Do parents care more about their children's confidence or their grades? Research findings.

[PurplePenOfProgress]

'The UK Private Tutoring Rate Report 2026'

Key Findings:
*what parents say tutoring actually changed - confidence is mentioned 27 times more often than grade improvement in reviews.
*what 24,183 UK private tutors actually charged, by subject, level, region and reputation - including interactive tools, maps and graphs for comparison across these factors, and how it has changed since 2028
*The majority of UK private tutors are not, in the formal sense, qualified teachers - PGCE, the standard teacher-training qualification, is in roughly 1 in 10 profile descriptions/qualifications

Full report here: https://tutorperch.com/news/uk-tuition-rate-report-2026

What do you look for?

@PurplePenOfProgress Are you looking for responses from all parents, or just from parents who have used private tutoring for their children?

Hmm. Have you considered that “confidence” might be a socially-acceptable euphemism for “better grades”?

Either. I think it's really interesting findings, and the Sutton Trust report suggests that 29% of secondary aged students in England and Wales have received private tuition at some point, increasing over a 20 year period they have collected the data for.

Absolutely, this is just the data, and I think it's open to interpretation. There certainly is a relationship between student measurable progress and confidence.

Surely if a child increases in confidence in a particular subject, they will naturally do better at it. Likewise an impovement in results is likely to improve their confidence. They go hand in hand with one another.

What happens to those students who still can't do very well despite a lot of tutoring - that is going to negatively affect their confidence, surely?

There is also the question of why parents arranged private tutoring for their dc in the first place. Was it for 11-plus swotting and/or entrance exams for private school applications, or was it because their child was seriously strugging and behind in state school? Did they perhaps have a need for additional support, such as children with severe anxiety or dyslexia for instance?

Without knowing the demographic of the parents & children included in this data, the findings can only really be taken with a pinch of salt.

And finally... This dataset is being used as a sales tool for private tutoring, so they are only going to include a selection of the most favourable data harvested, aren't they? Not that I'm a cynic or anything, of course. 😁

So have 3DC, all of whom I've used private tutoring for. All three of them are in mainstream but have additional needs and have struggled for completely different reasons at different stages of education. It has 100% been about confidence. When I was at primary school I suddenly had a complete mental block about maths, having previously been very good at it. My parents asked a friend of theirs who was a maths teacher to tutor me a little bit. She did one session with me, showed me how to do the thing I was stuck on and and told me that I needed to not panic; that big numbers were just the same as little numbers and behaved in the same way and that they were nothing to be scared of. My experience of someone taking the time to reassure me and hand hold me through the thing I was finding difficult is what has made me think that tutoring is invaluable when a kid looks like they need it, are open to it, and you can afford it. And yes, the end result is higher grades but the bigger win is greater confidence to tackle things that you find hard, ask for help, and triumph anyway. That's hard to get in a class of 30 kids, particularly if you don't speak up.

Yes, the ones who don't speak up in class in case they are scared of being told off for getting it wrong.

We are looking into a tutor for our son in maths and confidence is the first word that comes to mind, he shies away from maths and is scared of it, that fear of failure means he’s doomed to not succeed. So I’m hoping tutoring will build his confidence…to in turn improve his grade!

https://tutorperch.com/research/uk-tuition-rate-report-2026 - heres the link to the full report, the full methodology is on there - analysed the full dataset of all 24,183 UK private tutors profiles and rates and 83,475 parent and student written reviews that were archived in the First Tutors dataset. This is only data from one platform, but was a very long standing (20 years!) and reputable (recommended in the Telegraph etc...) platform for tutors and parents.

Analysed data can be presented in a multitude of formats, and is usually presented in such a way as to show the results in a positive light.

What's that old saying about statistics again?

Woops! *Since 2018!

I didn’t consent to my profile being used in this way and I doubt any other tutors or parents did either so the research is ethically unsound. You also haven’t distinguished between real tutors who have actually got work and people who signed up as tutors and never had a single booking. Or reviews from people’s mates who booked them once specifically to write a review vs genuine parents. Because you can’t know any of that from your methodology when it doesn’t even include informed consent. So the results aren’t very accurate.

The booking count is a real limitation of the data set that we cover in our report's limitations section, under 'review verification' so thank you for raising it. First Tutors never published booking counts, so the data set can't separate tutors who landed lots of work from those who never had a client. The review provenance has some nuance in that First Tutors did require people to pay the unlock fee to leave a review, so we believe at a population level the data is probably quite reliable but we do acknowledge this in our report as well.

Regarding consent, the source profiles were public-facing on First Tutors, and the report only publishes aggregates and percentiles. No individual profile or price is reproduced. If you'd rather have your data removed from the underlying dataset, email us and we can work with you to handle this. If you aren't happy with your data being on the publicly available sources we used you can contact them directly - I dont think I can list emails here but search for Wayback Machine (digital archive of the web) and Common Crawl (publicly accessible repository of raw web data).