Teach17

Some tutor time activities look great on a pastoral calendar and then die the moment you try them with an actual tutor group.

Vertical tutoring makes this even harder.

You might have an enthusiastic Year 7 sitting next to a Year 11 who has mocks next week. One pupil wants to talk. Another has barely woken up. Some have known each other for years; others would never normally speak.

So a good vertical tutor activity needs to be simple.

Ideally, you should be able to explain it in under a minute, run it without photocopying anything and involve pupils from Years 7 to 11 without making it feel childish for the older ones.

Here are 17 that I think genuinely pass that test.

1. The Question on the Board

Probably the easiest tutor activity of all.

Write one question on the board before pupils arrive.

Not a knowledge question. Something they can actually have an opinion about.

For example:

Would you rather have more money or more free time?

Should pupils be allowed to use phones at lunchtime?

What makes somebody a good friend?

Is it better to be brilliant at one thing or good at lots of things?

What is one invention the world would be better without?

Give everyone 30 seconds to think before taking answers.

Then use the most useful follow-up question a tutor has:

Why?

Five minutes gone, everyone can contribute and no resources were required.

2. What I Wish I Had Known

This is exactly the sort of activity a vertical tutor group can do better than a normal year-group form.

Ask your Year 11s:

What do you wish somebody had told you when you were in Year 7?

You will probably get answers about homework, friendships, detentions, revision, choosing options and not worrying so much about small things.

Then move down the years.

Year 10 can give Year 9 advice.

Year 9 can give Year 8 advice.

Even Year 8 can tell Year 7 what they have learned during their first year or so at secondary school.

Keep it conversational.

The point isn’t to make older pupils deliver a speech. It is simply to make some of the experience already sitting in your classroom useful.

3. The 60-Second Expert

Pick someone and give them one minute to teach the group something they know.

Anything sensible is allowed.

How a Rubik’s Cube works.

Why a particular football team is having a terrible season.

How to play a chord on a guitar.

A strange fact about sharks.

How Formula One qualifying works.

Three useful words in another language.

Something about a computer game.

The beauty of this activity is that age suddenly matters much less.

Your Year 7 pupil may know far more about space than your Year 11s. Someone who rarely puts their hand up in lessons may happily explain everything you never wanted to know about Pokémon.

You start learning who the pupils actually are.

4. Solve This School Problem

Give the whole group a genuine school problem.

For example:

How could we reduce litter?

What would make lunch queues work better?

How could Year 7 pupils settle into school more quickly?

How could the school get more pupils reading?

What would make tutor time better?

Put pupils into small mixed-age groups and give them five minutes.

There is one rule:

They have to come back with a solution, not just a complaint.

If an idea is genuinely good, pass it on.

Pupils quickly spot whether student voice means anything.

5. The Five-Question Quiz

You do not need a PowerPoint.

Ask five questions aloud.

One science.

One geography.

One sport or popular culture.

One maths or logic question.

One completely random one.

Put pupils into mixed-year teams rather than letting each year group stay together.

That last point matters.

The quiz is really an excuse for a Year 8 pupil and a Year 10 pupil to have a conversation.

Keep a tutor-group league if they enjoy it, but don’t feel obliged to turn everything into a competition.

6. This or That

Give pupils two choices.

Summer or winter?

City or countryside?

Books or films?

Early start or late finish?

Money or free time?

Travel into the future or into the past?

Homework every night for 20 minutes or one large piece at the weekend?

Ask them to move to one side of the room or simply raise a hand.

Then pick people to explain their choice.

The activity takes seconds to start but can produce surprisingly good discussions.

The key is not the choice.

It is the explanation.

7. Beat the Tutor

The whole tutor group plays against you.

Pick a category:

capital cities

flags

logos

science

football

music

films

spelling

mental arithmetic

general knowledge

You answer one question. They answer one.

Keep a running total over the term.

There is something quite useful about turning Years 7 to 11 into one team rather than five little year groups sitting in the same room.

And yes, occasionally losing helps.

8. What Happens Next?

Give the group a situation.

Then ask them what probably happens next.

You stay up until 2 am the night before a test.

You keep putting off a piece of homework until Sunday night.

You send an angry message while you are annoyed.

You revise by reading the same page again and again.

A friend sends you their completed homework.

You spend £10 every week without really noticing.

These can lead naturally into conversations about revision, organisation, friendships, money, sleep and online behaviour.

