken for knowing. No tutor fixes that. It is fixed by changing the method.

What to do this week

Before you hire anyone, three things worth trying, all free:

• Watch one study session without helping. You are answering one question: can they do it, or won't they start? That single observation sorts most families.
• Swap rereading for self-quizzing. Close the notes, write down everything remembered, then check. It feels worse and works better — that gap is the whole point.
• Move one thing earlier. Not the whole schedule. One assignment, started the day it is set. Whether that is possible tells you more than any diagnostic.

Sources

• Nickow, A., Oreopoulos, P., & Quan, V. (2024). The Promise of Tutoring for PreK–12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence. American Educational Research Journal. (Earlier version: NBER Working Paper 27476, 2020.)
• Education Endowment Foundation, Teaching and Learning Toolkit: “One to one tuition” and “Metacognition and self-regulation.”
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
• Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning. Memory, 17(4), 471–479.