Who decides the weekly colour — the student, the parent, or the AI?

Ideally the student and parent together, in a 90-second Sunday conversation. The AI does not infer it from typing patterns or response times. We were deliberate about this — opaque algorithmic guessing is the opposite of what a self-regulation tool should do. The label is a shared, human-set artefact.

What if my child sets every week to GREEN to get more sessions?

It happens. Two correctives stop it being a problem. First, the daily mood check still downgrades a green week if today is tired. Second, the two-week alert fires if a child has been claiming GREEN through obvious signs of strain. In practice we see the opposite — students settle into AMBER more often than they should, and the Mentor occasionally nudges them back up.

Why a weekly colour rather than a daily one?

Because a week is the unit children and parents actually plan in. School weeks have shape — Monday tired, Wednesday football, Friday end-of-week dip — and a weekly label respects that. The daily mood check handles within-week variation. Two scales beats one.

Does an AMBER week mean my child is unwell?

No. AMBER means 'normal life intensity is currently high'. Mocks coming up, a stressful week at school, a heavy fixture list, a friendship wobble. AMBER is the appropriate label for a lot of perfectly healthy teenage weeks. The point is to acknowledge it and adjust load accordingly, not to flag a problem.

The Green-Amber-Red Energy Protocol: How the Mentor Decides Whether a Session Happens

Every aitutors.me session begins with the same small piece of choreography. The Mentor reads a colour. It asks one question. It then either runs the session, downgrades the session, or politely declines to run a session at all.

The colour is the weekly energy label: GREEN, AMBER, or RED. The question is the daily mood check. Together they decide whether tonight is full-throttle revision, a gentle confidence builder, or quietly going to bed.

This article is the long version of how the protocol works and — more importantly — why it exists.

The two-scale design

There are two scales in the protocol because tiredness has two timescales.

The first is the week. A week has a shape. There's a science mock on Thursday. The football fixture's on Saturday. A friend has fallen out with another friend, again. These things make the whole week heavier, even on the days nothing specific is happening. So the week gets a colour.

The second is today. Even in a perfectly green week, the student might have just done a four-hour debate competition and be flatlining. So we add a 30-second mood check that can downgrade today's session, regardless of the weekly label.

Scale	Set by	Updated	Purpose
Weekly label	Student + parent on Sunday	Once per week	Context for the whole week
Daily mood	Student at session start	Every session	Today's reality

The Mentor combines them. A green week and a high mood means full session, harder content if wanted. A green week and a tired mood means gentle session, no new material. An amber week and a tired mood means the Mentor suggests skipping today. A red week means no tutoring at all, regardless of mood.

What each colour actually does

GREEN

Default state. Roughly: school is fine, life is fine, sleep is fine.

Full 25-30 minute sessions available
New topics allowed
JMC and stretch material on the menu (if the student wants them)
Challenge mode unlocks on high-mood days

This is the colour we expect about 60-70% of weeks to be. It's not "everything is perfect", it's "everything is normally fine".

AMBER

The most-used colour in real life, in my experience. Means: life is currently quite full. Energy is fine but not abundant.

Session length capped around 15-20 minutes
Core topics only — no new big concepts
JMC and competition prep paused (one fun puzzle only, no timing)
If today's mood is "tired", the Mentor suggests skipping

AMBER is not a crisis state. It's a healthy acknowledgement that not every week is a peak week. Most KS3 students should be AMBER more often than they think.

RED

Tutoring is off. Hard rule.

No tutoring sessions, full stop
Homework support only — short, factual, no Socratic stretch
The Mentor explicitly reframes rest as the highest-value activity
Two consecutive RED weeks fires the alert protocol (more in a minute)

RED isn't a punishment or a worry — it's a structural acknowledgement that adolescent brains under chronic strain don't learn well, and pushing them just makes it worse. Sleep beats sessions is the operating principle.

"Sleep beats sessions" — the actual evidence behind the rhetoric

This is the one place where my opinion is genuinely backed by quite a lot of research. The NHS sleep guidance for adolescents — 8-10 hours a night for 11-14-year-olds — exists for a reason. Education Endowment Foundation evidence on metacognition keeps coming back to the same point: students who can regulate their own load outperform students who study harder for the same hours.

What that means in practice: the marginal hour of revision at 9.30pm on a Tuesday after a long day produces almost no real learning. Worse, it eats into sleep that would have consolidated the previous learning. So the highest-value version of "more tutoring" is, surprisingly often, less tutoring and more rest.

The energy protocol is what happens when you take that seriously as a design principle. Most edtech apps optimise for engagement minutes. We optimise for the opposite, where the evidence supports it.

The daily mood check

After reading the weekly colour, the Mentor asks one question. It looks roughly like this:

Quick check for today:
(a) Ready to go — let's do this
(b) Good — normal session is fine
(c) Okay — keep it light today
(d) Tired — maybe just a quick review

That's it. Four options, ten seconds. The output drives session length:

Mood	Session
(a) High	Full + harder content
(b) Normal	Full 25-30 minutes
(c) Okay	15-20 minutes, gentle
(d) Tired	10 minutes max, or skip

The combination with the weekly colour is multiplicative. AMBER + tired is a stronger signal than either on its own.

The two-week alert

If the Mentor sees the student in AMBER or RED for two consecutive weeks, it triggers a soft alert. The student sees a brief, non-clinical message — something like "I've noticed things have been heavy for a couple of weeks, would it be worth talking to your parents about the schedule?"

This is not a diagnosis. It's the equivalent of a head of year quietly mentioning to a parent that a child has been flat for a while. Often the parent already knows. Sometimes they don't. Either way, the system has noticed, and noticing is the first thing.

We deliberately don't escalate beyond this — the Mentor isn't a clinical tool, and pretending it is would be worse than useless. But noticing matters.

Why this protocol gates everything

A common question: does the energy protocol apply to the Junior Maths Challenge prep? To scholarship sessions? To exam crunch time?

Yes. Especially then. The pattern I've seen, both as a parent and from talking to other parents, is that the moments of highest perceived urgency are precisely when the energy protocol matters most. A child preparing for an entrance exam in two weeks needs more protection from over-study, not less. So the same colours gate Professor Abel's competition prep just as firmly as they gate Pi's algebra sessions.

If anything, the JMC gating is slightly stricter — no competition prep on AMBER, none on RED, never on the day before a football match if the student has set "no maths after games" in their preferences.

What this looks like in practice

A real-ish week in the life of an AMBER label:

Monday: AMBER + tired. Mentor suggests skipping. Student skips. Sleeps.
Tuesday: AMBER + normal. Mentor runs 15-minute Pi review, no new content.
Wednesday: AMBER + tired. Mentor downgrades to 10-minute confidence builder.
Thursday: AMBER + high (slept well, science mock went OK). Mentor allows a full 20-minute Pi session on the topic the mock highlighted.
Friday: AMBER + tired. Skip.
Weekend: rest, family, sport.

Three sessions in a week, total ~45 minutes. Calm, paced, in tune with the actual life the child is leading. The alternative — daily 30-minute sessions because the calendar says so — would have been worse on every measure that matters.

Jason runs aitutors.me. He has a Year 8 child and around fifteen years of building software adjacent to education. Updated 21 May 2026.