How to find a tutor

🔍 Finding and engaging a tutor is simply the best and most effective way to ensure you achieve your learning goals. 👩‍🏫

Whether your goal is to find a tutor to help catch up or excel at school, to learn a language or instrument, a new skill like coding or to work with a private business or life coach, there are different ways to find them.

The best place to start is to have a clear idea and what it is that you want to achieve - whether that's a specific outcome or overall goal. The most effective way to then achieve it is to work with a tutor who offers personalised support and guidance to get you there.

How to find a tutor 🔍

There are many ways to find a tutor in Australia with each way offering its own advantages and disadvantages. These include through:

• businesses with high fixed pricing, which may be outside of your price range
• agencies and companies that provide a ‘one size fits all approach’ to students
• platforms that provide programmatic tutoring not personalised to students
• agencies that connect you to a tutor, which typically charge high margins on top of what they pay tutors (hint: poorly)
• websites that require you to pay a monthly subscription regardless of usage
• directories that do not maintain any level of quality or safety control or support

We built Learnmate largely to eliminate the need for students to accept any of these trade-offs and with the ambitious goal of making it easy to find and access affordable quality tutoring in Australia.

Whether you’re looking for an in-person or online tutor, for school support (such as English, Maths, Science or any other subject), to learn a language, instrument or skill like coding, here’s how to use Learnmate and why it should be your go-to to find a tutor.

How and why to use Learnmate 🙌

Learnmate is one of the fastest growing tutoring communities in Australia. To help individuals tap into that community, we’ve built a robust platform that empowers you to search for tutors in our community.

Our tutors are a combination of high achieving former students, qualified teachers and professionals. We assess every application to list on Learnmate on the basis of its merits and whether we think they could make a valuable contribution to students.

Most importantly, you can see every tutor's profile to decide who is best suited for you and to have the comfort you're in good hands. So let's start finding potential tutors.

Using our search engine, you can:

1. Research and find. Search our amazing tutor profiles and identify tutors who suit your criteria, such as subject and year level, hourly rates, experience and qualifications, location, reviews and star ratings. Alternatively, our team are here to help you find someone – just reach out!
2. Contact. Once identified, sign-up to Learnmate (it’s free!) to reach out to your preferred tutors. Tutors will receive your message and write back to you in a few hours.
3. Ready for lessons. Organise a day and time with your tutor for your first lesson or lessons. They’ll book you in and Learnmate will take care of payments when the lesson comes around.

If you have searched for tutors by subject and want to filter the results based on advanced criteria, try our advanced filtering tools.

Using our filters, you can filter by:

1. Level. Search by year level and curriculum (ie. VCE, HSC, IB etc. for school level subjects or beginner, intermediate and advanced for languages, instruments and other skills).
2. Format. Find tutors who tutor online or in-person in an area near you
3. Budget. Find tutors who suit your budget by adjusting the minimum and maximum you are willing to pay per hour.
4. Qualification. Refine results to tutors who hold a specific teaching qualification.
5. Experience. See who has experience tutoring students with a particular special need or learning difficulty.

Once you have your search results, it’s time to decide on a tutor to contact and engage. We recommend reaching out to 2-3 tutors to ensure you find the right tutor for you. Try changing or removing your filters to increase your options.

Comparing tutors 👨‍💻

With your learning objectives and criteria in mind, it’s time to consider available tutors and decide who to engage. We recommend considering the following in making the decision who to contact:

1. About Me. Read your tutors ‘About Me’ for an overview of who they are, what experience they have and what they offer. Considering the tutor’s profile and qualifications, form a view who you think suits you (or the student you’re assisting to find a tutor) best.
2. Badges. Consider what badges the tutor has. Badges include:
   1. WWCC. This means this tutor has provided their Working with Children Check to Learnmate and we’ve been able to verify that they are cleared to work with children under the age of 18. If a tutor does not have this badge, be sure to ask them for it.
   2. Qualified Teacher. This means a tutor has a teaching qualification and has provided evidence of it to Learnmate to verify. They’ve trained as a teacher.
   3. Verified. This badge is awarded to tutors who provide evidence that they achieved the marks or have the experience they state in their profile. For instance, an academic transcript that shows they scored certain marks or received a particular ATAR score.
   4. ATA Trained. This badge is awarded to tutors who complete Learnmate’s professional tutor training course. This course was designed in conjunction with the Australian Tutoring Association to raise the standard of tutoring in Australia.
3. Tutor Tier. There are 4 tutor tiers on Learnmate; Bronze, Silver, Gold and Pro. These tiers are awarded to tutors based on their experience with Learnmate and indicate how many hours the tutor has completed with us. The higher the tier, the longer they’ve been with us and the more hours they’ve put in.
4. Hourly rate. It’s important to consider who suits your household budget. With tutors starting at $30/hr, there’s a tutor for virtually every household budget on Learnmate. That said, consider value for money in who you engage. Hourly rates typically vary based on a tutor’s experience, qualifications, expertise and what they offer ‘out of lessons’. A tutor may be more expensive, but if they have years of experience behind them and are happy to provide support for free during the week, they may present better value for money.

Conclusion 👇

Finding a tutor isn't always easy, but it shouldn't be difficult or cost an arm and a leg. Finding the right tutor can be even harder and more expensive but Learnmate is here to help take the stress, difficulty and financial pain out of the process.

Remember, it is free to join Learnmate and you can always reach out to new tutors on Learnmate at any time. You're never signed up to a lesson plan or monthly subscription so you have freedom to only engage a tutor if they’re the right fit for you and only for so long as you need.

Engaging the right tutor can be the most important decision you make in the pursuit of your learning goals and we hope you pursue those goals with Learnmate.