parent guides

Is the tutoring working? How to track Kent Test progress with real numbers

A good tutor is worth every penny - but most parents pay for months of tutoring with no independent way to see what it's doing. Here's how to measure progress properly, spot the moment the trend changes, and know exactly where the money is going.

Reviewed 20 October 2026 against kent.gov.uk

This is a guide for the many Kent families who use a tutor and want the numbers to back up the investment. It's also the reason we built progress tracking into Kent Test Prep in the first place - and why tutors themselves are starting to use it with their students.

The uncomfortable maths of tutoring

At £35 to £45 an hour, a year of weekly tutoring costs somewhere between £1,400 and £1,800. Most parents happily pay it - one-to-one teaching is genuinely powerful. But here's what usually happens in exchange for that money: the tutor says "she's coming along nicely", your child seems happier, and you find out whether it all worked on results day.

That's not a criticism of tutors. Measuring progress properly takes standardised tests, consistent question difficulty and weeks of comparable data - none of which fits inside a one-hour lesson. It's a gap in the setup, not in the teaching. And it's a gap that's easy to close.

What "is it working?" actually looks like in numbers

Forget single test scores - one mock on a tired Thursday tells you almost nothing. What you're looking for is a trend across weeks, in three layers:

The moment that matters: the trend change

Every parent's real question is "when did it click?" With weekly tracking you can actually answer it. You'll see the week the line bends upwards - often a few weeks after a tutor starts targeting a specific weakness - and you'll see plateaus, which are just as valuable to spot. A plateau after three months of flat scores is the signal to change approach: different topics, more exam technique, perhaps fewer sessions. Without the data, that plateau is invisible until it's too late to do anything about it.

This is also the honest answer to "has the money been worth it?" If your child started at a 98 standardised and now sits at 112 twelve weeks later, that's the return on roughly £500 of tutoring, made visible. If the line hasn't moved, you know to act while there's still time. Either answer is worth having.

Why the best tutors love this (not fear it)

You might expect tutors to resist independent measurement. The good ones do the opposite - and here's why: it proves their value in a way no testimonial can. A tutor who can show a parent a rising trajectory graph and say "that's the work we did on non-verbal reasoning in March" never has to justify another invoice.

It also makes them more effective between sessions. Tutors see their students one hour a week; the other 167 hours are where practice either happens or doesn't. Kent Test Prep runs that part - adaptive weekly missions built from each child's own results, marked instantly, with the scores feeding straight back. The tutor walks into each session already knowing where the child stands, and spends the hour teaching instead of testing.

If your child's tutor isn't using it yet, it's worth mentioning: we run a partner programme for tutors that gives them a progress view of the families they introduce - so you, they, and your child are all finally looking at the same numbers.

A simple weekly rhythm to try

Questions parents ask

Written for families combining tutoring with Kent Test Prep, and for the tutors who work with them. Scoring uses the same standardised scale family as the Kent Test and ISEB Pre-Test (see our pass mark guide and ISEB guide for how those scales work).