Private Tutoring Rules for Teachers: What's Actually Allowed

Ask around a staffroom whether teachers are allowed to tutor privately and you will get three confident and contradictory answers. Someone will tell you it is banned outright. Someone else will say it is fine as long as you do not tutor your own pupils. A third person will say it depends on your contract, which is closest to right but is usually offered as a shrug rather than as information. Search online and the picture is worse: a large number of tutoring platforms have an interest in telling you it is straightforwardly fine, and a smaller number of legal blogs have an interest in telling you it is fraught.

The honest answer requires actually reading the documents, so that is what this page does. It works through the three separate layers of rules that could in principle restrict you, establishes what each one actually contains, and then sets out — using a real regulatory decision published in 2026 — exactly where the line sits and what crossing it costs. If you want the money side of the same question, our companion guides cover the tax mechanics of tutoring income alongside a PAYE salary and what the tutoring market looks like after the National Tutoring Programme.

The three layers of rules that actually apply

A teacher's terms and conditions in England and Wales are built from three stacked sources, and confusion about tutoring almost always comes from attributing a rule to the wrong layer.

• Layer one: statutory pay and conditions. In England this is the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document (STPCD), made under the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act 1991 and given legal force by an annual order. Wales has its own equivalent, the STPC(W)D. This is the layer that sets your pay range, your directed time, your PPA entitlement and your professional duties.
• Layer two: the national collective agreement. The Conditions of Service for School Teachers in England and Wales — universally called the Burgundy Book — is the agreement between the National Employers' Organisation for School Teachers and the teacher unions covering sick pay, maternity, notice periods, travel allowances and similar. It is incorporated into most maintained-sector teachers' contracts by reference.
• Layer three: your own contract and your employer's policies. Your written statement of particulars, your school or trust's staff handbook, its code of conduct, its safeguarding policy, and — in an academy trust — its register of business and pecuniary interests. This layer varies enormously between employers and is the one almost nobody reads until something goes wrong.

Most of the folklore about tutoring assumes the prohibition lives in layer one or layer two. It does not. It lives entirely in layer three, and the practical consequence of that is significant: two teachers doing identical tutoring work in neighbouring schools can be in completely different positions, and neither can settle the argument by pointing at a national document.

What the STPCD really says about your own time

We searched the complete text of the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document 2025 and guidance on school teachers' pay and conditions — the 2025 document remains the operative one at the time of writing, with the STPCD 2026 still in draft and consultation and expected to be published later in the autumn term with retrospective effect from 1 September 2026. The search terms were the obvious ones: private tuition, private tutor, outside employment, other employment, second job.

There are exactly three occurrences of the word "tutoring" in the entire document, and all three sit in the guidance section about TLR3 payments, dealing with catch-up tuition funded through the National Tutoring Programme — a completely different subject, covered in our guide to tutoring work after the NTP. There is no clause on private tuition, no restriction on outside employment and no duty to seek permission before working elsewhere.

What the STPCD does do is define the boundary of your employer's claim on your time, and it does so unusually clearly. Paragraph 51.5 provides that a full-time teacher must be available to perform duties "at such times and such places as may be specified by the headteacher … for 1265 hours", allocated reasonably across the directed 195 days of the school year. Paragraph 51.6 pro-rates that for part-time teachers. Paragraph 51.7 then adds the open-ended obligation everybody recognises — to work "such reasonable additional hours as may be necessary to enable the effective discharge of the teacher's professional duties, including in particular planning and preparing courses and lessons; and assessing, monitoring, recording and reporting on the learning needs, progress and achievements of assigned pupils."

And then comes the sentence that matters here. Paragraph 51.8 states:

"The employer must not determine how many of the additional hours referred to in paragraph 51.7 must be worked or when these hours must be worked."

That is a limit on the employer, not on you. Beyond the 1265 directed hours, the school cannot tell you when to work — which necessarily means it cannot, through the STPCD alone, tell you what else you may do with an evening or a Saturday morning. The document reinforces the point at paragraph 52.4, the work/life balance provision, which requires governing bodies and headteachers to have regard to the need for teachers to balance their professional duties against "the time required to pursue their personal interests outside work", and to adhere to the working limits in the Working Time Regulations 1998.

