I started my tutoring career on First Tutors. Now they’ve closed — here’s what to do next.

By Rich Thompson, founder of Tailored Tutors. Started tutoring 2010. Published 29 May 2026.

First Tutors closed. I didn’t see it coming.

In 2010 I was living in a yurt in a field in Surrey. That’s not a metaphor. An actual yurt, on a farm, with a wood-burning stove and no running water for the first few weeks. I’d just come back from two years backpacking across South America — no plan, a reasonable tan, and exactly no idea what to do next.

I painted houses from 8am to 4pm. Then I tutored from 5pm until 8pm most evenings, and all weekend.

My mother had spent her career as an A-Level biology teacher. She was retiring, didn’t want to keep wrestling with specification changes, and handed her students on to me. So I had a ready-made base to start from. Friends of friends followed. Neighbours. Word spread in the way it only spreads in Surrey — over a garden fence and then aggressively.

But to grow beyond that circle, I needed something more. I put a profile on First Tutors. That’s where the first proper clients came from. I drove all over Surrey doing face-to-face sessions — sometimes three or four in an evening — and First Tutors was how most of those bookings started.

Sixteen years later, I got the email saying they were closing. I was shocked, genuinely. Not because I rely on them now — I don’t, and haven’t for years — but because of what they represented. For tutors starting out, particularly in 2010, First Tutors was the first rung on the ladder. It was where careers began.

If you’re a tutor who built your client base there, or a parent who’s used it to find tutors for years, this post is for you. I want to tell you what First Tutors was, what it taught me, and what to do next.

What happened to First Tutors — and what it meant for UK tutors

First Tutors ran for over 20 years. At its peak it was one of the most visited tutoring marketplaces in the UK — a directory of thousands of tutors covering every subject, every level, every region.

The model was simple. Tutors listed for free. Parents paid a connection fee — typically £20 to £30 — to unlock a tutor’s contact details. Then the two sides connected directly and arranged sessions. The platform took its cut upfront and stepped back.

It wasn’t frictionless. There was a constant cat-and-mouse with the platform over contact details — tutors would try to slip a phone number or email address into their messages, and First Tutors would filter or block it, because the connection fee was the whole business. I’m not criticising that. It was their model. We all knew the rules. You’d find creative ways around it, they’d update the filters, you’d find a new way. It was almost a sport.

But once you’d done it enough times — once you’d built up a run of good reviews and a decent profile — the leads were consistent. I’d get enquiries every week. And I had a rule: I always offered a free first session. Not half a session. Not a “free 15-minute consultation”. A full hour, free. I never had a student take a free first session and not continue. Not once.

“Once you had consistently good reviews it was a pretty consistent source of income. It worked. It was an institution.”

Its closure has been covered in some detail by the tutoring community. For background on the business side, the Companies House entry is public. Tutorperch has also put together a useful summary of the closure and what it means for tutors displaced by it.

What I learnt on First Tutors that I’d tell any tutor today

The most important thing I learnt in those early years had nothing to do with First Tutors itself. It had to do with what I was actually doing wrong as a tutor — and I was doing something wrong. Badly wrong, in fact.

Here’s the mistake: I assumed that if a student understood the content, they’d be able to perform in the exam. That’s not true. It’s almost never true. And it’s the single biggest trap that new tutors fall into, particularly tutors who were naturally strong students themselves.

I’m that kind of student. I could learn a topic, understand it deeply, solve novel problems with it, and then sit an exam and do very well without really trying. Not because I was revising strategically — just because the way I process and retain information happens to translate well into exam performance. Most students are not like that. I had to learn that the hard way.

I had a student — I’ll call him Tom, name changed — at A-Level Biology, in North London. Dyslexic, bright, genuinely interested in biology. We’d spent several sessions on a specific topic. I quizzed him verbally. I used a digital quizzing tool. He could answer every question. He knew the content cold.

Then I gave him a past-paper question on the same topic. The result was below a D. I was floored.

That was the moment I understood what A-Level examining actually is. It’s not a content test. It’s a game, with very specific rules, and you have to teach students how to play it.

The trap students fall into — an example

This pattern repeats across biology, chemistry, maths. A-Level and GCSE questions are deliberately constructed to be opaque. They’re multi-modal — text, graphs, tables, data sets, all combined. The marks live in the gap between knowing a fact and recognising what the question is actually asking for.

