People often assume tutoring is about helping children who are struggling.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it's about something completely different.

Sometimes it's about making sure a child who is flying doesn't lose their love of learning.

A while ago, I was supporting a student with Further Maths GCSE.

Now, I'll happily admit that Further Maths isn't my specialism.

I explained that to her parents from the beginning.

But we'd worked together for years, and by this point my role wasn't really to teach every method.

It was to think alongside her.

We were working through a past paper when one question asked us to "find" something.

She stopped.

Then announced: "This is like a kidnapping, and we need to find the victim. If we don’t, we’ve let them down. So, what do we know."

From that moment on, every piece of information in the question became a clue.

She wasn't solving a maths problem.

She was solving a mystery.

She worked through it like a detective.

And she got there.

I loved that moment.

Not because she'd answered the question.

But because it reminded me that children don't all think in the same way.

Some need counters.

Some need diagrams.

Some need stories.

Some need movement.

And some need to imagine they're solving a crime!

The role of a tutor isn't simply to explain.

It's to discover how the child sitting in front of you makes sense of the world.

Because once you find that...

Learning becomes so much more than getting the right answer.