One genuine qualification. Paragraph 51.7's "reasonable additional hours" obligation is real, and the Working Time Regulations limit referenced at 52.4 is a limit on your total working time, not just your teaching hours. If tutoring volume reaches a point where your planning, marking and reporting visibly suffer, or where your total weekly hours across both jobs raise a working time issue, your employer has a legitimate and quite separate basis for a conversation. That conversation is about capability and working time, not about a rule against tutoring — but it is not a conversation you would win by quoting paragraph 51.8.

The Burgundy Book says nothing about it either

The second place people expect to find a restriction is the Burgundy Book, on the reasonable assumption that a national conditions-of-service agreement running to over twenty thousand words must cover outside work somewhere. It does not. We searched the June 2023 revision for the same terms and found no clause on private tuition, outside employment, other employment or second jobs anywhere in the document.

More usefully, the Burgundy Book explains why. Its Section 8 is headed "Miscellaneous Conditions" and covers insurance against assault, compensation for criminal injuries, loss or damage to personal property, travelling allowances, the school meals service and residential establishments. Its final paragraph, numbered 6 and headed "Conditions of employment", consists of a single sentence:

"Other conditions of employment and working time for teachers are set out in the STPCD/STPC(W)D."

The Burgundy Book deliberately defers the entire field of working conditions to the STPCD. And the STPCD, as established above, says nothing about private tuition. The two national documents therefore do not merely fail to ban tutoring — they point at each other, and neither picks the subject up.

So where do the rules actually come from?

From your contract and your employer's policies, and they are neither trivial nor uniform. The clauses that turn up most often in school and academy trust contracts fall into a handful of recognisable families, and it is worth knowing what to look for rather than reading forty pages of handbook hoping something jumps out.

• Secondary employment clauses. Typically worded as a requirement not to undertake any other paid employment or business activity without the prior written consent of the headteacher or trust, sometimes qualified as consent "not to be unreasonably withheld". These are the clauses that most directly bite on tutoring.
• Conflict of interest and business interest declarations. Academy trusts operate registers of business and pecuniary interests as a matter of financial governance, and many extend the declaration duty to all staff rather than just trustees and senior leaders. Paid tutoring of children connected to the school is a textbook declarable interest.
• Staff codes of conduct. Most are built on the national "Guidance for safer working practice for those working with children and young people in education settings", which deals directly with one-to-one situations, communication with pupils outside school, and the gifts-and-payments boundary. This is where a rule against accepting payment from the parents of pupils at your school usually lives.
• Safeguarding and child protection policies. Frequently require prior approval of any arrangement involving one-to-one work with a pupil, whether or not it is paid, and whether or not it happens on school premises.
• Use of school property and intellectual property clauses. Resources you made in directed time, on school equipment, for the school's curriculum are a genuinely contested area. Reusing them in paid tutoring can engage an IP clause even where the tutoring itself is unobjectionable.

None of these is unreasonable in principle, and none of them is a blanket ban. What they generally require is disclosure and approval. The overwhelming majority of headteachers, asked in advance whether you may tutor a GCSE pupil from another school on a Tuesday evening, will say yes without a second thought. The overwhelming majority, asked afterwards why they were not told you had been taking money from a Year 11 parent in your own school, will start a disciplinary process. The difference in outcome is enormous and the difference in effort is one email.

Tutoring your own school's pupils: the real red line

Everything above is the permissive part of this guide. This section is the part that matters, because this is where teachers actually get into serious trouble, and where the seriousness is routinely underestimated.

Paid tutoring of a pupil at your own school creates several conflicts simultaneously, and they compound.

• Assessment integrity. You may be marking that pupil's work, setting their target grades, submitting their predicted grades to UCAS, deciding their tier of entry, or authenticating their non-exam assessment as their own unaided work. Being paid by the parent while doing any of those is a conflict that cannot be managed by good intentions.
• Equity between pupils. The pupils who can pay get privileged access to the teacher who sets and marks their assessments. The pupils who cannot do not. A school that permits this is creating a two-tier relationship between its staff and its intake, which is why most simply do not permit it.
• The appearance of it. Even a scrupulously honest arrangement looks, from the outside, like a teacher monetising their position. Regulatory bodies weigh public confidence in the profession as an interest in its own right, quite separately from whether any pupil was actually harmed.
• Safeguarding. One-to-one contact with a pupil from your own school, off school premises, outside school hours, arranged privately, sits squarely in the territory that safer working practice guidance exists to control.
• Criminal law. Discussed in its own section below, and the single most under-appreciated point on this page.

