Learning support
A tutor can only adapt to what they know. This guide covers what to share, in what form, and how information should flow between you, the school and the tutor over time.
Tell the tutor everything that would change how they teach: the diagnoses or support plans, yes, but also the history, the strengths, the previous tutoring that failed, and the two or three things that reliably help your child settle. Put it in writing before the first session, share reports rather than summarising them from memory, and agree how updates will flow.
This guide is for parents briefing a new tutor on a child’s learning difference, school plan or history. It covers what to share, the consent side of sharing it, and what good ongoing updates look like.
Write a one-page brief. It need not be formal; it needs to be specific. Five elements cover most of what a tutor needs:
Send the brief before the first session, not during it. A tutor who has read about your child arrives differently: prepared, calm, and able to spend the first hour building rapport rather than taking a history.
Write it with your child’s dignity in view, because the brief may be read again in a year and, one day, by them. Describe needs as needs, strategies as strategies, and avoid anything you would not want read aloud at a family dinner. A good test: the brief should make the tutor like your child more, not less.
Share documents in full where you can. A school report, an individual education plan (IEP) or a specialist’s assessment contains the professional’s actual observations and recommendations, which survive summarising poorly. Your memory of a report is a view of it; the document is the thing itself.
Assessment reports deserve particular care. A psycho-educational evaluation, the kind of assessment an educational psychologist produces, typically gathers developmental history, school records, questionnaires and several hours of individual testing, and its recommendations section is written to be acted on by the people who teach the child. A tutor is exactly such a person; the report is, in part, addressed to them.
If a document is long, flag the two pages that matter most. Tutors will read the whole thing, but your flag tells them where you need the teaching to land.
Refresh the brief once a year, or sooner if something material changes: a new diagnosis, a new school, a new medication, a sibling born. The child the tutor met in January is not quite the child sitting in front of them in October, and the written record should keep pace with the real one.
Documents about a child’s learning are sensitive personal information, and sharing them should be deliberate. Three rules keep it clean:
Expect the same care in return. It is reasonable to ask how the tutor or agency stores documents and who sees them; a professional answer names a policy, not a shrug. Our own placements follow a written child-safeguarding policy covering sessions, supervision and conduct.
If your child is old enough to understand, tell them what you have shared and why. Children cooperate with arrangements they know about, and a tutor who mentions the support plan to a child who has never heard of it has been set an impossible first session.
The brief is a beginning, not a file-and-forget. Information needs to move in three directions over the life of an arrangement:
| From | To | What moves | How often |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | Tutor | School news, report changes, things noticed at home | As they happen |
| Tutor | Parent | Session notes: what was covered, how your child responded | After every session |
| Parent | School | What tutoring covers, with the school’s awareness | Termly or at review points |
| School | Tutor (via you) | Targets, topics, teacher observations you choose to pass on | At your discretion |
Where a shadow teacher works with your child in school, the same map applies with the shadow in the tutor column; working well with your child’s shadow teacher covers the daily handover in that arrangement.
Good updates are short, specific and about the work. "We covered fractions of amounts; she needed the bar model twice, then did six independently; ten minutes of the same next time" is a useful note. "Great session!" is not.
Ask for the rhythm in advance: a short note after each session and a fuller look back every few weeks, set against the goals you agreed at the start. If progress stalls, you should hear it from the tutor, not discover it at report time.
Updates should also travel at decision points: before school meetings, when a report arrives, when medication or routines change. A tutor working from six-month-old information is, in effect, tutoring a child who no longer quite exists. The five-line update format in the school-tutor communication template keeps each exchange small enough to actually happen.
If you are preparing for a school meeting about support, our guide to preparing for a learning support meeting pairs with this one, and the school-tutor communication template gives you the emails ready-made. Families looking for structured support can read about SEN tutoring in Bali, and the learning support guides hold the rest of the series.
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