The £40-an-hour problem
Dec 1, 2025
One-to-one tutoring is the best-evidenced intervention in education. It is also priced like a luxury good. Those two facts, side by side, are the quiet scandal of British schooling — and the reason we built brightboard.
Tutoring works
The Education Endowment Foundation finds that one-to-one tuition delivers around five months of additional progress on average. Wealthy families have known this forever — it is why they buy it. This is not a product that fails to work. It is a product that works and is rationed by price.
What it costs
A GCSE tutor in the UK typically charges £28 to £55 an hour, with London rates running far higher. One weekly hour lands somewhere between £120 and £320 a month, per subject — for the roughly two school years a GCSE course runs. For a family with two children and weak spots in two subjects each, real tutoring support becomes a four-figure annual cost very quickly.
So who gets it?
Exactly who you would expect. The Sutton Trust found that 29% of secondary students have ever had a private tutor — 45% in London, 19% in rural areas, and skewed towards the best-off households. Meanwhile the National Tutoring Programme was scrapped in 2024, and 58% of schools have since cut their tutoring offer. All of this while the disadvantage gap at GCSE sits at 19 months — the joint-widest since records began. And of the hundreds of thousands of students who resit GCSE maths each year, the vast majority fail again.
What students do instead
They improvise. More than half of teens say they have used AI chatbots for schoolwork. But a chatbot is homework help, not teaching: text-heavy, forgetful, aligned to no curriculum, and silent the moment you stop typing. The demand for an always-on teacher clearly exists. What is missing is something actually built to teach.
The point
The problem with tutoring was never the tutoring. It was the hourly rate. Software has a habit of taking things that cost £40 an hour and making them cost pennies — that is what brightboard is doing to one-to-one teaching, with a real tutor that speaks, listens and works on a live whiteboard, for less per month than a single hour with a human tutor.