Nobody really plans to become a tutor. Usually a neighbour asks if you can help their Year 9 son with his essays, or your cousin’s kid needs someone before her exams, and you say yes before you’ve thought it through. Then you’re sitting across from a 14-year-old on a Tuesday afternoon with no real idea what you’re meant to do for the next hour.
We run Tutors Field, so I get asked this a lot, mostly by people in exactly that spot. Rather than just tell them what I think works, I pulled up the profiles of every English tutor currently on the platform — 705 of them, out of about 4,900 tutors total — and had a proper look. Some of it confirmed what you’d guess. A couple of things didn’t.
Nearly 7 in 10 English tutors here are women. 68.9% female, 30.5% male, and a small handful who didn’t say. Not shocking given the wider education workforce, but worth knowing if you’re a bloke wondering whether tutoring’s “for” you — it isn’t a disadvantage, plenty of men do well at it, the field’s just skewed that way.
The one that actually caught me off guard: almost a quarter of English tutors (23.5%) also list Maths on their profile. Not Science. Not History. Maths, and by a fair margin. Makes sense once you think about it though — a family with a struggling kid would rather book one tutor who covers two subjects than juggle two separate people and two separate afternoons.
Geographically it’s lopsided too. Three-quarters of English tutors (75.2%) are based in NSW or Victoria. If you’re in Perth, or Adelaide, or out in a regional town somewhere — that’s not really bad news for you. Less competition when a parent nearby actually searches.
Only 13% of profiles mention primary-aged kids specifically, which surprised me given how much demand there genuinely is for help with early reading and writing. If you don’t have HSC or VCE-level experience yet, that gap is worth thinking about.
The word that comes up more than any other in these profiles is “experience” — turns up in about a quarter of them, 26%, more than ATAR, more than “graduate,” more than any specific credential you could name. Which tracks, if you think about what a parent’s actually trying to figure out at 9pm scrolling through a list of tutors on their phone. They’re not checking your transcript. They want to know if they’d trust you with their kid, basically, and “experience” is shorthand for that in a way a degree isn’t.
Work out where your student’s at before you teach them anything
Don’t launch into a lesson in the first five minutes. You need to know what you’re actually dealing with.
So just talk to them. Ask about their week, what they’ve been reading, anything. While they’re answering, you’re quietly checking three things — can they say what they mean (that’s vocabulary), do their sentences actually hold together (grammar), can you follow them without straining to (pronunciation, pace). Write it down as soon as the session’s over. Not later. You’ll forget half of it by the time you’ve had dinner.
It’s not a formal test and shouldn’t feel like one to them. It’s five minutes so you’re not running a generic lesson on a kid who needed something completely different.
Have some kind of plan, even a loose one
Walk in with nothing and you’ll end up having a nice chat rather than teaching anything. Fine once. Not fine every single week — the parent’s paying for their kid to get better, not for company, however good the company is.
A one-hour session roughly splits into four bits. Start with a warm-up, five or ten minutes, quick recap of last time — enough to get them talking before the actual work begins. Then new material, maybe fifteen minutes on one single thing (just one — resist the urge to cover three grammar points because you’re worried an hour on one thing looks thin). Teaching past tense? Put “I watched TV” next to “I was watching TV” and let them actually see it side by side instead of just hearing you explain it.
Then practice. Do a couple together, then step back completely and let them try on their own — a short dialogue, a role-play, a few lines they write themselves. Honestly this bit matters more than the explaining part. It’s where it actually goes in.
Leave the last five or ten minutes for feedback and start with what went right, actually start there rather than tacking it on at the end as an afterthought. Fix the two or three mistakes that matter, skip the rest. A kid who leaves feeling like they failed learns less than one who leaves thinking they got somewhere, even a little bit.
A few things that actually make a difference
Stop asking “does that make sense?” Nobody says no to that question, ever, regardless of whether it’s true. Test it properly instead — give them a sentence, ask if it’s right or wrong, or get them to build one themselves with the new grammar point right there on the spot.
Try to get the student talking more than you do. Some tutors go by something like 70/30, student to tutor, and it’s not a bad rough number to keep in the back of your head — it’s their fluency you’re building, and that comes from them actually using the language out loud, badly at first, not from you explaining it well.
Not every mistake is worth stopping for. If it actually breaks what they’re trying to say, fix it there and then, same if it’s the exact thing you’re teaching that day. But if they’re mid-sentence and finally speaking with a bit of confidence, let the small stuff go until they’ve finished. Interrupt someone every ten seconds to fix their grammar and pretty soon they just stop wanting to talk.
Figuring out how to describe yourself
There’s no single formula for this, but the numbers point somewhere.
If you’re new, you probably don’t have years behind you to point to, so don’t pretend otherwise — use whatever you’ve actually got. Maybe that’s a solid recent exam result. Maybe it’s offering English alongside Maths, since that pairing keeps turning up again and again in the data. Or just go after younger kids, primary age, where fewer tutors are competing for the same families.
If you’ve been at this a while already, the thing worth selling isn’t a list of quals, it’s that you’re steady. Parents whose kids are genuinely stressed about English tend to want calm more than they want impressive.
Either way — specifics beat adjectives, every time. “Experienced English tutor” could be anyone. Nobody remembers it five minutes later. But something like “helped three Year 10 students lift their essay marks by teaching them a repeatable way to structure analysis” sticks, because a parent can actually picture it happening to their kid.
Getting your first few students
Marketplaces like ours are the fastest way in front of families who are already looking for someone. No website needed. No business cards. You really don’t need any of that to start.
Then, once you’ve run a handful of lessons, word of mouth just sort of takes over by itself. A happy parent mentioning you to another one at pickup does more for you than an ad ever could. And a lot of tutors starting out will charge a bit less at first, purely to get some reviews in and build a bit of momentum — then put the price up once there’s an actual track record behind them.
Questions I get asked a lot
Do you need a qualification to tutor English here? Not legally, no — not for private tutoring. A Working with Children Check is expected though, most families will ask for one. Past that, it’s really about whether you know the material and have some sort of approach, particularly with exam-level students, where knowing the syllabus itself is worth a lot.
Is English or Maths the easier one to start with? Different kinds of hard, honestly. English is more about teaching structure and how to analyse something than marking a clear right or wrong answer, and some new tutors find that harder to build a lesson around. Loads end up doing both anyway — it’s the most common combination for a reason.
What age should a beginner aim for? Primary, probably. Less specialised material, and going by how rarely “primary” comes up in these profiles, noticeably less competition than the HSC and VCE crowd, where everyone’s after the same students.
Author: Sim K
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