Two conversations are worth having first, and both are free.
Talk to your child's teacher. They see the work daily and can usually tell you whether this is a rough patch or a pattern, which specific skills are weak, and whether the school already offers extra help. Ask what they'd focus on if they had an hour a week with your child — the answer is often the brief you should be handing a tutor.
Ask what's already available. Toronto boards run various homework help and after-school supports, and Toronto Public Library offers free programs across its branches. These don't suit every situation, but they cost nothing and they're a reasonable first step.
Sometimes the answer is that your child doesn't need a tutor at all. A temporary dip after an illness, a single hard unit, or a rough term after a move often resolves without paid help. A tutor is the right call when the difficulty persists across a term despite support, or when a specific gap is clearly holding everything else up.
"My child is behind in math" isn't yet a brief. These are:
A specific skill gap. Something from a previous year never landed and is now blocking current work. Usually the fastest to fix.
Current course support. They understand the material but need someone to work through it with them week to week.
Study skills and organization. They know the content and lose marks to missed deadlines, poor notes, or no revision strategy.
Confidence and anxiety. They freeze on tests, or have decided they're bad at a subject and stopped trying.
Learning differences. They need someone trained in how to teach around a specific difficulty.
These need genuinely different tutors. The last one in particular is not a job for a capable university student, however strong their subject knowledge.
It depends on what you identified above, and the honest answer is that the most expensive option isn't always the right one.
A certified teacher is trained to diagnose why a student is stuck, not just to explain the material. That matters most for persistent gaps, learning differences, and senior courses. It's what you're paying the premium for.
A subject specialist without teaching qualifications can be excellent for a student who understands the subject but needs help going deeper — a strong senior physics student, for instance.
A capable university student is often entirely sufficient for homework supervision, accountability, and elementary review. Paying certified-teacher rates for someone to sit with a Grade 4 student doing assigned worksheets is not money well spent.
Ask what the tutor is qualified in, not just that they're qualified. Someone certified to teach primary school is not automatically the right choice for Grade 12 chemistry.
Here's something worth knowing: there's no automatic background check for tutors in Canada, and in a city with as many independent tutors as Toronto, that matters.
A vulnerable sector check is the most thorough police record check available — it combines a police information check with an RCMP search for record suspensions relating to sexual offences, and it was created in 2000 specifically to protect children and vulnerable persons. But according to the RCMP, the decision to request one sits with the hiring organization, which also decides how often it's repeated.
That means an agency or tutoring company can require checks of its tutors — and a tutor you find independently may have never had one. Nobody is obliged to volunteer this.
So ask directly: does this tutor have a current vulnerable sector check, and who verified it? A reputable provider will answer immediately. If you're hiring privately, the tutor can obtain one through Toronto Police Service, though it takes time and they have to request it themselves.
Ask about supervision too. If something goes wrong with an independent tutor, there's no one to raise it with.
What are your qualifications, and in which subjects and grades?
Do you have a current vulnerable sector check?
How will you find out what's actually going wrong before you start teaching?
What will you send me after each session?
How will we know in two months whether this is working?
What happens if my child and this tutor aren't a good match?
Do you coordinate with the classroom teacher?
What's your cancellation and refund policy?
Question five is the one that separates good providers from weak ones. Anyone can say they'll help. A provider who can tell you what improvement will look like, and when you should expect to see it, has thought about accountability.
Not sure which kind of help your child needs? A free assessment will pinpoint the specific gaps, usually in about an hour — and sometimes the answer is less help than you expected. See how one-to-one tutoring works.
Guaranteed grade improvements. Nobody can promise this honestly.
Pressure to buy a large package upfront, before you've seen whether the match works.
No assessment, no plan. A tutor who starts teaching without finding out what's wrong is guessing.
Vagueness about qualifications, or credentials that don't match your child's grade and subject. In Ontario, ask specifically whether the tutor is OCT-certified and for which divisions.
No answer on screening, or irritation at being asked.
Selling to your fear. A provider whose pitch depends on what will happen if you don't act is not one to trust with your child's confidence.
No way to change tutors. Personality fit matters enormously, and first matches don't always work.
Most of the advice above applies either way, but online adds a few questions worth asking.
How is the session actually delivered? A shared whiteboard the tutor and student both write on is a meaningfully different experience from a video call where the tutor talks. For math and science in particular, ask to see the platform before committing.
What happens if the technology fails? Ask about the policy for a session lost to a connection problem — reputable providers rebook it.
How will you see what happened? In-home tutoring gives you incidental visibility; you're in the house. Online gives you none unless the provider sends session notes, which makes those notes more important rather than less.
Is your child suited to it? Older students generally adapt easily. Younger children and students who struggle to stay focused on a screen often do better in person, and no amount of good platform design changes that.
The genuine advantage of online is choice. Even in Toronto, the number of tutors who can teach Advanced Functions or Grade 12 Chemistry well is small, and they may be on the wrong side of the city. Online removes the commute from the equation for both of you — which in Toronto at 4pm is not a small thing.
Set the measure before you start, not after. A mark alone is a slow and noisy signal — it can take a full term to move, and it reflects things tutoring doesn't touch.
Better early indicators:
Your child can explain something this month they couldn't last month
Homework takes less time, or produces fewer arguments
They volunteer an answer in class, or stop avoiding the subject
The teacher notices a change without you prompting them
Review properly at eight to ten sessions. Ask what's improved, what's still weak, and how much longer the tutor expects to need. Open-ended arrangements that nobody reviews are how families end up paying for a year of something that stopped being useful in month three.
Look for persistence rather than severity — a difficulty that lasts across a full term despite support at home and school is the signal, not a single bad test. Start by asking the teacher whether they're seeing the same pattern in class. If the answer is that your child is managing fine day to day, the problem may be confidence or test anxiety rather than the subject.
Not for every situation, and it's worth being honest about that. Certified teachers are trained to identify why a student is stuck, which matters most for persistent gaps, learning differences and senior courses. For homework supervision or basic review, a capable student tutor is often entirely adequate and costs considerably less.
That depends on whether you're closing a specific gap or supporting a difficult course. A targeted gap often resolves in eight to ten sessions; ongoing support through a hard year may run a term or two. What matters more than the number is that someone reviews it regularly rather than letting it run indefinitely.
Generally not, though it depends on your child's age. Younger children often do better with a parent nearby, while most older students work more openly without one. Ask for a summary after each session instead — that gives you visibility without changing how your child behaves in the room.
Take it seriously and ask for a change. Rapport does a lot of the work in one-to-one teaching, and a student who dreads the session will get less from it regardless of how good the tutor is. Any reputable provider will swap the match without argument, which is exactly why it's worth asking about that policy before you commit.
Work out what's actually wrong before you shop for someone to fix it, because the brief determines who you should hire. Ask about qualifications for your child's specific grade and subject, ask about screening, and agree in advance how you'll know whether it's working.
If you've talked to the teacher and the difficulty is still there, talk to us about what your child needs — we'll find out where the gap actually starts and match them with a certified teacher, in your home or online.
About the author
President of Tutorbright