You haven’t announced a twenty-minute lesson on “making good choices”.

You have simply given them something to discuss.

For sensitive topics, keep the scenario fictional. Tutor time should not become an invitation for pupils to disclose personal information publicly.

9. The Memory Test

Write ten unrelated words on the board.

Give pupils 30 seconds.

Remove them.

How many can they remember?

Then ask them how they tried to remember them.

Now repeat the exercise with ten new words, but this time give them time to choose a strategy.

They might group the words.

Turn them into a story.

Create a ridiculous mental picture.

Say them aloud.

Make connections between them.

Compare the scores.

You have just introduced a conversation about memory and revision without producing a revision-skills presentation.

10. Spot the Connection

Put three apparently unrelated things on the board.

For example:

Apple

Newton

Gravity

Easy.

Then make them harder:

Mercury

Queen

Temperature

Or:

Amazon

Nile

Thames

Let pupils work out the connection.

Better still, ask them to create their own sets for the rest of the group.

This is particularly useful when you need something that can last three minutes or fifteen depending on how much tutor time you suddenly discover you have.

11. Odd One Out

Put four things on the board.

For example:

London

Paris

Rome

New York

Ask which is the odd one out.

The important twist is that there does not have to be one correct answer.

New York is outside Europe.

Rome has four letters.

London is the only one in the UK.

Paris is the only one with five letters.

Reward the justification rather than the answer.

Once pupils understand the game, let them invent their own.

It is much better than asking questions with only one pupil doing the thinking.

12. One Good Thing

Ask one question:

What’s one good thing that’s happened this week?

That is it.

It could be a good test result.

Someone scored at the weekend.

They finished a book.

They finally understood something in maths.

Their birthday is coming up.

Their dog learned something new.

They managed to get to school on time every day.

You do not need everybody to answer.

Tutor time can easily become notices, uniform, lateness, missing homework and reminders.

Occasionally talking about something that has gone well is no bad thing.

13. Would You Spend £100 On It?

This works particularly well across different ages.

Give the group £100 of imaginary money.

They can spend it on one improvement to their tutor room or tutor group.

Books?

Games?

Plants?

Breakfast once a month?

A speaker?

Better chairs?

A charity donation?

A tutor-group trip fund?

Something else?

The amount is deliberately small enough to force choices.

Then make them persuade you.

You can change the budget to £1,000 or £10,000 and see how the answers change.

It is a simple way of introducing decision-making and priorities.

14. Teach Someone Younger. Learn From Someone Older.

Pair pupils from different year groups.

Each has two minutes to teach the other something useful.

It can be academic, but it doesn’t have to be.

A revision technique.

A useful keyboard shortcut.

How to organise homework.

Something they learned in science.

How to pronounce something in French.

How to solve a small puzzle.

Then swap.

The younger pupil must teach something too.

That matters.

Vertical tutoring works much better when “older pupil helps younger pupil” does not become the only relationship available.

Everybody should occasionally be the expert.

15. What Would You Do?

Give them a school dilemma.

You notice somebody sitting alone every lunchtime.

A friend asks to copy your homework.

Someone posts an embarrassing photograph of another pupil.

A new Year 7 looks completely lost.

Your friend is panicking about an exam.

Someone makes a nasty joke and everyone else laughs.

What would you do?

These questions work well in mixed-age groups because pupils have different experiences of school.

There is no need to ask, “Has this ever happened to you?”

Keep the discussion about the scenario.

If something raises an actual safeguarding concern, of course, normal school safeguarding procedures take over.

16. The Year 7 Question Box

This is one I would definitely use in a vertical tutor group.

Let younger pupils submit questions anonymously about school.

Nothing hugely personal. Just the things pupils genuinely wonder about.

Do GCSEs really matter from Year 7?

Are Year 9 options difficult?

What are mocks actually like?

How much revision do Year 11s really do?

Does homework get much harder?

What happens if you get a detention?

Then let the older pupils answer.

You will occasionally need to correct some Year 11 wisdom.

But there is something reassuring about hearing from somebody who has already been through the thing you are worrying about.

You can reverse it too.

Ask Year 11 what they want to know about being a Year 7 in the school now. Schools change surprisingly quickly.

17. The Friday Five

Finish the week with five questions on the board:

What went well?

What was difficult?

What did you learn?

Who helped you?

What do you need to get done next week?

