Find qualified Spanish tutors

Ask for the exact credential, who awarded it and the country it relates to. A teaching qualification, professional status and evidence of Spanish proficiency answer different questions. If QTS is a requirement for your family, ask about QTS specifically rather than relying on the word ‘qualified’.

The QTS explanation below concerns England. For teaching credentials from elsewhere in the UK or overseas, ask which qualification or professional body is involved and how the tutor’s experience relates to your learner’s course.

Here is a constructed beginner example of the kind of explanation you can look for in Spanish teaching. A learner writes Me gusta los libros to mean ‘I like books’. Simply replacing gusta with gustan fixes this sentence, but leaves the learner without a reason for the change.

In this use of gustar, the thing liked is the grammatical subject. Los libros means ‘books’ and is plural, so the verb must be plural: Me gustan los libros — ‘I like books’. Me identifies the person who likes them; it does not make the verb singular.

Compare Me gusta el libro — ‘I like the book’. Here el libro is singular, so gusta fits. For a follow-up, give the learner las películas (‘films’) and ask them to say ‘I like films’. The answer is Me gustan las películas, because las películas is plural.

The useful sign of understanding is that the learner can choose the verb for the new noun and explain why. When comparing tutors, listen for explanations that make the language usable, with translations and enough practice for the learner’s starting point.

Describe a difficulty as well as a level. ‘I can recognise vocabulary but cannot follow a spoken question’ gives a tutor more to work with than ‘I need better Spanish’. For school or exam support, give the nation, qualification, exam board and course code where known. The AQA examples below are specific to those qualifications; use your own course details when enquiring.