I've Spent HK$480,000 on Tutoring. Here's the Honest Audit.

By Tiger Ma 虎媽手記 · 1 October 2025 · 5 min read

I work in financial services. My job involves evaluating the performance of assets against what was paid for them. I am, professionally, a person who asks "was this worth the cost?" for a living.

I have never once applied this framework to my children's tutoring spend.

That changes now, because I sat down last month and did the actual numbers. Six years, two children (my daughter is now P6; my son is in P3), every tutoring invoice I could find. The total came to approximately HK$480,000.

Let me walk you through what I found.

The Spreadsheet Nobody Makes

HK$480,000 is real money. It is more than a Hong Kong salary earner's annual gross income at the median. It is what some of my university classmates paid for an entire degree programme. When I wrote it out as a single number, I sat with it for a long time.

Here is how it breaks down, roughly:

• English tutoring (my daughter, P1-P5): HK$120,000 over five years. Specialist English centre, 90-minute sessions twice weekly, competition fees, supplementary materials.
• Maths tutoring (my daughter, P3-P5; my son, P1-P3): HK$95,000. Two different tutors at different phases.
• Mandarin tutoring (both children, various): HK$65,000.
• General tutorial centre "exam prep" (both children): HK$85,000. Multiple sessions in P4, P5, and P6 prep years.
• Various other interventions — reading programmes, writing workshops, a phonics programme my daughter "needed" in P1, an abacus class my son did for eight months: HK$115,000.

Four hundred and eighty thousand Hong Kong dollars.

What Actually Moved the Needle

Here is my honest assessment, broken down against measurable outcomes.

The English tutoring: genuine positive return. My daughter went from a student who could not write an organised paragraph to one who, at P5, was producing structured compositions with real ideas in them. I credit approximately 40% of that to the tutoring and 60% to the fact that she became a reader around P3 and reading English fiction is worth more than any structured lesson. If I could do it again, I'd halve the tutoring spend and double the time spent taking her to the library.

The first maths tutor (my daughter, P3-P4): near zero return. I hired him because she was struggling with multiplication and division. He was patient and kind. Her grades in maths improved. But when I look back at the trajectory, the grades were already improving — she was maturing, the teacher at school had changed, and we had started using an AI grading tool that helped her identify specific error patterns. The tutor was present during the improvement. He did not cause it. I paid roughly HK$45,000 to have a kind man sit next to my daughter while she learned maths on her own developmental schedule.

The second maths tutor (my son, P1-P3): clear negative return. He was excellent at producing correct answers. My son can perform maths procedures beautifully in front of this man. At home, without the tutor, he struggles to explain what he's actually doing. The tutoring created a performance that depends on the tutor being present. This is dependency, not learning. I ended it six months ago.

Mandarin: mixed. One tutor over two years with my daughter: worth it. She built genuine reading fluency. The other three Mandarin interventions — centres, apps, short-course workshops — produced nothing measurable. Zero.

The exam prep centres: generally poor value. These centres are very good at producing children who know how to answer the specific question formats they have been practised on. What they do not produce is genuine understanding. My daughter could answer P6 mock paper questions about topics she had never actually understood, because she had learned the answer patterns. This worried me more than the poor performance it was designed to fix.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Puts in the Spreadsheet

The financial figure is only part of the audit.

Opportunity cost: the hours. Six years of twice-weekly tutoring for my daughter means approximately 600 sessions of 90 minutes each. That is 900 hours in transit and in tutorial centres. I cannot calculate what she would have done with those 900 hours if they had been unstructured. Maybe nothing valuable. Probably some things more valuable than anything any tutor taught her.

The dependency problem. My daughter is now P6. She is technically well-prepared for the transition to secondary school. But she does not like working without support. She reaches for help before she has genuinely tried. I don't know whether this is personality or whether we created it. I suspect we partly created it. A child who has always had an expert sitting next to her may learn to feel incompetent without one.

The relationship cost. Evenings that could have been spent talking, playing, eating together without a schedule driving us out of the door. I don't regret every tutoring session — I genuinely don't — but I regret some of them. I regret the ones where I was buying my own anxiety management, not my child's education.

When Tutoring Is Worth It

After this audit, here is where I've landed.

Tutoring is worth the money when it is targeted, time-limited, and working on a specific identified gap. If your P4 child cannot decompose fractions and this is limiting her maths development, a tutor who works on that specific thing for eight weeks and then leaves is excellent value. If your P6 son cannot structure an English essay and he has exams in three months, focused intervention makes sense.

Tutoring is not worth the money when it is general, indefinite, and driven by parental anxiety rather than child need. Most of the HK$480,000 in my spreadsheet falls into this category.

The question I should have asked myself at every enrolment: "What specific thing will be measurably different after this programme, and by when?" If I couldn't answer that question, I should not have signed up.

The Number I Can't Put in the Spreadsheet

My son built a paper boat last Saturday morning. It was an unsanctioned project involving scissors, tape, and a kitchen bowl full of water. It took him two hours. He sank twelve boats before one floated.

He was problem-solving, adjusting hypotheses, failing, iterating, and completely absorbed. No tutor was involved. No invoice was generated. I have no idea what the learning outcomes were, and I don't care.

That morning is worth more than some of the receipts in my folder. I'm not able to put it in the spreadsheet. But I'm including it in the audit.