The Tutoring Industry Is HK$7 Billion a Year. Here's What It's Hiding.

By Ms. Poon · 15 October 2025 · 5 min read

For twelve years, I sat on the other side of the table from the tutoring industry's products.

I was involved in school admissions and academic assessment — first at a primary school, then for several years at secondary level. I interviewed children and evaluated their academic profiles. I watched the cohort of intensively tutored Hong Kong children move through assessments, interviews, and the first years of secondary school. I know what they can do. I also know what they cannot do.

The tutoring industry would prefer I didn't write this piece. But the parents spending HK$3,000 to HK$20,000 a month per child deserve to know what the industry is actually selling them.

What Intensive Tutoring Produces

Let me start with what it produces well, because I want to be fair.

A child who has been intensively tutored from P1 can typically answer coached question formats accurately and quickly. Their handwriting is often very neat. Their test-taking mechanics — time allocation, answering in the required format, reading question prompts correctly — are usually good. They score well on assessments that look like the assessments they have been practised on.

In a school admission context, if the assessment is a standardised test of academic content, tutored children often perform strongly. This is exactly what parents are paying for, and in the narrow context of that particular gate, the investment is not irrational.

But the gate is only the beginning. What happens inside the school after the gate is a different question, and the answer is often not what the parents expected.

What Intensive Tutoring Frequently Cannot Produce

Here is what I saw, repeatedly, over twelve years.

Children who cannot hold a spontaneous conversation. I do not mean children who are shy — shyness is not a problem. I mean children who have been so thoroughly coached in what to say that they have not developed the capacity to think on their feet in an unscripted situation. Ask a coached child "what is your favourite book and why?" and you often get a polished three-sentence answer that sounds exactly like the answer a tutor would want. Ask a follow-up they weren't prepared for — "what would the story be like if the ending was different?" — and they go silent. They have the performance. They don't have the thinking underneath it.

Skills that plateau at P4. This is the pattern that haunts me most. Children who were heavily tutored through P1-P3 often arrive at P4 with assessment results suggesting they are performing well above their year group. By P5, many of these same children are performing at or below their peers. What happened is that the tutoring carried them through a developmental stage they hadn't yet reached independently. When the curriculum complexity exceeded what the tutoring could scaffold, the gap appeared. The children were not stupid — they had never been stupid. They had been denied the chance to struggle productively at the right time, and that struggle is what builds genuine capability.

The ability to work independently. I cannot count the number of S1 students I encountered who had academic profiles that suggested strong independent learners, but who could not, in practice, approach an unfamiliar problem without guidance. They had spent their primary years in an educational context where an expert was always present, always directing, always correcting. The experience of sitting with confusion and working through it — the foundational experience of actual learning — had been replaced by an experience of being told what to do next. When S1 asked them to manage their own study, they didn't know where to start.

Genuine curiosity. This one is harder to measure, but it is very visible to a trained observer. Children who have been enjoying learning ask questions that weren't on the worksheet. They make connections between things. They notice unexpected things and want to follow them. Children who have been performing learning for assessors tend not to do this. They are very good at the performance. The curiosity has often been trained out of them by years of curriculum that exists to be mastered rather than explored.

The Economy of Tutor Dependency

There is a structural dynamic in the tutoring industry that I think parents rarely see clearly.

Tutorial centres, tutors, and learning programmes benefit from dependency. A child who develops genuine independent capability does not need the service anymore. A child who needs the service every week, indefinitely, is a recurring revenue stream. The incentives in the industry do not point toward producing children who outgrow the need for tutoring.

This is not a conspiracy. It does not require anyone to be deliberately malicious. It is simply what happens when commercial incentives and educational goals are misaligned. The tutor who produces a genuinely self-directed learner has optimised themselves out of a client. The tutor who keeps a child at the level of needing ongoing support retains the client. Most tutors are not consciously making this calculation. But the structure does the work anyway.

The Parents Who Outsourced the Education

The cases I found most difficult — not the ones who made me angry, but the ones that made me sad — were the families where the parents had effectively outsourced their child's education almost entirely. The child went to school, then to tutorial centre, then to another specialist, then home for dinner and sleep. The parents paid for all of it. They received reports, marks, certificates. They had technically purchased an education.

But they had very little relationship with their child's actual intellectual life. They didn't know what the child found difficult, or what she was interested in, or what questions kept her up at night. Those things had happened somewhere else, with paid professionals. When the child eventually hit a wall — and they often did, in S1 or S2, when the tutoring could no longer carry the cognitive weight — the parents were genuinely bewildered. The receipts were impeccable. The result was unexpected.

The education had been delivered. The learning had not happened.

What Doesn't Show Up on the Invoice

What produces genuine academic capability — not just academic performance — is much harder to buy than a tutorial session.

It is a parent who reads with their child and talks about what they read. It is a dinner table where questions are allowed to be difficult and not knowing the answer is acceptable. It is a child who is given problems to think through without being immediately rescued by a professional. It is time — unscheduled, unpressured time — to be bored, and then to resolve the boredom through genuine engagement with something.

None of these things generate invoices. None of them will be recommended in the school WhatsApp group. And every hour a child spends in an unnecessary tutorial centre is an hour she doesn't spend developing the independent cognitive habits that the best schools, and ultimately the labour market, actually reward.

The tutoring industry is HK$7 billion a year. It is selling something real. But it is also selling a substitute for something that cannot be purchased — and too many families do not realise the substitution has happened until the receipts don't produce the results they expected.