UK Stories

Families from all over the UK nominated their tutors for our Tutor of the Year Award. Read some of the incredible stories below!

Nominated Tutor: Sue W.

Sue has been tutoring my children for 8 months and in that time, both I and their teachers have noticed a marked increase in their confidence and ability with respect to academic achievements. All three of my children are very different in their approach to learning yet Sue managed to engage each one from the start. She was able to identify their strengths and weaknesses very early on and by doing so, was able to teach them using techniques that kept them interested. She has the amazing ability to make learning fun and my children look forward to her lessons. She uses humour to relax them and praises them whenever they do well which encourages them to go further. If they are struggling with something she tries different techniques to explain, or breaks the problems down into manageable chunks.

She can recognise if they are tired and will do something less taxing with them and conversely, if they are full of energy, she will utilise that to teach them something new or difficult. She empowers the children and encourages them to take ownership of their work. My youngest child (yr1) doesn’t think of her sessions as “work” but more like he’s playing games.

Since Sue started working with the children, they have found schoolwork easier and are achieving better marks when tested at school. They come home telling me that they feel much more confident in class and really proud that they are getting good reports from their teachers. Since they have been finding work at school easier they have much more capacity to move on to learning new things as opposed to getting bogged down with things that they are struggling to understand. Two of my children have entrance exams approaching but regardless of whether they pass or not, I am really pleased with the progress that they have already made. Her knowledge and experience of different exam systems is also very useful.

Sue is very personable, always in a good mood and happy to discuss any concerns that I may have. I would not hesitate to recommend Sue to any of my friends and would like her continue to tutor my children after the exams are over.

Nominated Tutor: David A

David has been tutoring my two sons for the past six months. Joe has been having Maths tuition as struggling at school and not receiving enough one on one time. My second son Charlie has an enthusiastic appetite for science and was bored at school as lessons weren’t stretching him so David has been giving him Science tuition. Initially Joe was very unimpressed about having to do extra tuition but after the first session there was not a further moan and after the first three sessions admitted it was helping. David very quickly found out Joes interests so I think the weekly chat about football and Arsenal got him onside! Since then Joe has received a couple of recognition postcards sent home from his school teacher to commend Joe for his improvement in Maths.

At the recent parents evening his teacher again said what a marked difference there was. For me personally it’s wonderful to see your child go from being disenchanted with a subject to enjoying it and succeeding. A massive thank you to David for his patience, dedication and helping a reluctant student to success. As for Charlie, well I think the two of them have had great fun talking about science and David has certainly been able to stretch Charlie way beyond where he was at school, and has been brilliant at working to the very loose brief that he was given while at the same time being mindful of the curriculum needs. A very big Thank You to David from the three of us!