Tutoring agreements: cancellations, payment and safeguarding

A tutoring agreement is a short document and does not need to be a defensive one. Two pages covering sessions, money, cancellation, materials and safeguarding will handle everything that realistically happens. The value is not in the drafting — it is in having decided the answers before the situation arises, because every one of these questions gets harder to settle once somebody is annoyed.

Cancellation is the clause that earns its keep

The economics of tutoring are the economics of a booked slot. A tutor who reserves Tuesday at five has turned down anyone else who wanted Tuesday at five, and a cancellation on Tuesday afternoon is not a cancellation of work — it is a cancellation of income that cannot be recovered. Families cancelling in good faith rarely see it that way, which is exactly why it has to be written down at the start rather than explained afterwards.

A workable policy has four parts, and the last two are the ones usually missing.

Where the prepaid money actually sits

Blocks of sessions paid in advance suit both sides — the tutor gets committed income, the family gets a discount and stops thinking about payment weekly. What neither side usually considers is what the payment is, legally, between the moment it clears and the moment the sessions are delivered. It is an unsecured debt owed by the tutor. There is no trust account, no protection scheme, and no priority if the tutor stops teaching, moves abroad or simply stops replying.

Two clauses make the middle bands safe enough to use. First, an expiry: unused sessions must be taken within a stated period, which stops a block becoming an open-ended liability the tutor is still carrying two years later. Second, a refund term for the unused balance if either side ends the arrangement — pro rata, at the per-session rate rather than the discounted block rate, which is fair to both and removes the argument entirely.

Employed, self-employed, or working through an agency

Most private tutors are self-employed and correctly so: they set their own rates, choose their clients, decide the method, use their own materials and carry the risk of an empty diary. Nothing about a family paying regularly changes that. The classification question only becomes live in two situations, and both are worth recognising early.

This matters to families more than they expect. Engaging someone who is in substance an employee brings tax, insurance and employment obligations that a private household is rarely set up for. Where the arrangement is anything more than a few hours a week on the tutor's own terms, it is worth working out deliberately rather than discovering later. The commercial terms — scope, payment, termination — are the same ones a freelance contract needs.

Safeguarding: what checks are actually available

This is the question families most want a clean answer to, and the honest answer in the UK is awkward. There are four levels of criminal record check: a basic check showing unspent convictions and conditional cautions; a standard check showing spent and unspent convictions and cautions; an enhanced check adding relevant information held by local police; and an enhanced check with barred lists, which also shows whether the applicant appears on a list barring them from working with children or vulnerable adults.

The difficulty is who can ask for them. Standard and enhanced checks are requested by an employer or recruiting body rather than by the individual — the GOV.UK eligibility tool states plainly that it is for companies registered in England or Wales. An independently self-employed tutor with no employer therefore typically cannot obtain an enhanced check on themselves, and offers a basic check instead, which is a much weaker document. A tutor engaged through an agency or a school usually can be checked properly, because there is a recruiting body to request it.

In the United States there is no single national equivalent. Background screening for people working with children is regulated at state level, and requirements vary widely between states and between school-based and private arrangements. Check the state position rather than assuming a commercial background check satisfies it.

What a tutoring agreement can usefully do, wherever you are, is record the position honestly: which checks the tutor holds, their date, and who obtained them. A stated position that a check was not available is more use to a family than an unstated one.

• Session location and supervision — whether an adult is present or nearby, and where in the home sessions take place.
• Communication rules — that contact with a minor goes through the parent or a shared channel rather than a private one.
• Recording — whether online sessions are recorded, by whom, where they are stored and for how long.
• Reporting — what the tutor does if they have a safeguarding concern about the pupil.

Contract with the adult, not the student

Where the pupil is a minor, the paying parent or guardian is the contracting party. A minor's capacity to enter a binding contract is restricted in most jurisdictions, so an agreement signed by the student is a poor instrument for recovering unpaid fees or enforcing a cancellation policy. Name the adult, have the adult sign, and identify the pupil separately as the person receiving the tuition.

This also settles who is entitled to information. Progress reports, attendance, concerns and assessment results go to the contracting adult unless the agreement says otherwise — which is worth stating explicitly where a student is over eighteen and the parent is still paying.

Materials, results and the two promises never to make

A tutor's worksheets, question banks and course notes are their own copyright, and supplying them to a pupil is a licence for that pupil to use them — not permission to share them with a class, a forum or a sibling's tutor. One sentence saying so is enough. Where materials are being licensed to a school or another provider rather than a pupil, that is a different document: see who owns course materials.

The two promises to avoid are a guaranteed grade and a guaranteed place. Neither is within the tutor's control, both convert an ordinary disappointing outcome into an alleged breach of contract, and neither is necessary to win the work. State what is being provided — sessions of a stated length, a stated focus, feedback in a stated form — and let the outcome be the pupil's.

The short version

Send it once, at the start, with the first invoice. Tutors resist this because it feels formal for a relationship that is essentially personal — but the families who object to a clear cancellation policy are precisely the ones who were going to cancel late, and the ones who do not object never think about it again.