Two children, same class, much the same ability last July. One starts with a tutor in the first week of September. The other gets one in March, when the mock results come home in a plastic wallet.
By May the first has had thirty sessions. The second has had eight. Both sets of parents paid for a tutor. Only one of them bought a year.
What the money actually buys
One-to-one tutoring is worth roughly five months of additional progress on the EEF's figures. Real, well evidenced, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But a tutor booked in September and a tutor booked in March are two different purchases, and what separates them is free. A decision about a calendar, taken in August, by a parent who happened to know when the tests were.
The families who book early are not always the richer ones. Some of them are simply better informed about the date.
The gap they arrive in Year 6 with
Those three numbers are why I find "SATs don't matter" a hard argument to sit through. They matter enormously to the child on the wrong side of that ten months. The result decides which Year 7 set they walk into, and 93% of secondary schools use it to do exactly that.
The National Tutoring Programme, which existed to close some of this, has ended. The gap widened afterwards. I would not plan around it coming back.
The lever that is actually available
So what is left for a family without a spare two thousand pounds?
Thirty school weeks sit between the first day of the autumn term and Monday 10 May 2027. Nine of them fall before Christmas, and those nine are the ones almost nobody uses, because in October nothing feels urgent and the tests are still theoretical.
A family who uses those nine weeks properly, at ten minutes a night, has done something in the region of fifteen hours before the tutored children have had their tenth session. None of that replaces a tutor, and I would not insult anyone by pretending it does. It is simply the portion of the advantage that costs nothing, and it goes unclaimed every single year.
Knowing the SATs 2027 dates in August is a small piece of information with a disproportionate effect. It is why we put the date and the school-week count on the front of the site rather than filing them in a guide, and why there is a free tier at all. Paying for more is a real choice, and I am not going to dress it up. Knowing when the tests are should not be.
The uncomfortable bit
Information is distributed as unevenly as money, and more quietly.
The parents in my WhatsApp group knew the 2027 date in July. Some of them have already told their child's tutor. Nobody circulated that to the families who were not in the group, and nobody meant anything by it. That is simply how a head start propagates, and it is the version of the gap that could be closed with a sentence.
Year 6 SATs are Monday 10 to Thursday 13 May 2027. Tell somebody who does not know.
A tutored child usually starts in September. That head start, rather than the tutoring itself, is often what shows up in May. A head start is the one part of the advantage that costs nothing.
Sources: Sutton Trust / DfE aggregate (2024), private tutoring access; Education Policy Institute Disadvantage Gap Report (2024); Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit; DfE policy records on the National Tutoring Programme
Know another parent who could use this? Send it their way.