The Rai case: what getting this wrong looks like

Abstract warnings about professional boundaries are easy to discount. A published decision with a named teacher, a date and an outcome is not. In February and March 2026 the Teaching Regulation Agency published a professional conduct panel outcome that is, as far as we can find, the clearest modern illustration of where the tutoring line sits — and it is worth setting out properly because the detail is instructive.

Mr Arfan Munir Rai was a teacher at Kensington Park School in London. A professional conduct panel convened on 16 February 2026 by virtual hearing, with the determination dated 20 February 2026 and the decision on behalf of the Secretary of State taken by Stuart Blomfield on 2 March 2026. The allegations, which Mr Rai denied in full, were that he had failed to maintain appropriate professional boundaries by offering private tuition sessions to pupils outside school premises and without the school's knowledge; that he had told pupils not to tell the school or their parents about the tuition; that he had told pupils to email him under a different name in order to conceal it; that this represented a failure to follow professional advice and instructions previously given to him; and that the concealment lacked integrity and was dishonest.

The panel worked through each allegation. On the tuition itself, it noted evidence about the school's own policy on external tuition, which required the prior approval of the headteacher, and quoted the school's Child Protection and Safeguarding Policy requiring that staff "have approved the arrangements for one-to-one tuition or coaching", with the addition that "last minute or informal arrangements should be avoided wherever possible". Mr Rai did not assert that he had obtained any such approval.

It is worth being precise about what the panel did and did not find, because secondary reporting of this case has not always been careful. The panel accepted evidence that Mr Rai had referred to seeking parental consent and therefore did not find that the tuition was intended to be provided without it. Allegation 1(b), a series of alleged comments to a pupil, was found not proven, and the Secretary of State's decision maker expressly put those matters out of mind. The findings that did stick were the ones about concealment.

On dishonesty the panel applied the test in Ivey v Genting Casinos — what the teacher knew or believed about the facts, and whether the conduct was dishonest by the standards of ordinary decent people — and found that asking pupils to use false names and email addresses, combined with telling them not to tell the school, was dishonest and known by him to be dishonest. The Secretary of State's decision records the panel's finding that "Mr Rai's conduct was not only dishonest but that he encouraged pupils to act dishonestly by asking them to use alternative names and/or email addresses when contacting him for the purpose of external tuition."

The panel found breaches of Part Two of the Teachers' Standards — specifically the requirements to treat pupils with dignity and at all times observe proper boundaries appropriate to a teacher's professional position, to have regard for the need to safeguard pupils' wellbeing, and to have proper and professional regard for the ethos, policies and practices of the school — and breaches of the statutory guidance Keeping Children Safe in Education.

The outcome was a prohibition order with a two-year review period. In the decision maker's words, Mr Rai "is prohibited from teaching indefinitely and cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children's home in England", with no application to set the order aside possible before 2 March 2028, and no automatic right to have it removed even then. He appealed to the Administrative Court under regulation 17 on grounds of procedural unfairness and irrationality; sitting in that court, Sir Tim Kerr dismissed the appeal in full, finding no procedural or other irregularity sufficient to unseat the panel's findings.

Position of trust: the legal point nobody mentions

This section is included because it is genuinely missing from almost every discussion of teacher tutoring, and it is the reason the "own school's pupils" rule is stricter than a mere conflict of interest analysis would suggest.

Sections 16 to 24 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 create offences of abuse of a position of trust, applying to sexual activity with a person under 18 even where that person is over the age of consent. Section 21 defines the positions that count. Subsection 21(5) is the one that matters here, and its wording is broader than most teachers realise: it applies where a person "looks after persons under 18 who are receiving education at an educational institution and B is receiving, and A is not receiving, education at that institution."

