You are two months in. Several hundred dollars down. Your child says it is fine, the tutor says there is progress, and the next report card is still months away.
So is it actually working, or just seems like it is?
Grades are the obvious answer but not exactly the best one, because they simply arrive far too late. By the time a report card confirms a problem, you have already paid for another term. What you need are the signals that move first.
Leading and lagging signals
A lagging signal confirms what already happened. A leading signal tells you where things are heading.
- Lagging: exam results, report cards, class position
- Leading: the kind of mistakes your child makes, how they approach a question they cannot do, how long homework takes, what they say about the subject
Most parents watch only the lagging signals, then feel blindsided. The leading ones are visible within weeks, but you need to know what to look at.
A realistic timeline
Weeks one to three: diagnosis
You are not looking for better marks yet but for evidence that the tutor has worked out what is wrong.
Check what your child and/or your tutor what they are working on. Are they fixing how they set out algebra to prevent losing method marks? Or did they just repeat some questions?
Weeks four to eight: process changes
Marks may not have moved, but some things should have.
- Homework takes less time, or the same time with less resistance
- Your child attempts the harder questions now instead of skipping them
- They can explain a method rather than just produce an answer
- They can correct themselves mid-problem
That second one matters most. A child who tries a question they would previously have left blank has gained something real, even if the answer is still wrong.
Weeks eight to sixteen: marks move
Now you should see it in their school work. Not a drastic transformation necessarily, but movement in the topics that were actually being worked on.
If nothing has shifted in the work by week twelve, there might be incompatiblilty with the approach, the fit, or it could perhaps have been an inaccurate diagnosis.
Look at the work, not the mood
The most common mistake is reading your child's feelings as evidence.
A child who likes their tutor is a good sign for continuity but shouldn’t be taken as the main factor. Some excellent tutors are not much fun. Some delightful ones achieve very little.
Look at the facts instead:
- Marked work. Are the same errors recurring, or new and more advanced ones are appearing? Recurring identical mistakes after two months is a genuine warning.
- Their workings. Is there more structure than before? Better structure usually precedes better marks.
- Corrections. Does your child go back and fix things, or just write the correct answer from the mark scheme?
Better questions than asking how tuition was
That question gets you a one-word answer every time but these ones get you something:
- What did you get wrong today, and do you know why now?
- What is the thing you are still stuck on?
- Did you understand it during the lesson, or only when you tried it alone afterwards?
- Can you show me how you would start this question?
And for the tutor
- What have you identified as the main issue?
- What have we fixed so far, and what is still open?
- What should I expect to see change over the next month?
- What is not improving as fast as you hoped?
A tutor who answers the last one honestly is worth keeping. One who says everything is going well, every time, for several months, may not be looking closely enough.
Signs it is not working
- No one can name the specific problem after a month
- The same mistakes keep appearing on marked work
- Sessions have become homework supervision rather than teaching
- Your child is dependent, unable to start anything without the tutor
- You get no updates unless you ask
- Confidence has not moved at all, in either direction
But be fair
Sometimes it is not working yet for reasons that are nobody's fault. A child rebuilding two years of missing foundations may show almost nothing for a term and then move quickly. This is why diagnosis in the first three weeks matters so much. If you know what is being rebuilt, a quiet patch is expected rather than alarming.
The question is not only whether marks have moved. It is whether what is happening matches what you were told would happen.
Give it a term, then decide
A reasonable review point is the end of a term, or around twelve weeks.
- Continue if: the problem was correctly identified, the work shows change, and your child can explain more than before.
- Change tutor if: nobody has identified the problem, the same errors persist, or the sessions have quietly become supervision.
- Stop altogether if: the issue turned out not to be academic. Some children do not need a tutor. They need sleep, a different teacher, or someone to notice something else entirely.
But you shouldn’t need to do it alone
Look at what this article just asked you to do. Track error types across weeks. Ask your child gently enough that they still talk to you. Interpret marked work you may not be qualified to read. Remember what you were told in week two so you can check it in week ten.
You are building a measurement system by hand, out of fragments, for something you are paying for.
And here is the frustrating part: most of this is already known. The tutor sees the errors change. They know which topics are still weak and which have been fixed. That information exists every single week. It simply never reaches you in any form you can act on.
That is a visibility problem, not a measurement problem, and it is the one we are building TutorMeet to solve. Progress you can see as it happens rather than reconstruct afterwards. A track record built from actual data, not from what a tutor remembers to mention. Identity and qualifications verified through Singpass.
Keep asking the questions. You should just not have to do all the work yourself.
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