Enter the emotional support tutor-therapist – !

SINGAPORE – On the eve of the A-level mathematics examinations in November 2024, Mr Lim Chuan Li received more than 800 WhatsApp messages.Some were panicked requests for clarifications on particular equations. Others asked to review challenging questions.The 36-year-old former Ministry of Education (MOE) teacher, who now tutors at Zenith Education Studio in Tampines, spent the entire day in front of his laptop responding to each one.To the rest of his junior college (JC) students who did not reach out, he sent them encouraging messages in the week leading up to the national exam, such as “Every flower endures a tough storm before it blooms with beauty, you have survived a very challenging period and now is the time for you to shine”.Enter the emotional support tutor-therapist. Beyond academic guidance at the secondary school and JC level, a large part of his or her job is to provide round-the-clock support to anxious students and, sometimes, their parents.In education-obsessed Singapore, such tutors command eye-watering sums of money. Families in Singapore spent $1.8 billion on private tuition for their children in 2023, according to the latest household expenditure survey, marking an increase from $1.1 billion a decade earlier.“What really distinguishes me is that I’m always there to support the students, in terms of the different kinds of help they need,” says Mr Lim, who is often glued to a stylus, annotating students’ work on his phone, when he is not teaching 10 classes a week.The help needed ranges from short questions over WhatsApp requiring brief responses to more complex problems needing handwritten explanations or video recordings. A timely response is crucial, even outside exam season. The bachelor tries to respond within the hour, so his charges do not “feel stuck” in their learning process.Although he teaches only in the afternoon, his first task of the day, starting at 7am, is to respond to late-night messages from students. He lays down his phone to rest at 11pm, and the cycle repeats the next day.“As a general rule, I tell my students if I don’t reply to them in 24 hours, I must have missed their messages. It gets buried under the other million questions I get,” he says, adding that they should ping him again.He teaches about 260 students a year. First-year JC students pay $380 for four two-hour group lessons with him a month. Each class is capped at 35 students.Responsiveness is one of the key ways tutors compete to stand out in an increasingly saturated shadow education system – a term used by experts to refer to supplementary tutoring.Tutor Lim Chuan Li sends out affirmations and encouraging messages to his exam-stressed students.PHOTO: LIM CHUAN LITutor Timothy Chia takes a different approach when it comes to student support, by deploying artificial intelligence (AI), live streaming and pre-recorded lectures.“On major exam days, I wake up at 6am and, while students are on the way to school, I’ll be texting them,” he says. To ease exam nerves, he conducts live-streaming sessions in the hours leading up to exams so that swarms of students are able to pose last-minute questions at the same time.The 36-year-old former JC teacher of over seven years founded private tutoring chain Illum.e in 2021, and now coaches around 160 secondary and A-level students a year in English and General Paper. He charges between $75 and $100 a class – each capped at 35 students – with students typically signing up for 40 classes a year.Beyond exam support, Illum.e also uses a web platform where students can practise past-year papers online and get immediate AI-generated feedback for their essays.Developed by Singapore-based company KiteSense, the AI tool is fed answer keys and other work samples, and provides instant feedback based on certain parameters. The feedback is later discussed with the centre’s tutors.Mr Chia notes that students crave immediacy of feedback that they may not be able to find in time-strapped school classrooms. “The AI portal makes the feedback occur in two minutes instead of two weeks,” he says.Selling aspiration and approachabilityToday, much of what is attractive about tuition centres extends beyond academic support. Successful centres tap the anxieties central to the student and parent psyche.At The Thought Tailor, prestige-driven marketing forms part of its strategy, tapping universal parent-student aspirations to gain admission to the world’s best universities.At The Thought Tailor, prestige-driven marketing forms part of the centre’s strategy.ST PHOTO: GIN TAYVisitors to the centre at Goldhill Plaza are greeted by signage highlighting the tutors’ brand-name qualifications from Oxbridge, the London School of Economics and King’s College London.Like many tuition