Don’t march around the room demanding five answers from everybody.

Let pupils pick one.

Some weeks it will produce a good discussion.

Other weeks you will get:

“Lunch was nice.”

That’s fine too.

The value is in creating a small routine where pupils occasionally stop and take stock of their week.

The Best Vertical Tutor Activities Do Something Slightly Different

The biggest mistake with a vertical tutor group is treating it as five separate forms that happen to occupy the same classroom.

Year 7 sit together.

Year 8 sit together.

Year 9 sit together.

Year 10 sit together.

Year 11 sit together.

Not much vertical tutoring is actually happening.

You don’t need to artificially force friendships between pupils of different ages. But tutor time can create regular, low-pressure opportunities for them to know one another.

That seems to matter.

A UCL doctoral study looking specifically at activities and prosocial behaviour in vertical tutor groups found that the activities which appeared particularly significant were those that helped pupils become familiar with one another and created a bond within the group. The research was a small qualitative case study, so it should not be treated as definitive proof, but the finding makes intuitive sense: if pupils are going to help and support one another, they first need to know one another.

Research published by the Social Mobility Commission also found an association between vertical tutoring and a smaller progress gap for disadvantaged pupils in the schools it studied. Importantly, the report did not claim that vertical tutoring automatically causes better outcomes. It noted unsuccessful implementations too and called for larger, longer-term research.

That qualification is important.

Simply putting five year groups into one room does not magically create a community.

You have to give them reasons to interact.

Don’t Turn Year 11 Into Unpaid Teaching Assistants

There is another trap worth avoiding.

Older pupils can be brilliant with younger ones.

But Year 11 should not spend every tutor period mentoring Year 7, checking planners, explaining homework or acting as junior members of staff.

They are pupils too.

Sometimes the Year 7 should teach the Year 11.

Sometimes everyone should play the same game.

Sometimes pupils should simply talk.

That is a healthier version of a mixed-age community.

Don’t Make Everything Worthy

Not every tutor activity needs to cover resilience, careers, British values, financial literacy, wellbeing and revision simultaneously.

Sometimes a quiz is enough.

Sometimes a strange question on the board is enough.

Sometimes ten minutes laughing over an impossible desert-island decision does more for the group than another worksheet on “teamwork”.

There is a serious point behind this.

Relationships are part of school life, not an optional extra. In March 2026, Department for Education survey data showed that 79% of both Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 pupils said they had felt they belonged at school every day or on most days during the previous week. That still leaves a sizeable minority who felt that sense of belonging only sometimes or not at all.

Tutor groups cannot solve that on their own.

But being known, having somebody say hello and feeling that you belong to a small group within a very large school is a decent place to start.

If You Have Five Minutes Tomorrow Morning

Don’t plan a lesson.

Choose one of these:

Put one question on the board.

Ask an older pupil what they wish they had known.

Run five quiz questions.

Give them an odd-one-out.

Ask them to solve one small school problem.

Get somebody to teach the room something for 60 seconds.

That’s enough.

The best tutor time does not always look impressive from the corridor.

Sometimes it is simply 20 pupils of different ages talking to each other who otherwise wouldn’t.

And that is rather the point of a vertical tutor group.

Sources Used

University College London, Graham Best, Activities and Prosocial Behaviour in Vertical Tutor Groups (2014). This doctoral research examined two vertical tutor groups and found that activities helping pupils become familiar with one another and form bonds appeared particularly significant in developing prosocial behaviour. The study is useful but small in scale, so its findings should be treated cautiously.

Social Mobility Commission, Against the Odds: Achieving Greater Progress for Secondary Students Facing Socio-economic Disadvantage (2021). The research found an association between vertical tutoring and a smaller progress gap for pupil-premium pupils in its sample. It also found that vertical tutoring was not successful in every school and recommended further large-scale longitudinal research.

Department for Education, Parent, Pupil and Learner Voice: March 2026. Used for the current data on pupils’ reported sense of belonging and safety in secondary schools in England.

Department for Education, Every Child Achieving and Thriving (2026). Used as wider context on the importance of belonging, particularly during the transition into secondary school and for pupils who may be more vulnerable to disengagement.

The evidence base specifically for vertical tutoring remains relatively limited. The practical activities above are therefore suggestions for making mixed-age tutor time purposeful and enjoyable, rather than claims that individual activities have been experimentally proven to improve outcomes.