Is it too early to Start Tutoring?

This is one of the most common questions I get from parents. Their kid is in Year 9 or 10, things are going reasonably well, and they’re not sure whether tutoring is actually necessary yet. They’re not convinced it’s the wrong call — they’re just not convinced it’s worth it.

The default assumption most people fall back on is that tutoring is a Year 11 and 12 thing. I’ll wait until it gets serious and the stakes are high.

In my experience, that’s the biggest misunderstanding in the industry.

I’m not saying you need to start in Year 6. But with a subject like English especially, trying to nail a highly technical skill set under the pressure of VCE when you’re already in Year 11 or 12, is a completely different beast than building those skills earlier, over the long run. The gap I see between students I’ve been working with for two or more years versus students who’ve had to pick up the pace in Year 12 is enormous.

A student who starts late in Year 12 has to learn everything and apply it at the same time at the highest-pressure point of their schooling! And to actually achieve great results at the end of it all is an even more impressive feat.

Some of my current students came into this year already knowing how to write a strong essay. With them, I can focus entirely on fine-tuning as we push their work to the 9+/10 range. With the students who are only just getting started now, I’m spending large chunks of our sessions teaching the fundamentals of what a good essay even looks like. They’re not behind through any fault of their own. They just haven’t had the time to build those foundations yet.

Part of the problem is that tutoring has earned a reputation it doesn’t fully deserve. Most tutors aren’t particularly good at what they do, and that’s led a lot of people to write it off as either something you only need in Year 12 or not worth it at all. But that couldn’t be further from the truth — especially in English, where literally everything comes down to having someone in your corner who can give you consistent, high-quality feedback. The ability to build those habits and instincts earlier, so you can simply apply them in Year 12 rather than scramble to learn them, is an advantage that is genuinely hard to put a number on.

There’s also a second-order benefit people don’t think about: the less time and energy your child spends getting up to speed in English, the more bandwidth they have for their other subjects. A student who already has English under control going into Year 12 is a student who can actually focus on everything else too.

And then there’s the anxiety. I see it constantly — students who were doing well in Year 11, felt on top of things, and then hit a wall in Year 12 because the level of work required jumped dramatically and they weren’t prepared for it. Starting earlier removes that because you’re not showing up to the hardest year of school feeling like you don’t know what you’re doing.

Needless to say, English carries more weight on your ATAR than any other subject. I’ve heard countless stories of students who scored 40+ study scores across the board, but because their English result let them down, their ATAR didn’t even crack 90.

All of that is to say: starting sooner is always better than later. The best time to start was yesterday. Give your tutor the time they need to actually get your child where they need to be. Not just to catch up, but to be genuinely prepared.