How to Choose an IGCSE or IB Tutor: What to Ask, and What the Answers Should Sound Like

Most families choose a tutor on price and availability. Both are visible in thirty seconds and neither tells you anything about what will happen to the grade.

The two things that do predict the outcome are harder to see. The first is whether the tutor knows the mark scheme as well as the subject. The second is whether the tutor is willing to tell you that tutoring is not what your child needs.

There is one practical test that surfaces both at once: ask for a diagnostic on a recent past paper before you commit to any package of hours. A tutor who works through your child's actual script will tell you, within one session, where the marks are being lost and roughly how long it will take to stop losing them. A tutor who wants a block of ten lessons before looking at anything is selling hours, not outcomes.

The rest of this article is what to ask, how to read the answers, and the situations where the honest recommendation is to hire nobody.

These are ordered by how much they separate one tutor from another. The first two do most of the work.

Notice that none of them is about the tutor's biography. A biography is a claim; these are demonstrations.

There are two independent axes here, and most families only check the first.

Axis one: subject depth.

A real degree in the subject buys you one thing that matters enormously and is almost never named. The tutor is never bluffing. When your child asks the question that is one layer below the syllabus, and every good student eventually does, they get an answer instead of a deflection. They can also see where a topic is going, which is what lets them teach Year 10 algebra in a way that does not have to be unlearned at IB.

Axis two: exam fluency.

This is knowing that IGCSE Physics wants the idea phrased in a particular way, that a Paper 4 question with four marks is telling you it expects four distinct steps, that IB Paper 3 rewards a different skill from Paper 1. None of this comes with the degree. It comes from working through mark schemes and examiner reports until the patterns are obvious.

I am a physicist with a doctorate, so axis one came with the training. Axis two took considerably longer, and I built it the slow way, one past paper at a time, over about ten years of teaching. A tutor strong on axis one and weak on axis two teaches the subject beautifully and leaves marks on the table. The reverse, common with tutors who drill past papers without understanding them, produces students who can pass this year's paper and fall apart when the question is phrased differently.

A teaching qualification is a third thing. It is a real signal about managing a classroom of thirty. One to one, it tells you very little.

The default answer is one, provided that person is genuinely strong in both.

The reason is diagnostic, not economic. At IGCSE and at IB SL, a large share of what looks like failing physics is actually failing algebra. A student who cannot confidently rearrange one of the equations of motion is not confused about acceleration; they are confused about isolating a variable. A physics-only tutor sees the wrong subject and treats the symptom, week after week. Someone who holds both subjects at once names the real problem in the first session and fixes it once.

Two tutors becomes the right call in a narrower set of cases. The clearest is Year 2 of the IB with Maths AA HL and Physics HL together, where each subject is deep enough to consume its own hours and the calendar leaves no room to share them. The second is when the two subjects have genuinely different problems: content gaps in one, exam technique in the other.

Be careful with the opposite signal. A tutor advertising Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Economics is not offering you five strengths.

One hour a week, sustained across two terms, beats four hours a week for a month. This is not a preference, it is how the material consolidates: the gap between sessions is where the learning is tested, and removing the gap removes the test.

On realistic timescales, moving a student two IGCSE grades usually takes two to three terms at one session a week, with work done in between. It can happen faster, but when it does the student generally already knew the material and needed the technique. Anyone quoting you a much shorter timeline is promising something outside their control.

When to start.

For IGCSE, the useful moment is the beginning of Year 10, not February of Year 11. For the IB, it is the beginning of Year 1, not IA season in Year 2. In both cases the late version costs more and delivers less, because the work stops being teaching and becomes triage.

In the final run-up, frequency can reasonably go up, but only if the extra hours are spent on past papers under timed conditions. Past a certain point, more teaching is a comfortable way of avoiding the thing that is actually frightening, which is sitting a full paper against the clock.

The number that predicts progress better than session count is what happens between sessions. If nothing is done in the gap, the second session repeats the first, and you are paying for the same hour twice.

This section exists because almost nobody writing about tutoring will write it, and it is the part most likely to save you money.

When the obstacle is not the subject.

Chronic lack of sleep, exam anxiety that has crossed into avoidance, an undiagnosed learning difference, or a difficult situation at home. In all four, adding a weekly obligation to a child already at capacity makes things worse, and the grade does not move because the grade was never the problem.

When the student did not agree to it.

A sixteen year old who has been signed up against their will can sit through an hour a week for a year and learn nothing, quite deliberately. The conversation to have first is with them, not with a tutor.

When the gap is years wide and the exam is weeks away.

If a student is three years behind in algebra and sits the paper in ten weeks, no schedule of hours closes that. The honest options are a tier change, a subject change, or accepting the grade and protecting everything else. A tutor who takes the booking anyway is taking your money.

When the school has support you have not used.

Departmental clinics, catch-up sessions and teacher office hours cost nothing, and the teacher running them is the person who will write the predicted grade. Use that first.

The general form of the rule: a tutor who has never told a family "not yet" or "not me" is a tutor who has never really looked.