AD: FREE 40-minute one-to-one maths tuition session for your child with toota

How has lockdown tutoring been going?

If your household has been anything like mine, it has been a bit up and down, with our main issues being Maths.

Kids don’t seem to learn maths in the same way I was taught all those years ago. At the age of six, Sebastian’s work I can cope with, but this week it was Eliza’s fractions that really challenged us with boxes, boxes everywhere and we had to watch BBC Bitesize a number of times to understand how they do the working out.

Then there is Isaac, who is in his first year of secondary school in Year 7. To be fair to him, he has been amazing, he just gets on with his work that has been set without complaint. Maths is done via Hegarty Maths, which is a great resource for kids and does offer a tool to show kids how to solve a problem, but it is no replacement for face-to-face tuition.

toota is a new service offering online one-to-one maths tuition with fully qualified teachers. Part of the UK’s largest education staffing business, Supporting Education Group, toota gives you access to some of the best maths teachers in the UK and we were invited to trial a lesson.

They work at all levels, from KS1 (age 5-7) all the way up to A-Level and Functional Skills and can help with specific issues, give general tuition or give help with studying for upcoming exams. Despite our issues with Eliza’s fractions, I decided that Isaac would benefit most from a lesson and signed him up.

When you sign the kids up, you can leave notes about what they are struggling with, so they can hit the ground running. The website is easy to use, simply open the lesson link at your allocated lesson time and you are introduced to your teacher.  There is no need to download any software.

Isaac’s teacher was Raj and at the start of the lesson, he gave Isaac some simple maths challenges to assess his ability and knowledge.

After 3 months of doing schoolwork on his own, Isaac really lit up when doing his lesson. It was great to see him interacting with Raj, asking questions and trying new maths challenges. The screen can be easily changed from a video chat to a workbook and back again, although I do recommend having a pen and paper to hand too.

Every session is recorded and accessible with your own dedicated account, so if Isaac needs to re-visit his learning, it is all there in his own bespoke revision library, which can be accessed and played back at any time.

All the online teachers are fully registered in the UK teachers who stand out for helping students gain entrance to top schools, pushing them to achieve top tier grades, or supporting borderline students to grades they didn’t think were achievable. The teachers are matched based on your child’s Maths level and main goal and once they’re happy and working together, they can keep the same teacher for each booking.

Isaac has had two lessons now and has really enjoyed them. In fact, he set himself three separate alarms for the second lesson as he was so excited about it. This one ended with a challenge of turning six pens into four equilateral triangles. He got there in the end by making a tetrahedron.

toota have a fabulous promotion at the moment, offering a FREE 40-minute one-to-one maths tuition session to trial with your child. I highly recommend the sessions and will definitely be booking more. Once you have had your free trial, there are two types of session to choose from; Supercharged online 40 mins, which costs £35 or a 60 minute lesson with costs £49.

Disclaimer: This post has been written in collaboration with toota and Tots100. All thoughts and opinions are my own.