The first person you hire, and what you actually hand over

There is a point at which a tutor stops being limited by teaching hours and starts being limited by everything around them: marking, messages, scheduling, printing, chasing payments. The hours are full and the income has stopped growing, because the growth is being consumed by work that does not require a teacher.

Hand over the administration, not the teaching

The instinct is to hire someone to teach a group, which reduces your teaching hours: the part that earns most per hour and the part only you can do. Almost always the better first hire takes the surrounding work: attendance, parent messages, printing and organising materials, first-pass marking of objective questions, chasing missing homework.

That is frequently ten to fifteen hours a week for a tutor with several groups, and every hour of it returns at your teaching rate rather than at theirs.

Two things not to delegate

• The difficult parent conversation. A parent who is worried needs the person responsible for the teaching. Delegating it reads as being handled, and it turns a solvable concern into a departure.
• Judgement about a student. Whether a student is falling behind, whether to move them, what they need next. All of that requires seeing them teach and be taught. An assistant can collect the evidence; the reading of it stays with you.

Write down what you do before you hand it over

Most delegation fails for a boring reason: the task existed only in the tutor's head, so the assistant does it differently, the tutor corrects it, and after three rounds it is faster to do it themselves. Spend twenty minutes writing the actual steps, including the small decisions, which are the part that never gets said. The written version is also what makes the second assistant cheap to add.

Give access to the parts, not to everything

An assistant who needs to record attendance does not need to change grades or see fee records. This is not distrust; it is the ordinary practice that keeps a mistake small and keeps the responsibility for a grade unambiguous. Whatever system you use, decide who can do what before the first day rather than after the first problem.

Sources

• International Labour Organization — Teachers and education personnel
• OECD — Education and Skills