You're in. Let's get you set up.

Congratulations, and welcome to The Student Tutors. You've made it through the interview, which means we're confident you've got what it takes, so now it's just a case of getting your account and profile properly set up before your first lesson.

Ted's welcome video, 10 minutes, worth watching before you dive into the guide below.

This guide walks through everything in one place: your TutorCruncher profile, DBS and ID checks, what a great session looks like, how jobs and payments work, how lessons actually run day to day, and how to earn extra through tutor content. It's built to be worked through top to bottom, with a couple of quick checks along the way, not a test, just a way for both of us to know the essentials have landed.

• Complete your TutorCruncher profile: qualifications, subjects, a proper profile photo
• Upload your ID (passport or driving licence) and DBS certificate as Documents
• Set up your Stripe payout account so you can actually get paid
• Know how to raise a safeguarding or wellbeing concern if you ever need to
• Skim the resource library and get familiar with how Bobbin works

Your TutorCruncher profile

TutorCruncher is the platform everything runs through: job matching, scheduling, invoicing, and payments. A complete profile is what gets you matched with the right students, so it's worth doing properly now rather than patching it later.

• Profile information: your qualifications, experience, and the subjects you teach.
• Teaching skills: every subject and level you're genuinely qualified to teach. This is literally what the matching is based on, so be thorough here.
• Profile picture: a proper photo someone else has taken of you, plain background, no selfies. Parents are trusting us with their kids, and a scruffy phone selfie undermines that before you've even said hello.
• Qualifications: academic achievements and anything else that shows your expertise.

You'll find a Documents section in the left-hand menu with a Single Document Upload button. This is where your CV, certificates, ID, and DBS all go. Your bank details and uploaded documents are only ever visible to you and TST's owner-level admins.

DBS, ID & safeguarding

You'll be working directly with under-18s, so this section isn't optional admin, it's the part that keeps students safe and keeps TST able to operate. We'll have talked through this at interview too, but here's the reference version.

A DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) check is the standard UK safeguarding requirement for anyone working with children, and TST requires a valid one on file for every tutor. Upload your certificate as a document on your TutorCruncher profile as soon as you have it.

Alongside your DBS, please upload a photo ID, your passport or driving licence, as a document on your profile too. This is standard identity verification for anyone tutoring under-18s and something we're required to hold on file.

If anything a student says or does in a lesson worries you, about their welfare, home life, or state of mind, don't sit on it. TutorCruncher has a built-in way to flag this properly:

• From a Job or Lesson page, there's an option to raise a Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concern directly.
• Or via your profile icon (top right) → Safeguarding/Wellbeing Concerns, where you can also see anything you've reported before.
• Once raised, it goes straight to Faye, TST's designated Safeguarding/Wellbeing lead (faye@thestudenttutors.co.uk), so you don't need to chase it up separately.

Contact Ted directly at ted@thestudenttutors.co.uk, or email info@thestudenttutors.co.uk, which reaches both of them. Either of them can also be reached on WhatsApp if that's faster for you, Faye's number is 07970 432980.

Delivering brilliant lessons

This is the actual job. Great tutoring at TST looks a specific way: fun, interactive, and challenging, for both of you. Here's what that means in practice.

• They're stretched and challenged, but supported, never afraid to get things wrong or ask a "silly" question.
• They notice their own progress, and get the chance to reflect on and feed back on the session.
• They have a genuine rapport with you, and you make the subject feel relatable, not academic for academic's sake.
• They leave with clear feedback, one small independent task, and something to look forward to next time.

• Think of it as personal training for the mind: every session tailored to that one learner, not a generic lesson plan.
• Praise often, even for small progress, it's one of the most reliable motivators there is.
• Keep it interactive. The student should be doing most of the talking and the work, avoid "chalk and talk" where you explain and they just take notes.
• Check understanding constantly with quick quizzes, recap questions, or getting them to teach the concept back to you, rather than asking "does that make sense?" (they'll always say yes).
• Teach study skills alongside the subject: active recall (retrieving information, not just re-reading) and spaced repetition. This is often the bit that actually moves grades.
• Set one simple task between lessons, enough to reinforce, not so much it becomes a chore.

Treat this as a flexible template, not a script, adapt it to the learner and the topic.

