What to Ask a Tutor Before You Book

Ask a prospective tutor about price and you will get a confident answer inside a minute. Ask whether they hold a current enhanced DBS check, whether their identity has been verified, and what they have actually delivered for a past student, and you learn in the same few minutes what genuinely matters. The order you ask in changes what you find out. Lead with price, which is the natural instinct because tutoring is a service you are paying for, and you end up comparing tutors on the one thing everyone can answer smoothly, while safety and competence never come up. Lead with trust — verified evidence first, safeguarding and fit second, price last — and by the time cost enters the conversation you already know who you would be paying.

Why the natural order gets it backwards

Price is the easiest question to ask and the easiest one to answer, so it tends to go first by default. A tutor can quote a rate instantly, and a rate is simple to compare across a shortlist, which makes it feel like progress. The trouble is that price tells you nothing about whether the person is safe to be around your child, whether their qualifications are real, or whether they have actually helped a student improve. A confident, well-priced answer to "how much do you charge?" can come from someone who has never been asked to prove anything else.

Flip the order and the shortlist gets easier, not harder. Once you know a tutor's identity, background check and qualifications are genuine, and you have seen evidence of real delivered work, price becomes a straightforward comparison between people you already trust — not the only lever you have to judge them by. The trust-first order also protects you from a specific trap: a tutor who is cheap because they have nothing checkable behind them, and a tutor who is expensive for the same reason. Price alone cannot tell the two apart.

What "verified" should mean, and why it comes before everything else

Most directories ask you to take a tutor's word for it. A profile states a qualification, a DBS check, a glowing history — and you, a parent with no way to check any of it quickly, decide how much to believe. Tutorwise is built to remove that guesswork. Instead of a self-written bio, every tutor carries a credibility score computed from signals the platform has checked itself, not signals the tutor typed in. That is what Credibility as a Service, or CaaS, means in practice: a confirmed identity, a current enhanced DBS check, qualifications that have been seen rather than claimed, delivered sessions from real bookings, and reviews that can only come from families who actually worked with that tutor, combined into one score you can see before you ever start a conversation. The full mechanism is set out in how Tutorwise scores tutor credibility, but the point for this guide is simpler: a platform that verifies before it publishes has already done stage one of the questioning for you. Your job is to know which questions that covers, and which ones it deliberately leaves to you.

Stage one: the questions that check evidence, not impressions

These four are facts, not opinions. Each has a right answer, and each should be checkable rather than taken on trust.

Do you hold a current enhanced DBS check, and can I see it? This is the single most important safety question, and it is not rude to ask directly — a genuine tutor expects it. An enhanced DBS check confirms someone has been screened against official UK criminal-records and barred-list information for work with children, which what a DBS check actually tells you explains in full, including what it does and does not cover.

Has your identity been confirmed, not just claimed? A background check is only as strong as the identity it is attached to. If nobody has verified that the person in front of you is the person named on the certificate, the certificate proves less than it appears to.

What are you qualified in, and can you show it rather than describe it? A degree, a teaching qualification, familiarity with the exact exam board and level your child sits — whichever applies. Years of experience is not the same claim as a qualification; ask for both, and ask to see the second one.

What have you actually delivered, for a real student, that I could check? Look for specifics tied to genuine bookings — a subject, a level, a change over time — rather than a slogan. A platform where results come from verified sessions removes most of the guesswork here; on an open listings site, this is the question worth chasing hardest, because it is also the easiest one to embellish.

Stage two: the safeguarding question most parents skip

Safety is not only the DBS check. It is also how sessions are actually run. Ask how the tutor structures contact with your child: whether communication and scheduling go through a platform that keeps a record, rather than a personal number handed over on day one; and, for a younger child, whether a parent or another adult is expected to be present or reachable during the session. A tutor who has a clear, ordinary answer to this — because it is simply how they always work — is showing you a habit, not just a policy. One who has never been asked and has no answer at all is worth a second question, not an assumption.

This is also where online tutoring deserves the same scrutiny as in person, not less. A screen does not lower the bar. If anything, verifying identity and keeping communication on a recorded platform matters more when you are not meeting on your own doorstep first.

Stage three: fit, which no score can answer

Once the facts are settled, the remaining questions are matters of judgement — you form them from how someone talks, not from a document.

How do you help a child who is stuck? This is the most revealing teaching question there is. Listen for a real method — finding the specific gap, changing the explanation, breaking the problem down — rather than "I'm very patient," which describes a temperament, not a technique.

How will you keep me informed, including when things are not going well? You want to know what a bad week looks like and how you will hear about it. A tutor who plans to report only good news is managing you, not teaching your child.

What can't you help with? Save this one for last. A tutor who names a genuine limit — a level they do not cover, a gap outside their strength — is showing you the honesty you will rely on for the rest of term. One who claims to fix everything has told you they will not be straight with you when it is inconvenient.

Only now, talk about price

By the time you reach cost, you are no longer using price to decide who is trustworthy — you already know that. You are comparing a rate between people you have already checked, which is a much simpler decision: like-for-like sessions, a clear cancellation policy, and whether the rate reflects the level and exam you actually need rather than a generic subject rate. A cheaper tutor with nothing verified behind them is not a bargain; you have simply moved the cost of checking their claims from the fee onto your own time; and a more expensive one is not automatically better unless the evidence in stages one and two backs it up.

How Tutorwise front-loads the trust stage

Here is the practical effect of asking in this order on a platform where verification happens before publishing. Because identity, the DBS check and qualifications are confirmed as a condition of being listed rather than as claims on a profile, most of stage one is already answered by the time you open a tutor's page — you are confirming what the platform has checked, not starting from nothing. That frees your actual conversation for stages two and three, the parts a system genuinely cannot judge for you: how this specific person will work with your specific child. A five-star average, by contrast, only tells you that a small group of reviewers felt positively; it says nothing about whether the underlying facts were ever checked, which is the distinction drawn out in full in why verified credibility beats a five-star average. If you would rather not run the credential checks yourself line by line, starting with tutors whose credibility is already verified does the job stage one is for, and leaves your questions for the part only you can judge.

Frequently asked questions

What is the single most important question to ask a tutor? Whether they hold a current enhanced DBS check and can show it. It is the one safety question with a clear right answer, and it should come before anything about teaching style or price.

Should I ask about price first or last? Last. Asking it first anchors the whole conversation on cost before you know whether the person is safe and qualified to be considered at all. Once trust and fit are settled, price is a short, simple comparison.

Do these questions change for online tutoring? No. Identity verification and a recorded, platform-based way of communicating matter just as much online as in person — arguably more, since you lose the reassurance of meeting on your own doorstep first.

What if a tutor won't answer a verification question directly? Treat it as an answer in itself. A genuine tutor expects to be asked for a DBS check and proof of qualifications and will not be defensive about it. Reluctance is worth weighing as heavily as anything they do say.

Does a verified credibility score replace the need to ask these questions myself? It replaces the need to chase the paperwork yourself for the facts it checks — identity, DBS, qualifications, delivered work. It does not replace stage two and three: the safeguarding conversation and the questions only you can judge for fit.

More in this series

• Red flags parents should watch for when choosing a tutor
• What a tutoring credibility score actually measures
• What evidence should a tutor profile show?