Online English classes vs neighbourhood tuition: an honest comparison

Where local tuition genuinely wins

• Very young children. Below Class 2, a child often needs someone physically guiding the pencil. A screen cannot do that.
• Children who cannot yet sit still. If your child cannot hold attention for twenty minutes with an adult present, a screen will lose them faster.
• Unreliable internet. A class that drops twice a week is worse than no class. Be honest about your connection before paying for a term.
• Families who want one adult handling all subjects. A local tutor covering maths, science and English has a view of the whole child that a subject specialist does not.

Where online genuinely wins

• Specialist teaching. Your locality has a limited number of tutors. Online, you can find someone who does one thing specifically, such as moving Hindi-speaking children into English writing, rather than someone who covers everything adequately.
• Every child writes in every class. In a well-run online batch of six, the teacher sees every child's screen or book at once. In a room of fifteen, the quiet child at the back writes nothing for forty minutes and nobody notices.
• Recordings. A missed class is recoverable. A missed local class is simply missed.
• Time zones. For families who have moved abroad, online is often the only way to keep a teacher who understands the child's Hindi background. See our guide for Indian families who have recently moved abroad.
• No travel. Forty minutes of travel a day, across a year, is a significant amount of a child's life.

Batch size matters more than format

This is the part most comparisons miss. Whether the class is online or in a room matters far less than how many children are in it.

Batch size	What the child actually gets
1 to 1	Maximum attention, highest cost, and no peer pressure to keep up. Not always better.
4 to 6	Every child writes and is corrected in every class, with enough peers to stay motivated.
10 to 15	The teacher talks, children listen. Written work goes home to be corrected later, or not at all.
20 plus	A lecture. For a child who is behind in writing, close to useless.

A batch of six online beats a batch of eighteen in a room, and a batch of eighteen online beats nothing at all but not by much. Ask about batch size before you ask about anything else.

Questions to ask any tuition before you pay

These apply equally to a local tutor and an online one. The answers tell you more than any advertisement.

1. How many children in the batch, and is that a cap or a target? A cap is a promise. A target is not.
2. Will my child write something in every single class? If the answer is vague, the answer is no.
3. Who corrects the written work, and when do I see it? Homework corrected two weeks later teaches nothing.
4. Can I sit in on a class? A confident teacher says yes immediately.
5. What will you tell me if my child is not improving? Listen for whether they have a mechanism for this, or whether they have never considered the question.
6. Is it the same teacher every week? Rotating tutors is common and it resets the relationship every time.

Warning signs in either format

• No trial or demo class, or a demo that turns out to be a sales pitch rather than teaching.
• Guaranteed marks or guaranteed grades. Nobody can promise this honestly.
• Payment for a full year demanded upfront.
• No written record of what was covered or what improved.
• The tutor never asks you anything about your child before the first class.

How to decide

Take the free demo or trial from two or three options, whichever format they are, and watch the same three things in each.

1. Did your child speak during the class? A child who said nothing for thirty minutes will say nothing for the next six months.
2. Did your child write during the class, and was it corrected while you watched?
3. Did the teacher ask your child a question they had to think about, rather than one they could answer from memory?

Three yeses is a good sign in any format. Fewer than three, keep looking, including past us. Our own demo is a real thirty minute lesson and you are welcome to sit in and apply exactly these tests.