Choosing tutoring
A short conversation before booking tells you most of what you need to know, if you ask the right things. This question bank is organised so you can use it verbatim.
Ask about five things: experience with your child’s curriculum, safeguarding and vetting, logistics and pricing, progress reporting, and how the tutor would approach your child specifically. Thirty questions follow, grouped by theme, and you can copy any of them straight into a call or a WhatsApp message.
This guide is for parents shortlisting tutors or agencies in Bali, including us. Use it with anyone; a good tutor will welcome every question on the list. If you have not read it yet, our guide on how to choose a private tutor in Bali covers the vetting context these questions sit inside. It takes about six minutes to read.
You do not need all thirty. Pick two or three from each group, and listen less for polished answers than for specific ones. “I would start by reading her last report and testing the foundations the new syllabus assumes” is an answer. “I have a lot of experience with that” is a placeholder.
Keep the answers somewhere you can compare. The tutor comparison worksheet is built for exactly this: one column per candidate, the same questions down the side.
The questions matter less than the listening. Three patterns separate a strong answer from a weak one. First, specificity: strong answers name curricula, year groups, topics and situations (“I taught the IGCSE extended paper to a Year 11 student at a school in Canggu last year”), while weak answers stay at the level of adjectives. Second, evidence offered without prompting: a professional mentions references, checks and written terms before you ask, because they have answered these questions many times. Third, honest limits: a tutor who says “that is outside my subjects” or “I would want to see her school reports first” is showing you how they think. A tutor who claims to teach everything to everyone is telling you the opposite.
Note the answers as you go, even in keywords. Two conversations blur into each other within a day, and the comparison is the point of the exercise.
Eight questions that establish whether the tutor knows your child’s actual course, not a neighbouring one.
These questions are not awkward; they are the job. Any tutor or service working professionally with children has answered them before, and the good ones answer them gladly, because clear safeguarding protects the honest tutor as much as it protects your child. Evasion here is the single strongest signal this list can give you.
Get the practical terms in writing before the first session, however informal the arrangement feels. The questions below surface the terms families usually discover too late.
One habit saves most pricing confusion: always ask for the total monthly figure, not the hourly rate. An hourly rate multiplied by sessions, plus travel, minus package discounts, plus any materials fee, is the number your budget actually lives with. Two services quoting the same hourly rate can land a hundred thousand rupiah apart by the end of a month.
Progress you cannot see is progress you are asked to take on trust. These questions establish what you will actually receive.
A note on the honest answer to expect: good reporting is specific and sometimes unflattering. “She now solves two-step equations unaided; fractions are the current block” is progress reporting. “Really improving, lovely to teach” is a review of the atmosphere. Ask for the first kind by name.
Before any of the above, the fastest opening move is four lines in a WhatsApp message. Any professional service can work from these, and the reply you get tells you a great deal about how the rest will go.
A reply that proposes next steps from those four lines is a service with a process. A reply that quotes a price without asking a question back is a different kind of service.
Every question on this page has an answer on our vetting page or one message away. Our vetting and child safety process is described in writing, and every engagement starts with a complimentary 30-minute discovery call. We reply within one working day.
WhatsApp +62 858 6969 6869 · info@privatetutoringbali.com · We reply within one working day.