IB Tutors in Nirvana Country: What One-to-One Teaching Adds to School

There is no requirement to, and many families do not. It usually helps, though, particularly in the Diploma years. A subject teacher who knows a student is getting extra support tends to be more specific in written feedback, and the tutor can then work from that rather than guess. Where it matters most is internal assessment. The teacher is the formal supervisor, and if they know a tutor is involved, the boundaries around whose work it is stay clear for everyone. The decision is yours, and no tutor will contact the school on your behalf.

Both, usually. Doing fine often means participating, submitting on time and behaving well, which is genuinely worth something. A criterion 4 is a separate statement about the quality of the work against a rubric, most often about thin analysis or reflection rather than missing content. The gap between the two is exactly the space tutoring occupies. Ask the teacher which criterion is weakest and what a level 6 response would contain, then share that answer with the tutor. It converts a vague worry into a specific target for the term.

For one subject, one session a week plus real independent work usually does more than two sessions with nothing in between. The exception is a short intensive period, such as the four weeks before mocks or during the final stage of an internal assessment, where twice weekly makes sense temporarily. Younger students in the Middle Years Programme rarely need more than once a week. We would rather propose fewer sessions and see the work done between them than fill a timetable, and we will say when a requested frequency looks like more than the student can absorb.

No. A tutor can ask questions, point at a weak justification, explain what an evaluation criterion is asking for and mark a draft the student has written. Writing any of it themselves crosses into the school's academic honesty rules and puts the candidate's own result at risk. If time is very short, the honest move is to narrow the scope of the investigation so the student can finish it properly rather than to have someone else fill the gaps. Tutors who agree to draft sections are not tutors we will suggest.

It can work, and in a compact community like this one it comes up fairly often. The conditions matter. The two students should be in the same subject at the same level, working towards the same assessment, and reasonably close in current attainment. Otherwise one is bored and the other is lost. Shared sessions reduce the per-family cost and suit revision and past-paper work particularly well. They suit internal assessment mentoring badly, because that work is individual by definition and the discussion cannot be shared.

It happens, especially in mathematics where several valid approaches exist. The rule we ask tutors to follow is to teach the school's method first, then show the alternative as an extra tool while naming it as such. A student who arrives in an exam holding two competing systems and no clear preference tends to freeze. If a tutor believes the school's approach is genuinely leading the student astray, they should explain the reasoning to the student and to you, not simply replace it and hope nobody notices.

More realistic here than in most of Gurugram, because the community is compact and gated and a tutor can move between two households on foot. Even so, weekday evening slots between six and eight are the most contested hours in the city, and a specialist teaching higher level sciences will fill those first. Families who can take a seven-thirty or later slot, or who accept a weekend home session with online support midweek, get better matches. Availability can be reviewed once we know your subject and level.

It can be, though not for content coverage. The value at that stage is habit formation: writing a reflection that actually reflects, designing an investigation with a controlled variable, using command terms deliberately. Those habits carry directly into Diploma internal assessments two or three years later, where fixing them costs far more time. Once a week is plenty. If a student is coping well and enjoying the subject, there is no case for adding sessions, and we will tell you that rather than sell a package you do not need.

Immediately, and you do not need to justify it in detail. One clear sentence about what did not land is enough, whether that is pace, explanation style or simply that your child did not engage. We would rather rematch after one session than have a family stay in a poor arrangement out of politeness. What we do ask is that you tell us early. A change made in the first fortnight is a scheduling task. A change made a month before final papers is a genuine setback for the student.