Two features of that drafting are worth pulling out. First, the test is institutional, not class-based — the pupil does not need to be taught by you, or even known to you, provided they are receiving education at the institution where you look after under-18s. Second, it does not care where the conduct happens. A teacher who tutors a pupil from their own school in a coffee shop on a Sunday is, for these purposes, still in a position of trust in relation to that pupil.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 inserted a new section 22A extending the position of trust offences to adults who coach, teach, train, supervise or instruct a child on a regular basis in a sport or a religion. Academic tutoring was not added. So a private tutor with no connection to the child's school is, on the face of the legislation, outside both section 21 and section 22A — a gap that has been raised in Parliament and by children's charities, and which a serving teacher should regard as a reason for more caution in their own practice rather than less.

Safeguarding yourself when you tutor privately

Working one-to-one with a child, in a private home, without a colleague in the building and without a school's reporting infrastructure behind you, is a materially different risk environment from teaching a class of thirty. That cuts both ways: it is a risk to the child and a risk to you, and the same practices reduce both.

DBS checks: what changed on 21 January 2026

For years the position for self-employed tutors was genuinely awkward. Enhanced DBS checks could only be requested by an organisation for a person it was recruiting into eligible work. A self-employed tutor, having no employer, could obtain a Basic check and nothing more — even though they were doing exactly the kind of one-to-one work with children that an Enhanced check exists to inform. Parents routinely asked for a check the tutor had no lawful way of obtaining.

That changed on 21 January 2026. Self-employed people and personal employees can now apply for Enhanced and Enhanced with Barred List(s) DBS checks for the first time, with private tutors named among the groups the change is intended to serve.

Three practical points about how it actually works, because the mechanics are where people go wrong.

• You must apply through a registered umbrella body. You cannot submit an Enhanced application directly to the DBS as an individual, and a parent cannot submit one on your behalf. An umbrella body is an organisation registered with the DBS to process applications; GOV.UK publishes the list.
• Eligibility still depends on the work, not the job title. Calling yourself a tutor does not automatically make every level of check available to you. The check level turns on the legal eligibility rules and the workforce category, which in turn depend on what the tutoring actually involves — frequency, whether it is unsupervised, and whether it meets the definition of regulated activity.
• A check is a snapshot, not a subscription. Unless you join the DBS Update Service, a certificate reflects the position on the day it was issued. The Update Service is the sensible option for a tutor who expects to show the same certificate to multiple families over several years.

Worth noting for serving teachers specifically: the Enhanced check your school holds for you is not yours to reuse. It was requested by your employer for your employment, and a parent asking to see it is asking for something your school is generally not willing to reissue. Our guide to DBS checks for teachers covers the school-side position in detail; the January 2026 change means that, for the first time, the answer to a parent asking for a check is to get your own rather than to explain why you cannot.

Independent schools, agencies and tighter contracts

Two groups of teachers face materially tighter restrictions than the general picture above, and both are worth calling out.

Independent school teachers are not covered by the STPCD at all — their pay and conditions are contractual, negotiated school by school, and their contracts are frequently far more prescriptive about outside work than a maintained school's would be. Restrictions on private tuition are common, sometimes because the school runs and charges for its own holiday revision or one-to-one programmes and does not wish to compete with its own staff. It is not a coincidence that the 2026 prohibition case arose at an independent school; the teacher's defence included an assertion that the tuition related to the school's own Easter revision programme. If you teach in the independent sector, your contract is the whole of the answer and the national documents are irrelevant to you. Our guide to independent school teachers and the TPS covers the wider divergence in terms.

Supply teachers engaged through agencies should check their agency terms as well as any school-level requirement. Agency contracts commonly include restrictive covenants preventing you from contracting directly with a client school for a defined period — usually aimed at preventing the school from hiring you without paying an introduction fee, but capable of catching tutoring arrangements introduced through the same route. The same applies in reverse to tutoring platforms: most take a commission and most have terms prohibiting you from taking a family off-platform after being introduced to them. Read them before you agree a private rate with a parent you met through an agency, because breaching one is a contractual problem with a commercial party rather than a professional conduct problem, but it is still a problem.