centres in Singapore, The Thought Tailor also hands out wads of free foolscap paper outside secondary schools and JCs, a common marketing strategy to attract new sign-ups. Its notepads feature the facade of Cambridge University’s Corpus Christi College, alongside a collection of QR codes linking to useful study resources online.The Thought Tailor’s notepads feature the facade of Cambridge University’s Corpus Christi College, alongside a collection of QR codes that link to useful study resources online.ST PHOTO: TEO KAI XIANGCo-founder Shawn Russell, who completed his master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Cambridge, says his centre’s marketing is prestige-focused to highlight how its teachers – four of whom are Cambridge post-graduates or graduates – can add value to students by providing them with “much needed frames of analysis”.The 36-year-old adds: “We also tell our students that our teachers have very humble backgrounds. I was from a neighbourhood school, I worked my way up, so they can do that as well.”This taps students’ aspirations of getting into these elite schools, as quite a few do request assistance with university admissions and personal statements. They also ask questions about what it was like to study at Cambridge.“These days, our students come mainly from Raffles Institution, National Junior College and River Valley High School. The students from these schools tend to be quite aggressive in terms of what they want. They’re quite mature in understanding what they need to do to succeed,” he says.These students, he notes, frequently request individual consultations seeking reassurance on their interpretation of essay questions. To help them build confidence, he cites a recent class during which he beamed a short clip of South Korean zombie horror film Train To Busan (2016) and asked them to discuss the protagonist’s characterisation, as a framing device to improve their essay-writing skills.Brand-name universities take centre place in The Thought Tailor’s marketing to students.ST PHOTO: TEO KAI XIANGAnother pull factor for teens is the approachability and friendliness of tutors, something that many tuition centres cultivate through an active online presence.Mr Lim’s unstuffy teaching style has found a wider audience on social media, where one of his viral Instagram videos from 2024 notched more than 500,000 views. In it, he explains trigonometry formulas while donning a chef’s hat and using a pizza as a visual tool.Zenith Education Studio is not alone in adopting such an approach to marketing. Other centres have also widened the breadth of their content beyond promoting past results to include online skits, giveaways and other social media tactics which zero in on teen concerns on TikTok and Instagram.“We speak directly to the JC kid,” says Ms Jamie Tan, Zenith’s head of marketing. She adds that the parents of these teens typically have less agency over which centres their children opt for as they age up.Zenith Education Studio had more than 5,000 student enrolments in 2024, and currently employs 70 tutors across its eight centres. “Our tutors are not just experienced, but they’re also your friend,” she says.For Mr Lim, this approachability manifests in posts highlighting his own experience with dyslexia – something he realised only when he became a JC teacher at age 26 – along with his quirky ritual of dressing up as Cai Shen Ye (the God of Wealth) and offering chocolate coins as “blessings” to students before major exams.Mr Chia of the Illum.e chain notes that the desire for approachable teachers is why there will always be demand for younger tutors, even those without teaching qualifications.His centre employs 23 teaching assistants – most of them undergraduates and ex-students of the centre – as current students find younger faces easier to approach and pose questions to, compared with a more wizened instructor.“Students like rapport. If you speak to someone close to your age, you’re more willing to share certain things. You’re more frank,” he notes. This, in his view, stems from performance anxiety before a figure of authority.This also informs the way tuition centres and curricula are designed, compared with in school classrooms. Beyond the social media skits that are now commonplace on tuition centre social media accounts, Illum.e also uses bright and colourful classroom decor, and encourages tutors to incorporate humour and create a casual environment for learning.“It’s about making a safe space. Students do not want to go to a place that’s high-stress,” he says. “You look at students’ lives – they lead very complex, busy and stressful lives. You don’t need to add extra layers of that.”MOE teacher-to-tutor pipelineAlthough providing round-the-clock support can be taxing, flexibility around work is one reason the tutor pipeline is thriving.For Mr Lim, the transition from teaching at a JC to private education was driven by a turning point in his life in 2021, when his father suffered a subdural haematoma, a brain condition requiring extensive care.