I Cancelled All Tutorial Centres for One Term. Here Is What Happened to My Children's Grades.

Last year, in August, I looked at the week ahead for both children and felt something I can only describe as secondhand exhaustion on their behalf. Monday: Cantonese tutoring for my daughter, maths for my son. Tuesday: English for both. Wednesday: maths for my daughter, piano for my son. Thursday: science enrichment for my daughter. Friday: "free" but usually used for catching up. Saturday morning: Olympiad maths preparation class for my son, which he hated but I was convinced was building character or something.

Both children were doing between fourteen and eighteen structured hours per week outside school. They were also doing approximately six to eight hours of homework. They were sleeping, on average, about eight hours a night, which sounds like enough until you subtract the time cost of transitions — packing bags, travelling to centres, decompressing after — and realise that their available unstructured time was approaching zero.

My son had started being sick on Sunday evenings. Not dramatically ill — just headaches, stomach aches, the physical vocabulary of a child whose body is trying to communicate what his words can't. My daughter had started going through the motions. She attended her sessions, she did the work, she was present in the technical sense of the word. She retained approximately nothing.

So I cancelled everything for one term. September through December.

The decision felt radical. My husband thought I'd lost my mind. My own mother, when I told her, said something I won't repeat here. The children, when I told them, looked like I'd announced Christmas had been moved up by four months.

Here is what I replaced tutoring with: school, homework, and two things only — my son kept piano (he genuinely likes it, it was not an academic pressure point) and my daughter kept a weekly reading habit we'd established that she treated as her own time. Everything else: gone.

And here is what happened to grades, because that's the question everyone is actually asking:

My son's grades: maths went down by 9 percentage points on the December exam. Chinese was unchanged. English actually improved by 6 points — his teacher later said he seemed more willing to write creatively, possibly because he had energy again.

My daughter's grades: across subjects, essentially flat. Her maths and science stayed similar; her English improved slightly. No collapse. No dramatic decline.

This was not what I expected. I had expected a clearer correlation — tutoring removed, grades fall. The maths decline for my son was real and correlated with the tutoring removal, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the other subjects, which had been tutored as diligently, showed no effect. Which raises the uncomfortable question: what were those sessions actually doing, if their removal left no mark?

My working hypothesis: we had been using tutoring as insurance against results we were afraid of, not as targeted support for genuine gaps. The Cantonese sessions my daughter attended every Monday — she was not struggling with Cantonese. She was getting B+. I was paying for extra Cantonese to maintain A grades and the B+ held without the tutoring, which means I was paying for the difference between a B+ and an A. Whether that difference justifies the cost is a question each family has to answer for itself.

What we went back to in January: maths tutoring for my son, one session per week (previously two). That's it. We have not resumed the other subjects.

What changed: both children are sleeping better. My son's Sunday illnesses have stopped. My daughter has started reading again in her own time — actual reading, for enjoyment, not assigned reading. When I ask them how school was, they have things to say. This sounds small. After the year where they came home and went directly to preparation for the next session, it is not small.

I'm not saying tutorial centres are wrong. I am saying we were using them as anxiety management — my anxiety, not my children's gaps — and that became a scheduling burden that was actually impeding learning rather than supporting it.

The number of sessions that produce genuine outcomes is probably smaller than the number of sessions Hong Kong parents typically buy. I have no data on this beyond my own two children, which is admittedly not a controlled study. But two children are two children, and what I observed in that term was not what I expected to observe.

Run your own experiment. You might be surprised by what survives the removal.