• Give a proper introduction of yourself at the start: your academic journey, hobbies, a bit of you.
• Make them feel there's genuinely nowhere else you'd rather be right now. Every session.
• Learn their starting point and motivation early: what they know, and why they actually care (or don't yet).
• Empathy is your biggest advantage, you sat these exact exams a couple of years ago. Use that.
• Plan the session so you're facilitating, not lecturing. A well-planned session with the learner doing the work is far less stressful for everyone than winging it.
• Tackle the highest-yield, most-challenging topics first, so there's time across several sessions to keep revisiting them.
• Match your resources to their actual exam board (AQA, OCR, Edexcel, etc.), and check specs are current.
• Make it genuinely fun. Games, interactive tasks, whatever keeps it upbeat.

Applying & scheduling in TutorCruncher

Once your profile's live, here's how jobs actually get from "available" to "on your calendar."

New opportunities show up on the Available Jobs page. You can filter by pay rate, subject, date, and your qualification level, then apply with a short cover note on the ones that fit. An admin reviews it and you'll hear back by email either way, and you can track anything pending under Current Applications.

• Add lessons from inside a Job via Add New Lesson: date, time, and a short description.
• A future-dated lesson is created as Planned.
• For recurring slots, use Actions → Repeat rather than adding each one manually.
• Keep your Availability current, so you're only ever offered slots that actually work for you.

Drag the lesson on your calendar, or use Actions → Edit on the lesson itself. For travel or materials costs, raise an expense from the Job or Lesson's Activity tab, the client's charged at their next invoice and you're paid out from that.

We charge parents full price for lessons cancelled with less than 24 hours notice, so we hold tutors to the same standard. Life happens and your own schedule will shift sometimes, that's fine, just tell the parent and Faye as early as you possibly can, so we can let the parent know or arrange a replacement tutor if the lesson genuinely can't go ahead. As long as everyone's told in good time, this is never a problem.

Teaching in Bobbin

Bobbin is where you prepare for, deliver, and write up your lessons, including the classroom itself, the whiteboard now lives inside Bobbin directly. In practice, this is all just a couple of buttons inside your login, and reminder emails land in your inbox before every lesson, so you'll rarely need to go looking for any of it.

Lessons are still created and scheduled in TutorCruncher, as covered in the last section. Bobbin then works alongside it: it's where you prepare a Lesson Plan, deliver the lesson itself, and complete the Lesson Report afterwards. Bobbin also adds AI-powered tools that transcribe each session and help you write that report, so there's less admin sitting between you and the next lesson.

• On the Bobbin Lesson page, click Join Space to open Bobbin's built-in whiteboard, this is where the actual session happens.
• You and your student share a live whiteboard and document view, seeing each other's cursor and working together in real time.
• Resource panel: pull in a worksheet or graph, then resize and annotate it on the whiteboard.
• Uploading documents: bring in your own PDFs or images and annotate directly on top of them.
• Chat: useful if audio drops, and a good place to drop links or homework you can both revisit next lesson.
• Presenter view: keeps your student's view following yours, and lets you manage participants, mute a mic, turn off video, or remove someone if needed.
• Progress tracking: log grades and homework as you go.

• Once the lesson ends, Bobbin transcribes it and generates AI insights: a summary, subjects covered, skills practiced, and strengths and areas for improvement per student.
• You'll get an email once it's ready, prompting you to complete the Lesson Report in Bobbin.
• Review the AI-generated content, edit anything that's off, and add your own Tutor notes, private observations that go into the report but sit apart from the AI insights.
• No usable recording for a session? You can still complete the report with your own notes instead, and the lesson bills as normal.
• Once submitted, you're redirected back to TutorCruncher and the lesson is marked complete there too, no double entry needed.

Watch: completing a Lesson Report in Bobbin, Bobbin's own 2-minute walkthrough.

Getting paid

Payments run through Stripe, connected directly to your TutorCruncher profile. Set this up early, it's the one thing that directly delays your first payout if it's left until later.

Your rate is set against the level you're actually teaching that lesson at, and moves up automatically once you're awarded Super Tutor status.

Go to My Profile → Payouts Account → Sign up now. You'll be taken to Stripe to enter your bank details, then redirected back, it links automatically. You only need to do this once, it's shared across any future TST profile you might have.