“The teacher schedule didn’t allow me the time and space to look after my dad’s healthcare needs,” says the National University of Singapore (NUS) maths graduate, who won an MOE Outstanding Youth in Education Award while teaching at Temasek Junior College.Although he now teaches about 260 JC students a year, the job affords him more flexibility and freedom. He lives with his retiree parents in their Tampines HDB flat, a 10-minute walk from his tuition centre, and enjoys more time with his family.Mr Lim Chuan Li left teaching to look for a job that could afford him more time with his parents.ST PHOTO: ARIFFIN JAMARFlexi-work is also the selling point for Mr Russell, who co-founded The Thought Tailor chain of tuition centres in 2022, and primarily teaches on weekends.The former MOE teacher tutors up to 300 secondary school and JC students a year in English and General Paper, and now has three centres in Novena, Bukit Timah and Jurong East. They charge $60 to $90 each two-hour class.While he conducts four in-person classes on Saturdays as well as Sundays from 9am to 9pm, his weekdays are dedicated to answering student queries on WhatsApp and curriculum design.This affords him the ability to work remotely. The bachelor sometimes takes midweek staycations at the Studio M hotel in Nanson Road, and splits his time between his family home in Singapore and a condominium he rents in Bangkok.“Whenever I have the time or need a change of environment, I would go to Thailand and work on my curriculum, and then fly back on Fridays,” he says.The Thought Tailor founder Shawn Russell says flexible work is one of the perks of being a tutor.ST PHOTO: GIN TAYTutors speaking to The Sunday Times declined to state how much they earn, but say their current salaries are higher than what they made as school teachers. To give a sense of the numbers, each JC student typically pays between $60 and $100 a weekly class, and the tutors who spoke to ST take on over 100 students each year.While part of this sum goes towards rental, marketing and other miscellaneous costs, the economics of tutoring means that the profession often enjoys higher wages than the $3,000 to $5,000 a month – according to company review website Glassdoor’s 2025 wage data – made by early- to mid-career teachers.Dr Jason Tan, an associate professor at the National Institute of Education (NIE), expresses concern over how the pervasiveness of tuition has created increasingly blurred boundaries between the private sector and the public education system.It is ironic, he says, that teachers trained by the mainstream school system now serve as a talent pipeline for the private tutoring industry. “I don’t think it’s possible to argue really that when you have such extensive private tutoring, there’s no effect on what goes on in mainstream schools,” he adds.Beyond being an off-ramp for teachers looking for alternative career paths, tutoring complicates the work of teaching in public schools, as teachers must now deal with classrooms of students who have increasingly divergent experiences of learning based on their family’s access to tuition, he adds.“It suggests to me, if nothing else, that a large number of parents feel their children need some out-of-school help,” he says. “It’s no longer supplementary in nature, as you have this interesting phenomenon of some students having tutoring that intentionally keeps them ahead of what is being covered in schools.”Making the best betterWhen ST asked tutors how they feel about this growing tension between equity and for-profit education that is not accessible to all, most point to their centres’ bursaries and discounts for the needy.Mr Russell says his centre, like many others, offers a discount of 10 to 75 per cent off fees for needy students, depending on how financially disadvantaged they are. Students must provide supporting documents such as family payslips or MOE Financial Assistance Scheme documents. Around 10 students receive this subsidy at his centres each year.Illum.e, which had over 1,500 enrolments across its five centres in 2024, offers a 50 per cent discount on fees to students under MOE’s Financial Assistance Scheme. Around 5 per cent of the centre’s students currently receive this discount.Zenith’s Mr Lim, meanwhile, counters that there are private tutors who charge even higher rates.