There is no proprietary method here and no acronym. What follows is simply what we do, in the order we do it.
I
Forty-five minutes at your kitchen table, at no charge and with no obligation. Bring the last two marked pieces of work and, if you have it, the most recent report. We read them, we ask your child what they think is going wrong, and we say what we think. Roughly one family in six is told that tutoring is not what they need — usually because the problem is a timetable, a subject choice, or something a school counsellor should hear about first.
II
Your child is assigned one tutor and keeps that tutor. Continuity is most of the value: a tutor who remembers last week's mistake can build on it. If the fit is wrong we change the tutor, not the pupil, and we do it within a fortnight of you telling us. There is no fee for a change and no need to explain yourself.
III
We work from your child's own exercise book, worksheets and textbook, against the Berlin framework curriculum and the demands of their particular teacher. We do not run a parallel syllabus, because a pupil carrying two curricula is carrying twice the load. Where a topic needs a different route in, the tutor writes one — for that pupil, that week.
IV
See below. One page, on the last working day of the month, in the parent area and by e-mail.
V
Every engagement has a horizon written into it at the start: a set of exams, a Probejahr, a term. At the horizon we stop and review. Some families extend and many do not, and we would rather be the second kind of institute than the first.
The progress record
This is a real report from an anonymised file, reproduced with the family's permission. Choose a month to see how the record develops.
Logarithms proper. On the December review we will look together at whether weekly sessions are still needed after the mock in January.
I would like to raise, at the December review, whether we drop to fortnightly after the mock. I do not think the weekly hour will be earning its place for much longer.
Yes — same login, same page
The parent area
Parents and pupil receive separate logins to the same area and see the same content. There is no view a parent has that the pupil does not.
Every past and scheduled session with its date, hour and tutor. Cancellations show who cancelled and whether the hour was charged.
Every monthly report since the engagement began, as a page and as a PDF. Nothing is edited after it is issued; corrections appear as a dated note underneath.
One invoice per month, in arrears, itemised by session. Downloadable for seven years, which is how long we are required to keep them.
A written channel to the tutor and to the director. Messages between pupil and tutor are visible to parents from the age of fourteen only with the pupil's knowledge.
The parent area is a plain, password-protected web page. It contains no tracking, sends no notifications to third parties, and holds no data about your child beyond what is described above.
Plainly
Not a 1, not a pass, not a place. Any institute that puts a number in a contract is selling you a number, and it is not theirs to sell.
One hour a week against twenty-eight is a supplement. Where the real problem is at school, the useful conversation is with the school, and we will say so.
The tutor will work through a problem of the same shape as the one that is set. They will not produce work that is handed in under your child's name.
Where we suspect dyslexia, dyscalculia, attention difficulties or something we do not recognise, we say what we have noticed and name people qualified to look at it. We do not test and we do not label.