How to hire tutors for your UK tutoring agency: the practical checklist

Hiring tutors is the second-hardest part of running an agency (after getting parents through the door). Get it right and your retention takes care of itself. Get it wrong and you spend every Sunday explaining to parents why their tutor cancelled.

This is the checklist I use for our own agency.

Where to actually find tutors

In rough order of return on time invested:

1. Personal referrals from current tutors. Easily the highest-quality channel. Pay a £100-£200 referral bonus once the new tutor passes 30 days and three completed lessons.
2. TES.com job postings. The default place serious teachers look. Posting a part-time tutoring role is typically £50-£150. You'll get qualified applicants, not career tutors.
3. LinkedIn. Especially for subjects in demand: A-Level Maths, Physics, Computer Science, Economics. Search “PGCE [subject] [city]” and message qualified teachers directly. 5-10% reply rate; high-quality leads.
4. Local university PGCE programmes. Trainee teachers in the placement-light terms (summer) are very open to tutoring work to fund the year. Approach the course tutor directly with a one-pager.
5. Existing-tutor LinkedIn networks. Many teachers job-hop to private tutoring around years 4-7 of school teaching. Recruit them at the burn-out point.

Avoid generic tutor marketplaces (Tutor.io, Superprof, Tutorful) as a recruiting channel. The tutors there are already on every other platform — you won't get exclusivity, and you'll lose them as soon as someone offers 5% more. Marketplaces are for tutor-led businesses; agency tutors come from teaching.

What to screen for before the interview

• QTS or equivalent teaching qualification. Not a hard requirement legally but a strong filter. PGCE counts. Subject degrees count if backed by 100+ hours of teaching.
• Enhanced DBS within 3 years OR subscribed to the DBS Update Service. Non-negotiable. See our DBS guide for the full picture.
• Two professional references, one teaching-related. Check both. Not a phone call — a reference checks email with three specific questions is enough.
• Right to work in the UK. Ask for documentation before the interview. You can't pay an unauthorised tutor even if everything else checks out.
• Public liability + professional indemnity insurance. Many of our tutors carry their own; some rely on our agency policy. Be explicit which side covers what.

The interview that actually predicts performance

Don't do a CV chat. Do a teaching task. A 30-minute structured interview where you give the tutor:

1. A made-up student profile (Year 10, target grade 7, weak on standard form).
2. 15 minutes to plan a 45-minute lesson aimed at moving the student from grade 5 to grade 7 on that topic.
3. 15 minutes to walk you through the plan — what they'd open with, the first worked example, the misconceptions they'd watch for, what the homework would be.

You learn more in 30 minutes of structured task than 60 minutes of “tell me about your teaching philosophy.” The two things to grade them on:

• Do they think about the student, or about the content?Strong tutors lead with “what does the student already know?” Weak ones lead with “here's how I'd explain it.”
• Do they anticipate misconceptions? Anyone can teach the right answer. Strong tutors teach against the wrong ones.

The contract terms that actually matter

Your tutor is self-employed (almost always — if you're treating them as an employee, talk to an accountant before anything else). Make the contract one page and cover:

• Pay rate per hour, with a clear statement of when you pay (monthly is standard).
• Cancellation policy. Both directions — tutor-cancels and student-cancels. Inside 24 hours, who pays who, and how much?
• Non-compete clause. The biggest practical risk: a tutor takes the student off-platform after the first lesson. Soft non-compete (12 months, only the introduced parent) is enforceable and reasonable. Hard non-compete (any subject, any student in the area) won't hold up.
• Safeguarding code of conduct. Reference your policy. They sign that they've read it.
• Tutor pay model for trials + late-cancels. Specifically: does the tutor get paid for a trial lesson if the parent doesn't convert? Our answer is yes, at the full rate. Tutors will treat the trial like a real lesson if you pay them like one.

Onboarding: the first month

• Don't hand them five students on day one. Start with one or two; let them get a feel for the platform and your house style.
• First lesson observation. Either a sit-in (online makes this easy) or a debrief 24 hours after. You catch the few who can sound great in interview but freeze in front of a kid.
• Pay the first invoice early. Run a one-off payout after the first three lessons. Builds trust faster than anything else.
• Set retention as the metric. Tutor performance is measured by parent retention past 3 months, not by lesson count.

Red flags worth turning down

• Tutors who won't do a teaching task in the interview. They have something to hide.
• Tutors who don't know what the current GCSE / A-Level spec changes are. Means they haven't taught the syllabus recently.
• Tutors who ask immediately about taking students off-platform. The 1 in 20 who'll do it anyway are the ones who flag it openly.
• Tutors who insist on cash-only payment outside the platform. You can't safeguard, you can't insure, you can't enforce the cancellation policy. Walk.

The honest truth

The first ten tutor hires set the tone for everything that follows. They become the people who recommend the next twenty. Hire slow, fire faster than you think is fair, pay better than the median. Everything else falls out of that.