How to ask permission without creating a problem

Teachers often hesitate to raise tutoring with a headteacher for fear of inviting a refusal that would not otherwise have happened. That instinct is understandable and, on the evidence of how these cases actually unfold, backwards. A refusal you can work around is a far better outcome than an undisclosed arrangement that surfaces later.

A good disclosure email is short, specific and pre-empts the obvious concerns. It says what you propose to do, who for, when, where, and confirms the three things a headteacher is actually worried about: that no pupil of the school is involved, that no school resources or premises are used, and that it will not interfere with your directed duties. Something in the region of:

"I wanted to let you know that I am planning to take on some private tutoring in my own time — GCSE maths, around three hours a week on weekday evenings, all pupils from other schools. No pupil at our school would be involved, I will not be using any school resources or premises, and it will not affect my directed time or my planning and marking. I have read the staff code of conduct and the safeguarding policy on one-to-one work and I am happy to complete a business interests declaration if that is the right route. Please let me know if you would like to discuss it or if there is anything further you need from me."

That email does several things at once. It creates a dated record of disclosure. It frames the arrangement in terms of the school's own policies rather than your entitlement. It removes the conflict question before it is asked. And if the answer is a refusal, it forces the refusal to be articulated, which gives you and your union something to engage with. There is no realistic downside to sending it.

Checklist before you take your first pupil

• Read your actual contract of employment for a secondary employment or outside interests clause, and note whether it requires consent, notification, or nothing.
• Read your staff code of conduct and safeguarding policy for anything about one-to-one work, private tuition, or accepting payment from parents.
• Check whether your trust operates a register of business and pecuniary interests that applies to all staff, not just leaders.
• Disclose in writing to your headteacher, even where no clause requires it, and keep the reply.
• Take no pupils from your own school. If you are considering an exception, get written approval first and expect it to be refused.
• Check any awarding body conflict of interest rules if you also examine, moderate or mark for a specification your tutees are sitting.
• Get your own Enhanced DBS check through a registered umbrella body, and consider the Update Service.
• Arrange public liability and professional indemnity insurance for the tutoring; do not assume union or school cover extends to it.
• Agree terms in writing with each family, and route all communication through the parent.
• Know your local authority children's services contact route before you need it.
• Register for Self Assessment if your gross tutoring income will exceed £1,000 in a tax year — see our tax guide for the deadlines.
• Do not use school-made resources in paid work without checking your contract's intellectual property clause.

Sources, and what we could not verify

The national terms analysis on this page is based on full-text searches of two primary documents: the School Teachers' Pay and Conditions Document 2025 and guidance on school teachers' pay and conditions, published by the Department for Education, and the June 2023 revision of the Conditions of Service for School Teachers in England and Wales (the Burgundy Book). Paragraph numbers quoted for directed time, additional hours and work/life balance are from the 2025 STPCD as published. Readers should note that the STPCD 2026 was still in draft and consultation when this page was written, with publication expected later in the autumn term and retrospective effect from 1 September 2026; our 2026/27 pay scales page tracks it. We have no reason to expect the 2026 document to introduce an outside-employment clause, but it is a draft and we have not assumed otherwise.

The professional conduct material is taken directly from the published TRA panel outcome for Mr Arfan Munir Rai (determination dated 20 February 2026, Secretary of State decision dated 2 March 2026), and the appeal outcome from reporting of the Administrative Court judgment. The DBS position is from the GOV.UK guidance on DBS checks for self-employed people and personal employees. The position of trust analysis is from the text of sections 21 and 22A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 on legislation.gov.uk.

Three honest limitations. First, we could not find published tutoring guidance from any major teaching union, and we have not asserted that any exists. Second, contractual practice varies so widely between employers that we have described the families of clause you are likely to meet rather than claiming any particular clause is standard — only your own contract can tell you what applies to you. Third, this page describes the position in England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland operate different pay and conditions frameworks and different regulatory bodies, and the STPCD and Burgundy Book analysis does not carry across.

Nothing here is legal advice. If you are facing an allegation connected to private tuition, contact your union immediately and before responding to your employer — our guide to what happens when you are investigated sets out the process.