Tutors are charging £250 an hour ‘to assist kids with anxiousness’
Tutors are said to be charging £250 an hour to help children with anxiety through school entrance exams.
More families are looking for people who can support their children with emotional regulation and for those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).
It comes as ministers are pushing for mainstream schools to be more inclusive to SEND children in a white paper due to be announced in the next few weeks.
All secondary schools will be expected to create inclusion units for those with additional needs, the Department for Education announced on Tuesday, as part of a 10-year plan to ‘transform the education state’.
Meanwhile, more parents are searching for tutors for their young ones, some getting several tutors in for different subjects.
Nathaniel McCullagh, founder and managing director of Simply Learning Tuition, said that some of these tutors go beyond the curriculum and are being brought in on wellbeing grounds.
He told The Times: ‘We are seeing both increased volume and much greater depth in the services parents are requesting around the 11-plus. Perhaps most striking is the rise in tuition to support anxiety and special educational needs.
‘A growing proportion of tutoring is now about emotional regulation, confidence and coping strategies, not just exam technique.’
Parents are said to be paying £250 for tutors to help their children with anxiety and well being outside of their school curriculum
Rather than being short-term fixes, tutors are now becoming facilitators of long-term broader support, Mr McCullagh said.
He added: ‘Parents increasingly see tutoring as essential rather than optional, especially as competitive senior schools can now choose from bright overseas students able to pay full fees.’
Tutors are now often being brought in much earlier than before, sometimes for children only in Year 2, he said. The focus on wellbeing that came out of Covid has affected the tutoring market, Mr McCallagh said, bringing forth a shift to ‘earlier, gentler and more psychologically informed’ support.
Fees for his agency can be up to £250 an hour for an in-person lesson and typically range between £100 to £150 for online sessions.
Tutoring service Power Tutors said: ‘Demand for SEND tutoring is growing, driven by earlier diagnoses, rising neurodiversity awareness, and an increased emphasis on one-to-one and small group support outside of mainstream settings.’
Specialist tutors are also becoming more common, according to Mr McCallagh, who said that parents are taking on confidence coaches and interview experts rather than the more traditional ‘one tutor does everything’ model.
‘Parents are effectively paying for expertise that schools often don’t have the capacity to provide,’ he continued.
Parents are also being directed by tutors who are telling them which schools to get their children to apply to and how to ask their child’s school for more input, Mr McCullagh said.
SEND Tutoring champions unorthodox teaching techniques. They say that their tutors commonly come up against ‘children who are navigating school corridors, social dynamics, and expectations that don’t always fit the way their brains work.’
To battle this, the organisation aims to take on the psychology of young people rather than just focusing on teaching them content.
Their website says they do this by helping young people ‘Understand their own neurodivergent traits, build confidence in their learning style, develop communication strategies, advocate for their needs in school and reframe their differences as strengths’
The company also explained how being in nature and creating a ‘safe environment’ can help neurodivergent children learn. Being outside ‘lowers cortisol. It reduces heart rate and muscle tension’, SEND Tutoring said.
A blog post on their website continued: ‘Psychological safety includes calm and non-shaming responses, clear boundaries, consent-based practices, no surprises wherever possible and permission to say no or not yet.’
They added that ‘this matters now more than ever’ because ‘today’s teenagers are growing up in a pressure system that barely lets them breathe.
‘Hormones, identity shifts, and the normal turbulence of adolescence are now layered with social media comparison, constant online visibility, exam stress, and the unspoken expectation to fit in, mask, and perform.’
Teaching training service Prospero Education gave advice on how SEND children could be taught for academic success.
Their website said: ‘Students with SEND may struggle with complex concepts and abstract ideas. As a tutor, you can help these students by breaking down complex ideas into smaller, more manageable pieces.
‘You can also use real-life examples or analogies to help students understand difficult concepts.’
