What you hand the parent
Most tutoring produces no artefact. The lesson happens, the hour ends, and what changed exists only in the tutor's memory.
Ask a private tutor what they give a parent at the end of a month and the honest answer is usually a conversation at the door, plus an invoice.
That is not a criticism of tutors. It is a description of the job. The hour is spent teaching, the notes are for you, and writing a report that a parent would actually find useful takes an hour you are not paid for. So the record lives in your head, and what the parent sees is your confidence.
Confidence works right up until the month a parent starts wondering what they are paying for.
The thing that is missing is small
It is not a report. Reports are the reason this problem exists — they take too long, so they do not get written.
What is missing is a record of what you tried and what it did. Movement break before fractions: worked. Counters for halves: partly. Reading the question aloud twice: no difference this time. Four weeks of that is a document no assessment can produce, because it is about this student, with you, in the room.
It is also the only honest answer to is this working? — a question every parent is asking whether or not they say it out loud.
Why we log the technique, not the score
A test score tells a parent where a student is. It does not tell anyone what to do on Thursday.
What we record instead is the technique and its outcome: the thing you tried, and whether it moved anything. That is the unit a tutor can act on, and over enough sessions it is the unit that shows a direction of travel. Progress toward a grade is downstream of it — you do not get the exam result without a run of Thursdays that went somewhere.
So the grade is the promise, and we are not embarrassed about that. It is what families are buying and what a student feels first. The rated technique is the evidence, week by week, that the promise is being kept.
What it is not
It is not an assessment, and it does not diagnose anything. The software proposes what you might try next based on what you have logged; you decide whether that is right for the student in front of you, and nothing reaches a parent that you have not read first.
The record belongs to you. We think it turns out to be the most valuable thing you produce.
This is how we have chosen to build. It is our own reasoning, not a measured finding.