Online vs in-person maths tutoring: what a decade online taught me

For A-Level Maths specifically, a well-run online lesson now beats an in-person one for most students — and I say that as someone who taught at kitchen tables before moving fully online. But "most" is not "all", the gap depends entirely on how the online lesson is run, and there are students I would still send to an in-person tutor without hesitation. Having taught thousands of hours in both formats, here is the honest comparison — including the parts that don't favour me.

What an online maths lesson actually looks like now

The picture parents carry is a laggy video call with a tutor talking over a PowerPoint. A properly run maths lesson is nothing like that. The centre of it is a shared whiteboard both of us write on in real time: I can see every stroke of the student's working as it happens, which — and this surprises people — is more than I could see across a kitchen table, where the page faces the student and half the working is hidden under a forearm. Past papers sit on the same screen. Diagrams don't have to be redrawn from scratch. And the whole board still exists after the lesson, which a scribbled pad of A4 never did.

Maths suits this format unusually well. It's a written subject: the entire transaction is visible marks on a page, and a shared screen shows those marks to both people at once, all the time. Subjects that live in conversation lose something over a call. Maths, oddly, gains.

The real advantage nobody mentions

The strongest argument for online tutoring has nothing to do with technology: it's that you stop choosing from tutors within a twenty-minute drive. In-person, your shortlist is whoever happens to live near you. Online, it's the whole country. For a specialist subject at a specific level — say, a Year 13 pushing for an A* on a particular exam board — the difference between the best tutor in your postcode and the best tutor available to you online is usually enormous. Most of the families I work with could not have found an equivalent specialist locally at any price. That, not the whiteboard, is the structural reason online tutoring has quietly taken over at the top of the market.

Where in-person still wins

I'd be lying if I said the format never matters, so here are the cases where I'd recommend in-person even though I don't offer it. Younger students, roughly Year 7 and below, often need a physical presence to hold attention — the screen gives them nothing to push against. Some students with attention difficulties fall into the same category, though by no means all; plenty focus better online, in their own room, with fewer social demands. And there's a small group of teenagers for whom the lesson only happens because an adult physically arrived and sat down — if your child treats a video call as optional in a way they'd never treat a visitor, that tells you the format you need.

What in-person does not win on, in my experience, is teaching quality at A-Level. By sixteen or seventeen, a motivated student engages with the maths, not the room.

The honest downsides of online

Three are real. Technology can fail — rarely, but a dropped connection in the last ten minutes of a hard integration problem is genuinely annoying, and a student without a quiet room or a workable device starts at a disadvantage. Online lessons are easier to cancel, mentally: nobody is standing on the doorstep, so a wobbly-commitment student finds it easier to drift, and the structure around the lessons has to work harder to stop that. And screens tire people — an online hour is denser than an in-person hour, which is mostly a compliment, but it means the format rewards tutors who plan properly and punishes the ones who fill time.

The kitchen table myth

The instinct that in-person must be better usually rests on one idea: that physical presence means engagement. A decade of doing both taught me the opposite correlation. At a kitchen table, a passive student can nod along for an hour while the tutor performs the maths. On a shared whiteboard, there is nowhere to hide — if the student isn't writing, the lesson visibly isn't happening, and I restructure it on the spot. The format doesn't create engagement, but it does make its absence impossible to ignore. That has been worth more to my students' results than any amount of sitting beside them.

How to decide for your child

Ask three questions. Is the student Year 10 or above, and broadly able to sit with a screen for an hour? Online works. Does the subject need a specialist — a specific board, a top grade, a real deadline? Online almost certainly wins, because the specialist pool is national. Is the fundamental problem that the student won't turn up to work at all? Then solve that first, in person, with someone — because no format fixes a lesson that doesn't happen. And whichever way you go, judge the tutor by the same standard: what happens in the working, and what happens between the lessons — not by the room the lesson happens in. There's more on how I run A-Level lessons elsewhere on this site.