“Over here, we really keep our fees as affordable as we can,” he says. “And on top of the fees, the part that is not explicitly mentioned is the additional value we provide to students. Additional consultations are free. Responses on WhatsApp are free. Additional free classes when needed. Apart from the fees they are paying, they are also getting a lot more value.”Dr Jacqueline Ho, an assistant professor of sociology at the Singapore Management University (SMU) researching meritocracy and inequality, notes that while centres deserve some credit for providing subsidies, the percentage of students on financial assistance is unlikely to be high as tuition centres are profit-driven entities. “There is a reason education is provided by the public sector,” she adds.She says there is reason to be concerned about the shadow education system’s impact on inequality, as the recent household expenditure survey highlights that higher-income parents spend more on tuition. “Intuitively, we’d think that investment in these activities would translate into better education outcomes. But to my knowledge, we have no empirical research that has been done on this question in Singapore,” she says.“Typically, we think about tuition contributing to inequalities in academic outcomes, but it may also contribute to inequalities in mental health and students’ sense of belonging in the education system,” says Dr Ho. “That is to say, among the students who lack confidence in the formal school setting, only those with the means and connections will be able to regain this confidence through private education.”Inequality researcher Nathan Peng adds that supporting students whose learning styles do not fit mainstream educational practices is still a service that must be paid for, and is not on offer to everyone who needs it.The assistant professor at SMU notes that private educators who can more effectively cater to different learning styles are likely to be in greater demand and command higher fees, exacerbating the relative advantage experienced by the more well-off in society.Meritocracy and parentocracyDespite MOE’s moves to reduce emphasis on grades, tutors and students alike believe that strong demand for private tuition is unlikely to falter.With Singapore students competing for places at prestigious universities abroad, academic results will continue to matter and worried students will reach for whatever support they can find to attain their aspirations.Mr Chia is blunt about his hard-sell pitch to anxious students and parents. “It is true that students who go through tuition do get extra help, and it’s not ideal. But ultimately, if we don’t allow this to happen, how can we claim to be meritocratic?“There has to be a way for someone who wants to improve to find the best way to improve.”Tutor Timothy Chia takes a different approach when it comes to student support, by deploying AI, live streaming and pre-recorded lectures.PHOTO: COURTESY OF TIMOTHY CHIALikening himself to a medical specialist, he says: “The usual angle I will give is that if you find out you have three months left to live, who are you going to seek help from?” He adds that many “late-stage” students come to him, desperate to be saved, with only a few months left to go before their A-level exams. But NIE’s Dr Tan cautions against this line of thinking. “Singapore’s meritocratic ideal is an ideal, it’s not a reality. Private tutoring is but one manifestation of ‘parentocracy’ in Singapore.”Parentocracy is a term coined by British sociologist Phillip Brown to refer to how parents’ wealth and wishes, rather than individual students’ ability and effort, determine school outcomes.With the widespread prevalence of private tutoring that treats education as a lucrative consumer good, he notes that it is no wonder that Minister for Education Chan Chun Sing has called on parents to not view teachers through a “service-client mindset”.But students who spoke to ST say that in today’s hyper-competitive education landscape, tuition remains a no-brainer for those who can afford this service. Ms Kellyn Ong, 20, a business and economics undergraduate at NUS, says tuition remains alluring because of smaller classroom sizes, how it bestows a competitive edge by covering subjects ahead of schools and its “24-hour service” compared with teachers’ limited school hours.While it might confer an unfair head start, Ms Ong does not see it as a must-have to avoid falling behind. Many of her peers did not attend tuition and still managed to do well, she points out. She herself received tuition for half of her subjects while in JC.“Tuition has definitely helped me, but if I had tuition alone without my own effort and just attended the classes without paying attention, I wouldn’t have done well,” she says. “It was tuition coupled with my hard work. But if I hadn’t had tuition, I would’ve needed to work harder to get to where I am.”Get the ST Smart Parenting newsletter for expert advice. Visit the microsite for more