How to ensure one-to-one tutoring, coaching, and mentoring arrangements are safe for children.
Tutoring Safety is the safeguards that protect children during private lessons or tutoring, ensuring appropriate boundaries, supervision, and vetting of the adults involved.
One-to-one settings like tutoring, music lessons, and coaching create situations where children are alone with adults. While most are perfectly safe, these arrangements require clear boundaries and oversight.
Most one-to-one tutoring is safe, but risk concentrates where boundaries blur. Common patterns include: tutors who message the child directly rather than the parent, sessions that move to private rooms with closed doors, 'extra' free sessions, gifts, or trips that build secrecy, and online tutoring where the camera is off, recording is disabled, or the platform is one the parent cannot see. Risks also rise when no organisation sits behind the tutor — no DBS check, no safeguarding lead, no complaints route, no insurance. Keeping a parent on every channel, an open door, and a regular check-in conversation with the child catches most concerns early.
In your child's behaviour
Verify background checks
Ensure all tutors and coaches have appropriate DBS checks (UK) or equivalent background screening.
Establish clear boundaries
Define where sessions happen, whether doors stay open, and how communication occurs (always via parents, not direct to child).
Regular check-ins
Ask your child about their sessions regularly and observe for any behavioural changes.
In immediate danger: call 999. For non-emergency police matters, call 101.
Concerned about a child but it's not an emergency? NSPCC helpline 0808 800 5000. Childline for young people 0800 1111.
This is practical educational content to support families. For case-specific concerns about a child's safety, contact the NSPCC helpline on 0808 800 5000 or your local safeguarding team.
Myth: All private tutors have to be DBS-checked by law.
Fact: Private tutoring is unregulated in the UK and there is no legal requirement for a tutor to hold any check or qualification. A self-employed tutor cannot apply for an enhanced DBS check on themselves — only a basic one — while agencies can obtain enhanced checks for their tutors, so ask what check they hold, at what level, and who obtained it.
Myth: Online tutoring is automatically safer than lessons in person.
Fact: The same safeguarding principles apply on a screen: a one-to-one video call behind a closed bedroom door carries its own risks. Choose platforms that record sessions or allow parental oversight, keep lessons in a shared family space, and keep all communication on the platform rather than personal messaging apps.
Myth: A serving school teacher who tutors privately doesn't need any checking.
Fact: A teacher's school vetting covers their school role, not their private work, and you are relying on your own arrangements when you hire them directly. Still take references you can actually phone, ask to see their DBS certificate and whether they are on the DBS Update Service, and keep sensible lesson set-ups regardless of their day job.
For lessons at home, stay in the house and within earshot, keep the door open, and use a room you pass naturally. Ask any tutor, music teacher, or coach about their DBS check and take references you can phone, and have a relaxed chat with your child after early sessions.
Set online lessons up in a family space rather than a bedroom, and keep all messages on the tutoring platform, not personal apps or social media. Watch for boundary creep such as friend requests, gifts, or contact outside lesson times.
Teens may reasonably want lessons without you hovering, so keep the arrangements transparent instead: you know the schedule, communication is visible to you, and any change of venue or time goes through you first.
Seventeen-year-olds are still children in safeguarding law, and A-level tuition is often one-to-one. Let them manage the studying, but keep the same ground rules about venues and visible communication, and take it seriously if they ever feel uncomfortable with a tutor or coach.
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