You can see your child understands more French than the marks show, and it is the speaking exam and the tenses where it slips away.
A 40-minute consultation. Joe calls you back within one working day, then sends two or three tutors with free trial calls.
From enquiry to first session
When you enquire, Joe will call you back to arrange a time that works for you. The consultation itself is a proper forty-minute conversation about what is going on with your child's French, the exam board, the predicted grade and which of the four skills is dragging the rest down. From there he starts thinking about which tutors would actually fit.
Joe sends a shortlist of two or three tutors he believes could work for your child, and each one offers a free trial call so you can meet them, hear how they explain a tricky tense and see who your child actually clicks with. No commitment afterwards, no card details and no awkward pressure.
From the trial calls you choose the tutor that feels right for your child, and weekly sessions begin on Lessonspace, our shared online whiteboard. You pay per session, there are no contracts, and if at any point it is not working, you stop.
Why us
A 20-second video from Joe on how The Degree Gap process actually works, from your first call to the tutor your child sits with.
Book your free call with Joe
Plenty of people can teach a vocabulary list. Far fewer can sit a nervous fifteen-year-old down and run a general conversation in French until it stops feeling like an ambush. Harry and Joe have met every tutor on the platform, and about thirty-three apply for each one we keep, so the person your child meets already knows how the role-play, the photo card and the general conversation are marked, and how to rehearse them out loud without the panic.
AQA and Edexcel both split GCSE French into four separate exams, one each for Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing, and each one carries a quarter of the grade. The catch is they word the writing tasks differently and structure the speaking their own way. If your child is taught on one board and drilled on another, marks go missing in the gap. Not sure which board your child sits? Joe works that out with you on the first call, before any tutor is suggested.
Most parents who reach us cannot name the exact problem, only that the effort is going in and the French grade is stuck. That is what the 40-minute call with Joe is for. Sometimes it is the tenses, the passé composé and the imperfect blurring into each other on the page. Sometimes it is the freezing in the speaking mock. Sometimes it is listening at full speed and catching almost none of it. He works out which one, then puts together a small shortlist of tutors around it.
Verified Google reviews
Real reviews from real Degree Gap families, all verified on Google. We picked these because they speak to what tutoring actually changes: the confidence to speak up, the exam technique, and the grade that finally starts to move.
My tutor is a very intuitive and superb teacher. She listened to my specific concerns and bolstered my confidence in answering questions. She taught me how to think critically and helped me through this highly demanding course. I will happily recommend without a second thought.
I was really pleased to discover the Degree Gap when my daughter needed help getting the grades she needed for GCSEs. The team offer a really personalised service and I felt really well looked after from the start. There are lots of tutors to choose from and all subjects are catered for, with great flexibility on timings. Highly recommend.
The support given to my son by The Degree Gap's tutors was fabulous and he passed all his GCSE subjects. They provided experienced and organised tutors. Tutors provided resources targeting specific areas of difficulty. The website is easy to use and tutors were polite and on time.
Who runs The Degree Gap
We are Harry and Joe, by the way, the co-founders of The Degree Gap. We started this because we kept seeing the same thing happen. Capable students were quietly getting missed in a class of thirty, where the pace and the attention could never match what they actually needed. So we built one-to-one tutoring around the child, matched on the exam board and on the way they learn, not just on the subject. Between us we have more than five thousand hours of one-to-one teaching, and a firm view that GCSE French is won in the speaking room and lost in the tenses, long before results day.
Book your free call with JoeJoe will call you back within one working day to arrange a 40-minute consultation. He will ask about the exam board, the predicted grade and which of the four skills is dragging, then send you two or three tutors with free trial calls so you can pick the one that fits. If he does not think tutoring is the right move for now, he will tell you that too.
Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons families come to us for French. The speaking exam is a performance, not a knowledge test, so we treat it like one. The tutor runs the role-play, the photo card and the general conversation out loud on Lessonspace, over and over, and helps your child build a bank of opinions and reasons to fall back on, so there is far less to freeze over on the day.
Tense accuracy is where a lot of French marks quietly disappear. Tutors drill the past, present, future and conditional until the endings stop being a guess, and they sort out the two that trip most students up, the passé composé and the imperfect. Both the writing and the speaking mark schemes reward getting the tense right, so the work pays off twice.
There is. The audio plays at close to native speed and only twice, so the real skill is knowing what to listen for. Tutors work through actual listening papers, teach your child to catch the tense markers and the small negatives like ne...jamais that flip a whole answer, and to predict the likely vocabulary from the question before the recording even starts.
Yes, plus Eduqas and the international GCSE. Each board splits French into the same four skills but words the writing and structures the speaking differently, so the exam board is part of how we match. If you are not sure which one your child sits, Joe will help you pin that down on the first call, before any tutor is suggested.
It works better than most parents expect. The audio on Lessonspace is clear, the tutor can put the photo card on the screen for both of them to see, and the whole speaking rehearsal can be recorded so your child plays it back and hears their own tenses. One-to-one online is honestly ideal for speaking practice and listening drills. We do not do in-person.
Yes. The 40-minute consultation with Joe is free. The trial calls with the tutors he suggests are free. You only start paying once you have chosen a tutor and weekly sessions begin, from £37 an hour. No catch, no card details upfront.
One free 40-minute call with Joe. Trial two or three tutors before you pay a penny.
Book your free call with Joe