How to use these guides
Each subject hub answers four practical questions:
- What's covered at each level (KS2, GCSE, A-level, etc).
- What tutoring usually focuses on — the highest-leverage areas at each stage.
- What to ask a tutor when you message — exam board specifics, level experience, recent exam-cycle currency.
- Common pitfalls — what tends to go wrong and how to avoid it.
Choosing where to start
Most parents arrive looking for help in one or two subjects. A few framings that can sharpen the choice:
- Stakes-led: which subject most affects what comes next? GCSE Maths or English at grade 4 vs 5 changes sixth-form options. A-level grades vs Russell Group offers. KS2 SATs vs Year 7 setting.
- Headroom-led: where is the gap between current attainment and target biggest? Often the most tutoring leverage is in the subject with the largest gap, not the highest-stakes one.
- Foundation-led: Maths and English foundations affect almost every other subject. A child struggling with written sentence construction or basic numeracy will struggle across the curriculum; tutoring foundations sometimes lifts multiple subject grades at once.
Subjects we don't list separately
Tutorperch tutors cover the full UK curriculum — these hubs prioritise the highest-volume requests, but tutors for Music, Drama, Art & Design, Latin, Classical Greek, Italian, Mandarin, Russian, Engineering, Design & Technology, Food Preparation, PE, Business, Accounting, Media Studies, Film Studies, Photography, and more are all on the directory. Use the main tutors page with the subject filter, or browse by exam board if your child sits a non-mainstream board for a niche subject.
One subject at a time
A common pattern parents fall into: hiring three subject tutors in March of Year 11, expecting to lift three grades. It rarely works that way. The student's time is fixed, and adding three new tutoring relationships at once usually means none of them gets the focus needed to translate into measurable lift.
More productive is identifying the one subject where the leverage is highest — the right combination of stakes, headroom, and tutoring fit — and going deep there before adding a second. Once a tutor-student pairing is working, that's when you expand to a second subject if there's still room in the timetable.