Knowing the content is necessary. It’s not sufficient. The exam is a separate skill, and it has to be taught explicitly. The tutors who understand this — who teach exam technique alongside content, who reverse-engineer mark schemes, who train students on exactly the vocabulary examiners want to see — are the tutors whose students actually move grades.

That’s what the years on First Tutors taught me. Not how to use a marketplace. How to tutor.

If you’re a parent looking for a tutor after First Tutors closed

You’ve probably landed here because you had a tutor through First Tutors, or you were in the middle of finding one. The closure is genuinely disruptive if you’re mid-search. Here’s what I’d do.

First, a word of caution. The UK tutoring market is entirely unregulated. Anyone can call themselves a tutor. A £25-an-hour undergraduate might be perfectly good — or they might spend an hour reading a textbook back to your child, confidently, and charge you for the privilege. There’s no body checking. No minimum standard. Nothing.

What you’re looking for is an exam specialist. Not just a subject expert — an exam expert. Someone who knows the specific exam board your child is sitting. Someone who can look at a mark scheme and explain exactly why one answer earns the mark and another doesn’t. Someone with a track record of results, not just a degree in the subject.

Ask the tutor directly: which exam boards do you teach? What do your students typically achieve? Have you tutored this specific paper before? A good tutor will answer all three without hesitation. A tutor who deflects or gives vague answers is telling you something important.

Other platforms worth looking at: Tutorperch, Tutorfair, Superprof. Quality varies enormously on all of them. The platform is not the vetting mechanism — you are.

Alternatively, if you’d like us to do the vetting for you, that’s exactly what Tailored Tutors is built for. Every tutor on our books has been personally interviewed and assessed. We only work with experienced exam specialists — former Heads of Department, current examiners, PhD-level subject experts. We cover all subjects, all levels, all exam boards. If you’d like to find a tutor, start here.

If you’re a tutor displaced by the First Tutors closure

Your reviews are gone. Your profile is gone. That’s a real loss, not a minor inconvenience — if you’d built up 50 or 100 reviews over several years, that’s years of social proof, wiped overnight.

The most important thing to do right now is ask every current and recent student for a review on a platform you control. Trustpilot, Google Business Profile, even LinkedIn recommendations. Don’t wait. The details are fresh now; they’ll fade.

Beyond that, the platforms that will serve you best as alternatives are the ones with lower connection fees or subscription models. Tutorperch has been positioning itself as a direct alternative. Tutorfair, Tutor Hunt, MyTutor (for online work) are all worth considering depending on your level and subject specialism.

The other option — the one I’d have pursued earlier if I’d known then what I know now — is to build your own client base outside any platform. A one-page website. A Google Business Profile. A presence in one or two local Facebook parent groups. It takes six months to get traction, and then it doesn’t depend on any company’s decision to close.

If you’re an experienced UK tutor with exam-board specific knowledge and a genuine track record of results, I’d also invite you to consider joining our network. Tailored Tutors is always looking for tutors at the top of the market — not generalists, not beginners. If that’s you, get in touch here.

What comes next

First Tutors closing is a moment to think clearly about what made it work and what didn’t.

It worked because it created trust between strangers. Parents didn’t know which tutors were good. Tutors didn’t have a way to signal their quality to parents they’d never met. A review system on a neutral platform solved that — imperfectly, but it solved it.

What it didn’t solve — what no marketplace has really solved — is the quality problem. You can have a hundred five-star reviews and still be a tutor who doesn’t understand how A-Level marking works. Reviews tell you about personality and reliability. They don’t tell you whether the tutor is actually moving grades.

That’s the gap I’ve spent fifteen years thinking about. A good tutor changes a student’s relationship with an exam. They stop seeing it as something that happens to them and start seeing it as something they can learn to do. That shift — from passive to active — is what the best tutors create. That’s what Tom eventually got to, by the way. He sat his A-Levels, knew what the questions were actually asking, and performed.

If you’re a parent who wants that for your child, I’d be glad to talk. We don’t push students who aren’t the right fit into our programme. If we’re not the right answer for your situation, I’ll tell you honestly. Book a free consultation here and we’ll work out whether we can help.