What is well evidenced

That tutoring works. The largest synthesis is a meta-analysis of 96 randomised studies, and its pooled effects are large by the standards of education research — around 0.38 standard deviations for one-to-one, drawn from 67 separate studies. Effects of that size are uncommon; most schooling interventions struggle past 0.1.

1 to 1 (67 studies)

0.38 SD

1 to 2 (14 studies)

0.29 SD

1 to 3 or more (24 studies)

0.36 SD

Figure 1Pooled effect size by tutor-to-student ratio, from 96 randomised studies. Note that the ordering is not monotonic. Nickow, Oreopoulos & Quan, NBER Working Paper 27476, 2020.

And here is the part the industry tends not to mention

Look at that third bar. If smaller groups were simply better, one to three would not beat one to two. The meta-analysis’s own table is not monotonic in group size, which means group size is not doing the work people assume it is doing. Something else — who the tutor is, what happens in the session, how often it runs — is carrying the effect.

There is a clean one-to-one result, and it is worth having, but it is narrower than it is usually quoted as being:

one-on-one virtual early literacy tutoring was nearly twice as effective as two-on-one tutoring for improving student learning… Tutors in two-on-one settings also spent 63 percent more time managing behavior and transitions
National Student Support Accelerator, Stanford University (2025), The power of personalized attention. Registered as TUT-12.

That is virtual early literacy tutoring. Not secondary English, not Australia, and not this. It is real evidence and it points the right way; it is not a warrant for claiming the same multiple applies to a Year 9 essay.

The Australian gap

Despite the popularity and success of one to one programs, there is little research that specifically examines the effectiveness of the one to one element of these programs in Australia.
Evidence for Learning (2024), Teaching and Learning Toolkit — one to one tuition. Registered as TUT-04.

That is the Australian mirror of the EEF Toolkit saying, in its own words, that the local evidence base for the specific thing being sold here is thin. Anyone quoting “+5 months’ progress” at you is quoting a pooled international figure, not an Australian measurement of their own programme.

So what should you actually ask a tutor?

If group size is not the mechanism, the useful questions are about what happens in the hour.

Who teaches the lesson, every week? The meta- analysis found effects varied by who tutored. A roster where your child gets whoever is free is a different product from a named person who knows the last six pieces they wrote.
What happens to the writing between lessons? Tutoring effects come from feedback on work, not from contact hours. Ask what is read, and what comes back.
What are they measuring, and against what? A tutor who quotes an effect size for their own programme should be able to say who measured it. Almost none can, and the tutoring entries in the register are there so you can check any figure you are given.
Beware the guarantee. Nobody can promise a band or a study score, and the year-to-year movement in national results is mostly noise the measuring authority itself declines to call a difference.

What this practice actually claims

One named practitioner teaches every lesson, weekly, and the work between lessons is reading the student’s writing closely enough to say what specifically went wrong in a sentence. That is the mechanism the evidence supports — feedback on real work by someone who remembers the last piece — rather than the ratio itself.

No outcome is guaranteed, no result is claimed on this site, and the register exists so that every figure used here can be checked against its source.

Test it before you buy it.

A twenty-minute discovery call and a free trial lesson — an honest read of your child’s writing, and what would move it. No obligation either way.

Weekly one-to-one lessons, Years 3 to 12 — what a term looks like →