Private Tutor and Tuition Insurance

This is the most useful thing a tutor can do for themselves, and it costs nothing.

An allegation of inappropriate conduct in a one to one lesson with no witness is extremely difficult to answer with evidence. It does not need to be well founded to be ruinous: an agency suspends, a platform removes a profile, a school stops referring, word travels in a parent group, and the tutor's income stops while the matter is investigated. The financial loss is frequently the defence and the lost work rather than any settlement.

So arrange the work to leave a record and a witness wherever possible. Lessons in a room with the door open and a parent in the house rather than behind a closed door in an empty home, a rule about not being alone in a property with a child, sessions at a kitchen table rather than in a bedroom, and written confirmation of arrangements with the parent. For online lessons, use a platform the parent can access, keep the parent informed of session times, and keep communication with the child through the parent rather than direct messaging. Then check the policy includes abuse allegation cover, because many general liability policies do not.

The ordinary liability exposure in tuition is mundane and still worth getting right, because the setting is a private home.

A tutor arrives with a bag, works at a table, and leaves. The realistic incidents are a spilled drink on a laptop or a table, a bag knocking something off a shelf, a child tripping over a cable, damage to a floor, and in a music or practical lesson equipment damaging something. None is dramatic and all are awkward, because the family is also the client and the relationship usually ends with the claim.

Public liability answers it, and £5 million is commonly required anyway by schools, agencies and platforms. Where lessons are taught in the tutor's own home the position changes more than people expect: other people's children on your premises is a different liability, your home insurer needs to know, and a tenancy agreement or mortgage condition may prohibit running a business from the property. That is worth checking before advertising, not afterwards.

A tutor's phone and laptop usually contain more sensitive information than the tutor realises.

Names, ages, schools, home addresses, parents' phone numbers, assessment results, notes about a child's difficulties, sometimes a diagnosis or an education plan, and payment details. It sits in a messaging app, an email account, a shared folder and a notes file, on a device that travels to other people's houses and occasionally gets left on a train. A compromise or a loss is a personal data incident involving children, which is the most sensitive category there is.

So the controls are simple and worth actually doing. A device lock and encryption rather than a four digit code, multi factor authentication on email and any cloud storage, a single place where records are kept rather than spread across apps, deleting records once there is no reason to hold them, and not discussing one family's child in a message to another. For online lessons, be clear with parents about whether sessions are recorded, where recordings are stored and for how long, because an unclear answer to that question is itself a problem.

There is one commercial habit in tuition that converts a professional service into a guarantee, and it is worth avoiding deliberately.

Families buy tuition hoping for a result, and the temptation to say a grade is achievable, to offer a money back promise, or to advertise outcomes is strong in a competitive market. A promise of a specific grade, a pass or an entry is a contractual commitment rather than a professional standard, and most professional indemnity wordings exclude guarantees and warranties outright, so the gap sits on the tutor. It also invites a dispute in a situation where the outcome depends mostly on the pupil.

So describe the service rather than the outcome: hours, content, approach, feedback and how progress will be reported. Where parents ask for a prediction, give a professional view with its basis and its uncertainty rather than a commitment. And be careful with specialist work: where you assess a child for exam access arrangements, advise on school applications, or give an opinion a family acts on financially, that is advice rather than teaching, and it is the part of tuition that genuinely needs professional indemnity.

One cover decides this and most tutors have never heard of it. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.