Why Paying for More Lesson Teachers Isn't Always the Answer

Your child is struggling in Maths. So you get a lesson teacher. Then English isn't moving either, so you get another one. Before you know it, three teachers are coming to the house, and the results still haven't changed.

Many Nigerian parents know this story. The problem usually isn't how much you're spending. It's what kind of help your child is getting.

What extra lessons can cost

In 2026, Leadership newspaper spoke to a full-time tutor in Abuja who charges between ₦50,000 and ₦100,000 per child a month, depending on the subject and the hours.

By our sum, if you hire three teachers at those prices, you're paying ₦150,000 to ₦300,000 a month. That's two to four months of minimum wage, every month. So it's worth knowing what actually works.

What the research says works

The Education Endowment Foundation, a well-known education research group, has studied tutoring for years. Here's what it found, in simple words.

• One-to-one tutoring helps. On average, children gained about five extra months of progress over a year.
• Small groups help too. About four extra months, though less for secondary school students, and it works less well once a group gets bigger than six or seven.
• Short and regular beats long and random. The best results came from sessions of about 30 minutes, three to five times a week, for up to about ten weeks, with tutors who link the lessons to what the child is learning in class.

Now look at that schedule. By our sum, it's only about 15 to 25 hours of tutoring in total, which is less than half an hour a day. You don't need endless hours. You need the right hours.

Teach the child where they actually are

Here's the big idea from J-PAL, a research centre at MIT. Their approach, called Teaching at the Right Level, groups children by what they can actually do, not by their age or class.

"Meeting children where they are can help them catch up in school." J-PAL

J-PAL says this approach has produced some of the biggest learning gains it has measured, and it's already used in seven Nigerian states. In Ghana, a trial in 210 schools found that this kind of targeted teaching raised children's maths and English scores.

So if your child in JSS 2 is still shaky on Primary 5 fractions, a teacher who keeps drilling JSS 2 work won't help much. A teacher who goes back and fixes the fractions will.

Why more teachers can make it worse

• Different teachers, different methods. Three teachers explaining the same thing three different ways can confuse a child who's already struggling.
• Busy teachers. Leadership found many lesson teachers running several homes a week on top of their school job. A teacher who's stretched thin has less time to really study your child's problem.
• More hours, same mistake. If the teacher hasn't found the real gap, more lessons just repeat the same thing.

What to check before adding another teacher

1. Ask for a diagnosis. A good tutor should tell you exactly which topics or types of question your child keeps getting wrong.
2. Ask how they'll fix it. Will they go back to the basics your child missed?
3. Keep it short and regular. Ask for focused sessions linked to what your child is doing at school.
4. Give it six to eight weeks, then measure. Compare test or mock scores before and after.
5. Try one good teacher before hiring three. Fit matters more than numbers.

The goal isn't to spend less on your child. It's to spend on help that works.

On Scholarleveling, your child can learn with a teacher in live classes on any phone, and you get a parent code to see their progress every week, so you know whether the help is working.

Read next: what to check when your child isn't improving in school, or how to cut school costs without hurting learning.