If you're considering tutoring for your primary school child, the first question is usually: how much is this going to cost?
The answer, depending on where you look, ranges from surprisingly affordable to eye-wateringly expensive. And the price you pay doesn't always correlate with the quality you get.
This guide breaks down exactly what primary school tutoring costs in the UK right now, compares every major option - from private tutors to online platforms to group lessons - and explains what the research says about getting the best outcomes for your budget.
The headline numbers: what parents are paying in 2026
Private tutoring rates in the UK have risen steadily over the past five years. Here's what the current landscape looks like for primary-level tuition specifically:
Private tutors (one-to-one, found independently): £25-£50 per hour. Qualified teachers with QTS typically charge £35-£60+, while university students and unqualified tutors sit at the lower end, around £15-£30. Rates are 15-25% higher in London and the South East compared to the North and Midlands.
Online tutoring platforms (one-to-one): £22-£55 per hour. Online sessions tend to be 10-20% cheaper than in-person because tutors save on travel time and costs. However, some platforms charge premium rates for features like progress tracking and recorded lessons.
Tutoring agencies: £30-£55 per hour. Agencies typically take a commission of 20-40% from the tutor's fee, which means you're paying more but the tutor isn't necessarily earning more. The tradeoff is convenience - agencies handle matching, DBS checks, and scheduling.
Group tutoring (small groups of 2-5): £10-£20 per child per session. This is where the economics shift dramatically. Because multiple children share the tutor's time, the per-child cost drops substantially while the evidence shows outcomes remain strong.
Subscription-based platforms (self-paced, not live teaching): £10-£60 per month. These provide AI-driven practice, worksheets, and automated feedback rather than a live teacher. They're a different proposition from tutoring - useful for building fluency, but not a substitute for responsive, adaptive human instruction.
For context, if your child has one hour of one-to-one tutoring per week at an average rate of £35, that's around £140 per month or roughly £1,400 over a 10-month academic year. For two sessions per week - which many parents find necessary in the run-up to SATs - double it.
What every major platform actually charges
Let's get specific. Here's what the main players in UK primary tutoring charge, what format they offer, and who's actually teaching your child.
Tutorful
Cost: £30-£55 per hour
Format: One-to-one, online or in-person
Who teaches: A mix of qualified teachers and unqualified tutors. Tutorful is a marketplace - tutors set their own rates and parents choose based on profiles, reviews, and pricing. Quality varies significantly because there's no requirement for teaching qualifications.
MyTutor
Cost: £22-£55 per hour
Format: One-to-one, online
Who teaches: Primarily university students from Russell Group universities. MyTutor's main focus is secondary and GCSE tutoring - their primary offering is less established. The lower price point reflects the use of undergraduate tutors rather than qualified teachers.
Kip McGrath
Cost: Approximately £35 per session
Format: Small group sessions, in-person at learning centres
Who teaches: Qualified staff at franchised centres. Sessions are structured around proprietary assessments and materials. The requirement for physical attendance at a centre limits flexibility - you need one near you, and your child needs to travel there.
Explore Learning
Cost: £114-£175 per month (membership subscription)
Format: Drop-in sessions at learning centres, groups of varying sizes
Who teaches: Trained tutors (not necessarily qualified teachers). The subscription model provides unlimited sessions, but you're committing to a significant monthly outlay regardless of how many sessions your child actually attends.
Atom Learning
Cost: £10-£60 per month (subscription)
Format: Self-paced online platform with AI-driven practice
Who teaches: No live teacher - Atom is an adaptive learning platform that adjusts content difficulty based on your child's responses. It also offers Atom Tutors for live one-to-one sessions at additional cost. Originally built for 11-plus preparation, it expanded to cover SATs and broader KS2 content. Recently launched a free tier (Atom Prime) for schools.
Third Space Learning
Cost: Sold to schools, not directly to parents (approximately £20-£25 per session when purchased through school budgets)
Format: One-to-one, online
Who teaches: Trained tutors based overseas. Third Space primarily sells to schools as a Pupil Premium intervention. Individual parents can't usually access it directly, though your child may receive it through their school.
Times Tables Rock Stars
Cost: Sold to schools (approximately £80-£120 per school per year)
Format: Self-paced online practice (gamified times tables)
Who teaches: No teacher - it's a practice platform. Extremely popular in schools for building times table fluency, but it's drill-based practice, not tutoring.
Bell.Study
Cost: £5 per lesson
Format: Live online group lessons with 2-5 children
Who teaches: Qualified, DBS-checked primary school teachers with QTS. Every lesson is taught live by a real teacher - not an algorithm, not a university student, and not an overseas-based tutor.
We built Bell.Study because we believe the current tutoring market forces parents into an impossible choice: pay £30-£55 per hour for a qualified teacher, or accept an unqualified tutor, an algorithm, or a subscription you'll forget to cancel. At £5 per lesson, live group tuition with a qualified teacher becomes accessible to families who would otherwise be priced out entirely.
Why prices vary so much - and what you're actually paying for
The range from £5 to £55+ per hour is enormous, so it's worth understanding what drives the differences.
Tutor qualifications. Qualified teachers with QTS command higher rates than university students or career-changers because they bring curriculum expertise, classroom experience, and an understanding of child development that comes from years of professional practice. The question is whether you're paying for those qualifications through a platform that adds a large margin on top.
Format: one-to-one vs group. One-to-one tutoring is inherently expensive because one adult's entire time is dedicated to one child. Group tutoring distributes that cost across multiple children. This is the fundamental economic lever that makes tutoring affordable - and as we'll see, the evidence shows it barely compromises effectiveness.
