With tutoring at £40/hr, is it time to try AI?

Every parent of a GCSE student eventually does the same sum. One hour of tutoring a week, at the going rate, for one subject, for the two years of the course. Then they look at the number, look at their child’s mock results, and wonder which one they can least afford.

The maths of the problem

One-to-one tuition is the best-evidenced intervention education has — the Education Endowment Foundation puts it at around five months of additional progress on average. It is also expensive: a typical GCSE tutor charges somewhere between £28 and £55 an hour, with London comfortably higher. A single weekly hour runs to £120–£320 a month, per subject. The thing that works best is the thing most families can’t sustain.

Is a chatbot the answer?

Plenty of students have already voted with their thumbs and are asking AI chatbots for homework help. And as homework help, chatbots are genuinely useful. But paste-your-question-get-an-answer is not tutoring. A chatbot doesn’t know your syllabus, doesn’t remember what you got wrong last week, can’t draw the diagram, and stops existing the moment you close the tab. Getting the answer is precisely the part of the process that doesn’t help you learn.

What to actually look for in an AI tutor

If you’re considering AI as a serious alternative to a human tutor — not just as a homework shortcut — hold it to a tutor’s standard:

• It should teach, not answer. Working on a board, step by step, asking you questions along the way.

• It should speak and listen. Typing at a wall of text is studying alone with extra steps.

• It should know your exam board, because that is the exam you are actually sitting.

• It should remember you — what you’ve covered, what you got wrong, what needs revisiting.

• It should be honest about what it is. No AI tutor should pretend to be a person.

Where brightboard fits

This is exactly the gap brightboard is built for: a tutor that speaks, listens and writes on a live whiteboard — aligned to your exam board, tracking your progress, available whenever you sit down to work. A month of it costs less than a single hour with a human tutor.

So — is it time to try AI? For homework shortcuts, you already can, and it was never the point. For actual tutoring, the fair test is simple: use it for a fortnight and ask whether you understand more than you did. That is the only measure a human tutor is held to, and it is the one we want to be judged on too.