Published 2 November 2025, updated 3 August 2026

Tutoring online is one of the few jobs where not driving genuinely costs you nothing day to day. Which is exactly why sorting a licence keeps getting pushed to next term. These are the questions online tutors actually ask us, roughly in the order they ask them.

I teach from my spare room. Do I honestly need a licence?

Day to day, no. Over a career, most tutors find it decides what work they can take rather than whether they can do the work they already have.

In-person tuition is generally paid at a higher rate than online, and it needs you to get to a family’s house, often in the sort of village or edge-of-town estate where the bus goes twice a day and not at seven in the evening. The same applies to the adjacent work: invigilation, in-school interventions, support delivered in homes, group sessions at a community centre. Every one of those is a travel job.

Schools and colleges also bring in extra invigilators and one-to-one support in the spring, and almost all of those adverts assume you can get yourself to the site.

There is a quieter version of the argument too. Tutoring is location-independent right up until you want to move somewhere cheaper, and cheaper usually means further from a station.

When in the tutoring year should I book this?

Summer, and it is not close.

Your demand curve is not a mystery. September to Christmas builds, January to Easter is steady, and the run-up to GCSEs and A levels from April into June is the busiest and least interruptible stretch of the year. Cancelling on a family six weeks before a paper is the one thing you cannot do.

From roughly mid-July the diary empties out on its own. That is your block, and it has a second advantage. You are not competing for instructor time with students who are only free in the school holidays for exactly the same reason. If summer is impossible, the October half term and the gap between the new year and the January restart are the next best windows.

Whichever one you pick, get the theory test done before it rather than during it.

My evenings are fully booked. Does that rule an intensive out?

The opposite. It makes you one of the easier learners to schedule.

Prime tutoring hours run from roughly four in the afternoon to eight in the evening, plus weekend mornings. That is exactly when every school-age learner and every shift worker wants their driving lessons, and it is the hardest part of an instructor’s diary to get into. Your free time is the middle of the day, which is the part instructors most often struggle to fill.

So if you genuinely need to keep a couple of evening sessions running, say so when you book rather than afterwards. A block of daytime hours with a hard stop at half three is a normal request, not a difficult one.

What does not work is keeping the whole evening block running and treating the driving as the flexible part. The hours are the course. There is no shorter version hiding inside it.

How many hours if I have never driven at all?

More than you would like, and about the same as everybody else. Being good at explaining things is not transferable here. Driving is a motor skill and it is built by repetition rather than by understanding.

Our courses are named for the tuition hours in them: Bronze 10 and 15, Silver 20, 25 and 30, Gold 35, 40 and 45, and Platinum 50, each with three hours of car hire on test day included. A complete beginner belongs at the Gold or Platinum end. If you had lessons at university and let them lapse, Silver 20 and upwards is the usual range, and if you are already close to test standard the Bronze courses exist for that.

Book on what you have actually done rather than on what you hope. Running out of hours with the test already booked is the expensive outcome.

One thing worth stating plainly: the number in the course name is tuition hours, not days. A 40 hour course is not forty hours of you being somewhere, it is forty hours of you driving, and it is the most concentrated week most people have had since sitting their own exams.

What am I actually paying, and when?

Two payments, and they are different things.

The deposit secures the course. It runs from £180 up to £900 depending on the length of the course, and it is a deposit rather than the total.

The balance is your instructor’s tuition fee. It is arranged after you book and due before training starts, and it varies by area and by manual or automatic, so there is no single national total anybody can quote you honestly. The breakdown of intensive course costs goes through both parts properly.

On top of that sit the DVSA’s own fees, which are nothing to do with us: £23 for the theory test and £62 for a weekday practical. If you are self-employed, and most tutors are, the useful bit of planning is that your summer block is also your lowest-income stretch of the year. Put the money aside during the exam season rush rather than trying to find it in August.

Can I keep teaching through the course week?

A little, and less than you think.

Five hours of driving is more tiring than five hours of teaching, in a different way. Teaching tires your voice and your patience. Driving tires the part of you that holds several things in mind at once, which is also the part that notices when a student has quietly stopped following. By seven in the evening on day three you will not be good at your job.

If you have to keep some sessions, keep the ones with your most established students and move the new ones. Tell parents a fortnight ahead. Families in the summer holidays are the most flexible clients you will ever have.

Block the week out in your booking system before you book the course, not after. Whatever platform you use, an open slot will get filled by somebody.

Who books the practical test?

You do. Since 12 May 2026, only the candidate can book and manage their own DVSA practical test, so the account is yours and so is the slot.

Your instructor’s job is advice: when you are realistically ready, which centres tend to have movement, and a heads up when an earlier slot appears. Nobody at a driving school can hold a date for you or move one on your behalf. In practice that means keeping half an eye on your phone during the course week, which is the one exception to leaving it alone.

What if I do not pass first time?

Then you book another test, pay the DVSA £62 again for a weekday slot, and probably take a couple of extra hours with your instructor first. Nobody can promise you a pass and you should be wary of anyone who does.

Ask your instructor for the specific faults rather than the headline outcome. That list is the thing you can actually work on in the couple of hours before a retest.

The thing worth planning for is the gap. Retests are not instant, and if your summer window has closed you may be sitting the second attempt in term time with a diary that has already refilled. Booking early in the summer rather than late leaves room for a second go inside the same quiet stretch, which is a better reason to move than any discount. The reviews page is a better guide to how the week actually feels than anything we could write here, and the FAQs cover the booking mechanics in more detail.