What an A-Level Chemistry Tutor Actually Does in a Session
The first session is usually diagnostic. A decent tutor won’t charge in with a topic — they’ll ask for your last mock paper, your school report, and the spec your school is following, then they’ll set you a 20-minute mixed-topic test on the spot. That tells them whether you’ve got a structural problem (you don’t understand moles properly, so half of physical chemistry collapses) or a tactical one (you understand it but you’re losing four marks per question on the unstructured calculation answers).
From session two onwards, the rhythm settles. Roughly 15 minutes on a topic the tutor’s pre-prepared — say, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and how examiners want it labelled with activation energy and catalysed Ea on the same diagram. Then 25 minutes of past paper questions on that topic, marked live so you see why your answer about “particles having more energy” only got 1 of 3 marks (the mark scheme wants “greater proportion of particles with energy ≥ Ea”). The last 20 minutes is mechanism drilling — nucleophilic substitution, electrophilic addition, the SN1/SN2 distinction that AQA loves to test in 6-mark synoptic questions. Homework is set against the next session, usually a 30-mark past paper section. A tutor who doesn’t mark your homework before the next session isn’t worth £45 an hour.
What to Expect by Topic
Physical chemistry — Modules 5 of OCR A, Topic 1.7 onwards on AQA — is where most tutoring time gets spent. Equilibria, Kc and Kp calculations, Born-Haber cycles, entropy and Gibbs free energy. These topics carry the highest marks per question on Paper 1 and the most algebra, so the failure mode is almost always arithmetic under exam pressure rather than misunderstanding. A tutor will typically force you to write out every step including units, even when you “know” the answer, because the OCR mark scheme awards method marks line by line.
Organic chemistry takes a different rhythm. The synoptic Paper 3 (AQA 7405/3) and Paper 5 in OCR A are where students lose grades — multi-step synthesis questions where you have to convert a ketone to a tertiary amine via four reactions, naming each reagent and condition. A tutor will get you doing these from a flashcard deck of functional group transformations. By Easter of Year 13 you should be able to draw any 4-step synthesis between any two named functional groups inside three minutes.
Inorganic chemistry, especially the transition metals on AQA Topic 3.2.5, looks like memorisation but isn’t. Octahedral splitting, ligand exchange in Cu(II), the chromate/dichromate equilibrium — examiners want you to explain colour change in terms of d-orbital energy gaps, not to recite “it goes blue”. Tutors who’ve examined for AQA know exactly which 3-mark trap question comes up every other year.
Common Pitfalls Year 12 and Year 13 Students Hit
The biggest one is moles. Students arrive in Year 12 from a GCSE course where mole calculations were two-step, then meet titration back-calculations involving impurity percentages and dilution factors and quietly stop showing working. By the January Year 13 mock, they’ve embedded a wrong intuition about which mass divides into which. Westminster and Manchester Grammar both report this as their number-one tutor referral reason for Lower Sixth.
The second pitfall is the Required Practical write-ups. A student at Tiffin told me last summer that her teacher had spent one lesson on the buffer practical instead of two, and she lost 6 marks on Paper 3 for not recognising the indicator selection question. A tutor with a lab background spots that immediately and prepares the missing technique questions.
The third is essay-style 6-markers — the “explain why the boiling point of HF is anomalously high” type. Students write three sentences when the mark scheme wants six points. Tutors fix this by giving you the mark scheme upfront, then forcing you to reverse-engineer answers that hit every bullet.
Pricing and How to Book
Realistic UK pricing in 2026: £35–£45 for a Lower Sixth tutor with a relevant 2:1 degree, £45–£60 for an experienced tutor with a track record of A/A* outcomes, £60–£80 for ex-examiners and Oxbridge graduates. Specialist tutors prepping for Cambridge NSAA or medical school chemistry components push £90 in central London.
On TheTutorLink the platform fee is 5% — paid by the tutor out of their hourly rate, not added on top. That means if you and a tutor agree £45/hour, you pay £45/hour and they receive £42.75. Compare that with Tutorful (25%), MyTutor (22%) or SuperProf (20%) where the same £45 lesson costs you £56–£60. Across a typical 40-session A-Level package the saving is £400–£600.
Your first lesson is free. Use it as a real diagnostic — bring your last mock paper, your spec, and three questions you couldn’t do. If the tutor doesn’t tell you something specific about your work by the end of that hour, book somebody else. There’s no recurring charge, no minimum commitment, and the tutor sets their own rate.