Daily learning targets break the first evening football runs late. A three-year plan is too far away for a 12-year-old to feel. So I built aitutors.me's learning plan around the thing in between — the school term. Each term, a family sets a light "focus" for each subject: a direction, not a contract. The week flexes underneath it; the tutor teaches toward it; the school report at term's end tells you where to point next. This is why the term, of all the horizons I could have chosen, turned out to be the right one.
The two planning traps
When you set out to help a child aim their learning, there are two obvious horizons, and both are traps.
The daily target. "Twenty minutes of maths every night." It sounds disciplined. It survives until Tuesday, when there's a late match or a wiped-out kid — and now the plan is a source of guilt instead of direction, a chore chart you tick rather than a thing you want. Everything I believe about tutoring, starting with sleep beats sessions, is at war with a daily quota. Our energy system exists precisely to protect a tired kid from that kind of relentless drip.
The grand plan. "By the end of Year 9 she'll be ready for top-set GCSE." Lovely, and completely inert. It's so far off that no Tuesday night ever feels connected to it — a child can't steer by a star that far away, and a parent can't tell if this week helped. The three-year arc matters, but as a landscape, not a to-do list.
I fell into both before I climbed back out.
Why the term is the sweet spot
The school term sits exactly between the two, and it inherits the strengths of each without their failures.
| Horizon | Long enough to hold a direction? | Short enough to feel? | Survives real life? |
|---|---|---|---|
| The day | No | Too short — it is the pressure | No |
| The term | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| The three years | Yes | No — too distant | N/A |
A term is roughly three months. That's long enough to genuinely become confident with fractions or get comfortable writing a paragraph — real progress, not a quick win. It's short enough that a child can feel the arc of it and a parent can look back and see movement. And it bends around life: a bad week doesn't break a term the way it breaks a daily streak. A term has slack built in.
There's a fourth reason, and it's the quiet clincher: schools already run on terms — they teach in them and, crucially, they report in them. A report comes home around each term's end, so the term is the natural moment to look at how things went and decide where to point next. I didn't have to invent a cadence; I just matched the one your family already lives by.
A direction, not a contract
Here's the thing I want to be clearest about, because it's where these systems usually go wrong. The term focus is a direction, never a scheme of work.
It looks like one honest line per subject:
- Maths — get confident with algebra.
- English — build paragraph confidence.
- Biology — keep the momentum from last term.
It does not look like "cover topics 4.1 through 4.6 by December." That's a school's job, and deliberately not ours — our tutors teach to the whole three-year KS3 landscape and follow a child's curiosity within it, rather than mirroring any one school's pacing or test calendar. A focus points the tutor; it doesn't hand them a checklist to march through. The child's own interest rides alongside it — "get confident with algebra… using it for game physics" — and the tutor turns that direction into the actual lessons, session by session.
Because it's a direction, there's nothing to fail. There are no daily quotas hiding inside it, no "you're behind" screen. And if you set nothing at all, that's a completely supported state — the tutors carry on with their sensible default of consolidating the subject and following your child's interest. The plan enriches tutoring; it is never a gate on it. I'd rather an empty plan than a plan that nags.
The loop that makes it real
A direction is only worth setting if it actually reaches the tutor and comes back changed. So the Term Compass closes a loop:
- Set. At the start of term, you set a light focus per subject. It takes a minute. Practical steps are in Setting a Term Focus With Your Child.
- Teach. The tutor opens each session knowing this term's focus for their subject, and teaches toward it — while the weekly rhythm underneath still flexes with your child's energy.
- Report. When the school report comes home, you pop the results in, reduced to a simple "below / on track / above" per subject. That's the honest signal of how the term actually went — you read the fuller version in your child's termly progress report.
- Re-point. The report suggests where each subject should aim next term — below expectation nudges toward improve, outstanding unlocks stretch — and you confirm or override it. Then the loop begins again.
That's the difference between a goal that sits in a box gathering dust and one that genuinely steers the term.
Why the family decides, not the app
The last principle is the one I feel most strongly about, and it's the one I got wrong first.
My early design had the app run the whole negotiation: the tutor proposes a goal, the child accepts it in their own words, the parent approves it — three little signatures inside the software. I built a fair bit of it before I noticed I was digitising a conversation families already have, and have better, at the kitchen table. A child's real agency isn't tapping "accept" on a screen; it's the actual talk with a parent about what this term is for.
So I tore that out. Families decide the focus together, offline. The app doesn't mediate it.
What the app does add is the one thing the kitchen table can't: the tutor's evidence. The tutor is the only party here who isn't at the table — it's watched your child every week and knows where they genuinely stumble and what lights them up. So it offers one quiet suggestion on your plan — "Ada flies through geometry but stalls on fractions; a focus here could pay off" — which you take into your own conversation, or ignore. It informs your decision; it never makes it. Your family owns the what; the tutor contributes only what it alone has seen.
That's the Term Compass: not a stricter plan than the ones that fail, but a lighter one — pointed at the horizon families can actually feel, and handed back to the people who should be holding it.
FAQ
Why plan learning by the term instead of by the day or the year?
A daily target breaks the first evening life gets in the way, and turns study into a chore chart. A three-year plan is too distant to feel real. The school term is the sweet spot — long enough to hold a genuine direction, short enough to feel, and it matches how schools already report. So we set a light term focus per subject and let the week flex underneath it.
Is the Term Compass a rigid plan my child has to hit?
No — that's the whole point. It's a direction, not a contract: one line per subject like "get confident with fractions", never "cover topics 4.1 to 4.6 by December". There are no daily quotas and nothing to fail. If you set nothing at all, tutoring carries on exactly as normal.
Who decides the term focus — the app, the tutor, or us?
You do, together, offline. Families settle these at the kitchen table, so the app doesn't run a negotiation — the parent sets the focus, and the tutor can offer one evidence-based suggestion from what it's seen in sessions. The decision stays with your family; the tutor just makes sure it's the one party who's watched your child every week.
Related reading
- Setting a Term Focus With Your Child
- Reading Your Child's Termly Progress Report
- Energy-Aware Tutoring, Explained
Duke Harewood built aitutors.me for his own KS3-aged daughter, after a wall of broken daily targets taught him to plan by the term instead. Updated 09 July 2026.