You can change your automatic payout date from the Payouts Account panel, changes take effect the following month, not immediately.

Become a Super Tutor

We love recognising excellence, which is why we created Super Tutor status. It's not just a title, it comes with real perks, and we genuinely can't wait to see you get there.

• Super Tutors consistently receive positive feedback from learners and maintain a reliable, dependable schedule.
• Getting there is really the fundamentals, done consistently: delivering great sessions, making a positive impact on every learner, and staying organised with your session planning and client communication.

We assess a combination of indicators: experience (usually a minimum of 6 months), client reviews, and feedback. There's no single box to tick, it's a rounded picture of how you're doing over time.

On top of that: special recognition within the team, and we celebrate Super Tutors regularly, not just a one-off badge.

Tutor content: the easiest extra pay you'll find here

This is genuinely one of the best-value things you can do as a TST tutor. Short clips, filmed in minutes, that pay on top of your lesson hours, and help parents find and request you by name. We want as many tutors sending content as possible, so take this section seriously.

Short phone-recorded clips of you. Zero editing needed, we do that part.

• Teaching tips: a quick method, exam trick, common mistake, memorisation shortcut
• Subject myth-busters: "You don't need to memorise every physics formula, here's why"
• Revision footage: just film yourself revising at your desk, phone propped up, no talking required
• Time-lapses: 20 minutes of revision compressed into 10 seconds
• Day-in-the-life: a short montage of your study day
• Motivation: a 20-second pep talk to a student who's struggling
• Past paper breakdowns: talk through a single question as if explaining it to a Year 10

You don't need to be "good on camera." The silent revision and time-lapse videos are some of our best performers.

• Vertical (9:16) on your phone
• 20 to 45 seconds long
• Good lighting: face a window or lamp, don't backlight yourself
• Quiet, tidy-ish background
• One take: if you fluff a line, just say it again, we edit the mistakes out

For talking clips, the structure that works: Hook (first 3 seconds, a bold claim, question, or common mistake) → Value (15 to 30 seconds, one tip explained simply) → CTA (last few seconds, "follow for more tips" or "book a consultation with The Student Tutors"). Revision, time-lapse, and day-in-the-life clips don't need any of that, just film.

Even easier. You're already in lessons, just flag the best moments and we'll clip them. Any of these count: you explained a tricky concept clearly, you answered a common exam question well, the student had a lightbulb moment, or you walked through a method that would help any student watching. Usually 30 seconds to 2 minutes of raw footage is enough.

Since 22 April 2026, names in the classroom display differently: tutors show as first name plus surname initial (e.g. "Ellie R"), and students show as initials only. This keeps everyone anonymous and means lesson clips are safe to post with minimal edits. Only clips from lessons on or after 22 April 2026 can be used, anything before that still shows full names and can't be used.

To submit a highlight: open the recording in Bobbin's Transcript tab, grab the recording link, note a rough timestamp ("around 14 minutes in" is fine), then describe what the clip is about in one sentence on the form below.

Payment is raised via TutorCruncher once a clip's accepted and scheduled. Most good-faith submissions get used, though submitting doesn't guarantee it.

• Money: 2 clips a week at £7 baseline is roughly £56 a month before any view bonuses. One viral hit can add £150 or more on top.
• More 1-1 bookings: parents who see your face on our socials often request you by name when they enquire, more visibility fills more of your calendar.
• It gets easier: the first clip is the hardest. By the fifth, it's a 3-minute job.

Teaching resource library

A running list of sites other tutors use for lesson planning. Not exhaustive, and most tutors lean on their own subject resources too, but useful when you're stuck for a starting point.

That's everything, you're ready to go.

Genuinely looking forward to seeing the difference you make. One last thing, then you're done.

Quick form, two minutes, so we know your account's properly ready rather than guessing:

• Platform or logistics question: faye@thestudenttutors.co.uk
• Safeguarding or wellbeing concern: raise it directly in TutorCruncher, don't wait or email around it
• Locked out of a job or lesson: flag it to Faye rather than troubleshooting alone
• Urgent and Faye's unreachable: ted@thestudenttutors.co.uk, or info@thestudenttutors.co.uk which reaches both, or WhatsApp Faye on 07970 432980