You’ve probably tried it before. A few sessions when an assessment looms. A holiday block when grades slip. A casual booking when something specific isn’t clicking. It feels reasonable. It feels flexible. And then six months later, your child is in roughly the same spot, and you’re wondering whether tutoring works at all.
It does. But not the way most families try it first.
What the research actually says
The research on small-group tutoring is clearer than most parents realise. Evidence for Learning, the Australian arm of the global Education Endowment Foundation, has reviewed hundreds of studies and found that structured small-group tutoring delivers an average of four months of additional progress per year. That’s a meaningful gap. But the studies that produce that result share three features: the sessions are regular, the curriculum is sequenced, and the same tutor sees the same students over time. None of those things happen in casual tutoring.
Casual tutoring fails for a simple reason. Learning isn’t a topping-up exercise. It’s a habit. A Year 5 student who does a session on fractions in March and then doesn’t see a tutor again until June has not “had tutoring on fractions” – they’ve had a single exposure, followed by ten weeks of forgetting. Cognitive science calls this the spacing effect, and it cuts both ways. Spaced practice builds long-term memory.
A structured weekly routine works because it does three things casual tutoring can’t. It builds a consistent relationship between tutor and student, so the tutor actually knows where your child is up to. It allows for sequencing – concepts taught one week are reinforced the next, then assessed the week after. And it creates a rhythm at home: a fixed slot, a predictable expectation, a habit your child eventually stops resisting.
How we built Boost around this
Boost is more than just tutoring. Every session opens with five minutes of fundamentals, moves through curriculum content with real teaching, and closes with the student doing the work themselves. Then it’s reinforced daily at home through Boost Accelerator. It’s not flashy. It’s how learning actually compounds.
If you’ve tried casual tutoring and it didn’t stick, that’s not a sign your child can’t be helped. It’s a sign the format was wrong.
Book a free academic assessment at one of our Hills based centres and we’ll show you exactly where your child sits.