Why Our Families Don't Hire Private Tutors
Private education in Tashkent comes with a second budget no school website mentions. A parent adds up the cost of tuition, and seasoned acquaintances correct them: multiply it. Maths separately, English separately, and c
Private education in Tashkent comes with a second budget no school website mentions. A parent adds up the cost of tuition, and seasoned acquaintances correct them: multiply it. Maths separately, English separately, and closer to the final exams, test prep — all of it after lessons, for extra money, with people the school has never met.
That second budget has become so normal that people have stopped asking the main question: why it exists at all.
Where the tutor comes from
A tutor appears not because a child is "weak". A tutor appears where the syllabus runs faster than the child can understand it — and no one nearby notices in time.
The academic director of our Russian-language division breaks this down with an example every family knows — in a long conversation about schooling:
"In the sixth-grade syllabus there's the topic of percentages — one of the few school topics a person meets for the rest of their life: they'll take out a mortgage, work out the overpayment, be short-changed here and there. Three weeks are set aside for it in the sixth grade. Only the strongest students absorb this difficult topic."
After that the gap grows in silence. In a mass-market school a teacher simply doesn't have the resource to close it — in the director's words, even when everyone can see a child "isn't studying at all", it all comes down to one thing: "you'd have to work with them separately, and the teacher has no time to work with them separately". The system pushes the family out onto the private-lesson market itself. A tutor is not a luxury and not "extra enrichment". It is a paid patch on a system that loses children along the way.
And one more uncomfortable detail from the same conversation — about what really pays for a private tutor's authority:
"A teenager will treat a tutor their parents personally pay good money for with a great deal of respect: well, this must be a top specialist. That isn't always the case."
The second budget doesn't buy a guarantee of knowledge. It buys the feeling that you've done something.
Support as architecture, not first aid
We built it differently, and you can check this — the support system is described step by step on the school's site. In short, support here is not a reaction to a bad mark but part of the structure:
- The teacher sees how a child is coping every day — not once a term in a test. If something goes wrong, the school responds within two days.
- Then comes a clear plan: help right there in the lesson, work in a small group, or one-to-one. The parent sees the process from the first step, rather than hearing about a problem at the end of term.
- Everything that elsewhere is paid for in the evenings is built straight into the timetable here: in the senior years, a daily hour to work through difficult topics with a teacher, preparation for international exams and, from year ten, help choosing a university; in the Russian-language programme, dedicated maths support from year six and, where needed, a plan tailored to the individual child.
Behind all of this is a simple principle our academic director puts like this:
"We assess you strictly, but we support you personally — these are entirely different things. We're ready to help you, we're rooting for you, we want you to succeed. But we grade honestly and strictly."
In a system like this, the gap never grows to the size that needs an outsider. That is why our families don't hire tutors — not because we forbid it, but because there is no reason left to. Ask about this at your visit — with the same list of questions we suggested using to test any school. "What share of your students' preparation do tutors cover?" is a question worth asking everywhere you go.
It isn't only about money
The second budget is measured not only in sums. It is measured in evenings. A child who has two tutors after seven lessons lives on the schedule of an adult with two jobs — and somewhere between maths and English their childhood is supposed to fit. A tired child doesn't learn faster. They just start to hate learning sooner.
Effort itself is not the enemy. There is exhaustion that destroys, and there is the kind of strain worth teaching a child to seek: "the pleasure of a great effort — I did it myself, I moved myself forward", as the director says. The difference is who designs that strain: a system that sees the whole child, or three adults who don't know one another, spread across the evenings.
The admissions stories we told about — animation, aerospace engineering, medicine — aren't assembled from evening sessions in scattered subjects. They are grown by a school that knows a child's strengths, their plan and their next step. A tutor, even a very good one, is responsible for their subject. The whole child is the school's responsibility — if the school is capable of it.
What this changes for you
When you work out the cost of schooling — at any school in the city — count both budgets: the official one and the evening one. An investment in a school that needs no second budget often turns out calmer, both for the family finances and for the child.
And let a child's evening belong to them.
How the support system works, step by step: oxbridgeschool.uz/support-tutoring. The full video is above in the article; individual moments: on "I did it myself" — 7:44, on assessment and support — 11:08, on percentages in the sixth grade — 14:07.