Platform overhead. Agencies and platforms that manage matching, scheduling, payments, DBS checks, and quality assurance add their margin to the tutor's base rate. You're paying for convenience and (in theory) quality assurance. Some platforms add 20-40% to what the tutor actually receives.
Location. In-person tutoring in London and the South East carries a significant premium - not because teaching quality differs by postcode, but because tutors' cost of living is higher and travel time is expensive. Online tutoring eliminates this geographic premium entirely.
Marketing and brand. Some of the highest-priced tutoring services are simply spending more on customer acquisition - Google Ads, Instagram campaigns, glossy websites - and passing those costs on to parents. A beautifully designed website doesn't make someone a better teacher.
What the evidence says about group tutoring vs one-to-one
If you're going to spend money on tutoring, it makes sense to look at what actually works. The most authoritative source on this in the UK is the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), an independent charity that evaluates the effectiveness of educational interventions using rigorous research methods.
Their findings are striking:
One-to-one tuition delivers an average of five months' additional progress per year. In primary schools specifically, the impact is around six months' additional progress. This is a powerful intervention - among the most effective the EEF has studied.
Small group tuition (groups of two to five) delivers an average of four months' additional progress per year. In primary schools, the impact is also around four months. Once group size increases above six or seven, there is a noticeable reduction in effectiveness.
The gap between one-to-one and small group tuition is real but modest - roughly one month of additional progress. And in some subjects, the gap narrows further. In reading, for instance, the EEF found that small-group tuition can sometimes be more effective than one-to-one, possibly because group discussion and peer interaction deepen comprehension in ways individual instruction cannot.
Given that one-to-one tuition typically costs three to ten times more than group tuition per child, the cost-effectiveness calculation strongly favours small groups. The EEF itself notes that "given the lower costs, small group tuition may be a sensible approach to trial before considering one to one tuition."
The evidence also highlights several factors that matter more than group size: the quality of the teacher, whether sessions target specific learning gaps rather than generic revision, and whether tutoring is linked to what the child is learning in school.
The post-NTP landscape: a growing gap
There's an important piece of context behind the current state of tutoring in the UK.
The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) was launched in 2020 to provide subsidised tuition to disadvantaged pupils, initially as a pandemic catch-up measure. Over its lifetime, the programme delivered tens of millions of hours of tuition and significantly expanded access to tutoring for pupils from low-income families.
The NTP ended in August 2024. Since then, the impact has been swift. Polling conducted for the Sutton Trust found that 58% of schools had reduced their tutoring offer compared to the previous year, and 37% of school leaders had stopped offering tutoring entirely. The most recent Sutton Trust data, published in February 2026, shows that only 23% of pupils from the least affluent backgrounds received private tutoring, compared to 30% from the most affluent. In London, 45% of pupils had received private tutoring, compared to just 19% in rural areas.
The NTP was imperfect, but it proved something important: when cost barriers are removed, tutoring reaches the children who benefit from it most. The EEF's own research found that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds - those eligible for free school meals - tended to benefit more from tutoring than their better-off peers.
The current market, where the average tutoring rate sits around £35 per hour, effectively excludes millions of families. A single parent working full-time on the median UK salary cannot afford £140-£280 per month for weekly tutoring sessions. The children who need the most support are the least likely to receive it.
This is the gap Bell.Study exists to fill.
How to get the most from your tutoring budget
Whatever your budget, here are some evidence-informed principles for getting the best return on your investment.
Target specific gaps, not general revision. Tutoring is most effective when it addresses the specific areas where your child is struggling. A diagnostic assessment - even an informal one - before tutoring begins allows the tutor to focus sessions where they'll have the greatest impact. Generic "SATs revision" is less effective than targeted work on, say, fraction arithmetic or inference questions.
Prioritise frequency over duration. The EEF's evidence suggests that short, regular sessions (around 30 minutes, three to five times per week) produce better results than longer, less frequent sessions. Twelve hours of tutoring spread across regular short sessions is more effective than the same twelve hours crammed into a few marathon weekends.
Check who's teaching. A qualified teacher with QTS and primary classroom experience will understand the national curriculum, how SATs questions are structured, and how to adapt their explanations to different learning styles. University students and unqualified tutors can be excellent, but the consistency is less predictable.
Look for DBS checks. Any adult working with your child should have an enhanced DBS check. This should be a non-negotiable baseline, yet many private tutors found through marketplace platforms operate without one. Always ask.
Consider group lessons before one-to-one. The evidence supports it, the cost savings are substantial, and your child may actually benefit from learning alongside peers. If group tutoring doesn't produce the results you're looking for, you can always escalate to one-to-one later.
Don't underestimate free resources. Past SATs papers are freely available on GOV.UK. The Standards and Testing Agency publishes every paper from 2016 onwards, complete with mark schemes. Free online tools - including times tables practice, SATs quizzes, and interactive maths games - can supplement tutoring without adding to the cost. Try Bell.Study's free practice tools
What £5 per lesson actually gets you at Bell.Study
We built Bell.Study around a simple question: what if the cost of a qualified teacher wasn't a barrier?
Every Bell.Study lesson is live, online, and taught by a qualified primary school teacher with QTS and an enhanced DBS check. Lessons run in small groups of two to five children, following the model that the EEF's evidence shows delivers four months' additional progress per year.
At £5 per lesson, a family can afford three sessions per week for £60 per month - roughly what others charge for a single hour. That changes the economics entirely. It means tutoring doesn't have to be a luxury. It means the children who need the most support can actually receive it.
We cover English reading, GPS, and mathematics across KS1 and KS2, with dedicated SATs preparation sessions for Year 6 and Multiplication Tables Check practice for Year 4.
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