---
title: "How Do I Know If My Child Needs a Maths Tutor?"
url: https://www.learningloftinstitute.com/answers/how-do-i-know-if-my-child-needs-a-maths-tutor
source: Learning Loft Institute
language: en
updated: 2026-08-21
section: "Answers › How Do I Know If My Child Needs a Maths Tutor?"
---
# How Do I Know If My Child Needs a Maths Tutor?
> **Answer.** The clearest signal is where the errors sit. A child whose homework is wrong because of fractions, negative numbers or times tables while the class has moved on to algebra has a gap that teaching closes quickly. A child who follows every lesson and does no practice needs a routine instead.
## Six things worth acting on
Each of these is observable from the kitchen table without knowing any mathematics yourself, and each points at something specific rather than at a general sense that things are going badly.
The last one is the most serious and the easiest to miss, because a child who has stopped asking questions is easier to live with than one who complains.
- Homework takes twice as long as the teacher intended, and most of the time goes on the first two questions — the prerequisite is missing, not the topic.
- The errors are housekeeping: signs, fractions, moving terms across an equals sign, in questions that are supposedly about something else. The layer underneath is not automatic yet.
- They can do it in the lesson and not three days later. It was followed rather than learned, and the remedy is spaced practice rather than re-teaching.
- The drop coincided with a stage change — Year 7, Year 10, the move into IGCSE. Pace and assumed knowledge changed underneath them.
- They can produce an answer but cannot say what it means or why it is right. This survives until a question is dressed differently, then fails completely.
- They have stopped asking questions in class. This is the point at which the school loses the ability to see the problem, and it usually precedes the grade falling by a term.
## Three situations that look the same and are not
The first is no practice at all. If a child understands every lesson and opens a book only when something is due, a tutor adds an adult but does not add a habit, and you will pay for someone to supervise work the child could do alone. Fix the routine for a month and look again.
The second is missed teaching — a long illness, a teacher vacancy, a change of school mid-year. That is a coverage problem, and coverage is cheap to fix: the specification, a list of what was missed, and someone to work through it in a fixed number of sessions. Open-ended weekly tuition is the expensive way to solve a finite problem.
The third is a collapse in willingness. If a child cries at the table or leaves the room when maths is mentioned, a new teacher on a Tuesday evening makes the week worse before it makes it better. That situation has to be addressed on its own terms first, and adding tuition to it is the commonest mistake we see well-meaning families make.
## The test to run this week
Take a homework sheet your child got wrong. Sit next to them and ask them to talk you through question one out loud. Do not teach, do not correct, do not sigh. Note the exact moment they hesitate.
Where that hesitation falls tells you what to buy. If it comes while reading the question, the issue is comprehension and the answer is not a maths tutor. If it comes at 'so what do I do first', the issue is that they have never practised choosing a method, and that is teachable in a group. If it comes halfway through the working — the method was right and the arithmetic or algebra collapsed — that is a gap in earlier material, and it is the one case on this page where a tutor is unambiguously the right purchase.
Five minutes of this is worth more than a term of school reports, because reports tell you the grade and this tells you the mechanism.
## What we do with the answer
Every family gets one free demo class, and we use it as a diagnostic rather than as a sales meeting. The tutor works through questions with the student and, afterwards, tells you which specific things are missing — 'fraction division and negative indices', not 'he needs to build confidence'. If a tutor cannot give you that after an hour, they were not looking.
We also say no. Roughly speaking, the families we turn away are the ones whose child needs a routine rather than teaching, and the ones whose difficulty is reading rather than mathematics. Both are better served elsewhere, and telling them so costs us a student and saves them a year.
Where we do take a student, classes run in groups of no more than four, which matters for exactly the reason the test above suggests: in a group of four a child has to attempt things, and in a one-to-one lesson a tired child can watch an adult do mathematics for an hour and go to bed feeling taught.
## What changes the answer
- One poor test after illness, a house move or a change of teacher is information about the term rather than about the child's mathematics.
- If reading the question is the difficulty rather than the mathematics, the subject to look at is English, and sometimes the right request is a school assessment.
- A child who has recently changed curriculum — a Pakistani board to Cambridge, or GCSE to IGCSE — is often not behind at all but missing specific topics the new syllabus assumes were taught earlier.
- In the last term before an examination a tutor is a triage service rather than a teacher, and it is worth being clear with yourself about which one you are buying.
## Questions
### At what age should a child start maths tutoring?
At the age a specific gap appears, which can be seven or fifteen. There is no developmental milestone at which tutoring becomes appropriate. What changes with age is the cost of waiting: a gap in fractions at nine takes a term to close, and the same gap at fourteen has had five years of algebra built on top of it.
### Is one-to-one better than a small group?
For a diagnosed gap being closed quickly, one-to-one is faster. For pace, exam technique and the habit of attempting things, a group of three or four is better and cheaper. The failure mode of one-to-one is a passive student; the failure mode of a group is a child who hides. Both are avoidable, and neither is automatically superior.
### How long before we see a difference?
For a diagnosed gap, four to six weeks — and what changes first is not the grade but the number of times a week your child stalls. For a confidence problem, a term. Anyone promising a grade jump in a month is describing a marketing timetable rather than how learning works.
### The teacher says my child is fine but the grades are low. Who is right?
Usually both. A teacher seeing thirty students judges against the class and against behaviour, and a child who is quiet, tidy and cooperative reads as fine. The grade is measuring something narrower. Ask the teacher a specific question instead: which topics did my child lose marks on in the last assessment, and were the losses in method or in accuracy?
### How do I judge a tutor after the first class?
Ask what specifically is missing. A good answer names topics and mechanisms — 'she is fine with the method but loses signs when expanding brackets, and she has not got division facts secure'. A vague answer about confidence and potential means the hour was spent teaching rather than looking, and you will get another eleven hours of the same.
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