Every academy website says the same things: qualified teachers, flexible timings, free trial. These ten questions will tell you far more than any homepage, because they are difficult to answer vaguely without the vagueness showing.
Ask them on a call or by email before the trial lesson, not after. Write the answers down. Ten minutes of questions now will save you from a year of lessons that quietly are not working.
How to use this list
You are not interrogating anyone. You are checking three things: whether the academy is safe, whether the teaching is real, and whether the commercial terms are what they appear to be. Questions 1 to 6 cover safety, 7 and 10 cover teaching, 8 and 9 cover the money.
The pattern of the answers matters more than any single reply. Precise answers throughout, with one evasion, tells you exactly where to look harder.
1. Where are your teachers based?
There is nothing wrong with teachers overseas - most good ones are. But an academy that avoids answering has told you something.
Good answer: "Egypt, mostly Cairo. Here is why, and here is what we do about safeguarding as a result."
Bad answer: "Our teachers are international." That is not a location.
2. What background checks have you carried out, and when?
Ask for specifics and dates. If the answer is "all our teachers are DBS checked" and the teachers live abroad, ask how. A DBS check searches UK police records only, so for someone who has never lived in Britain it returns an empty certificate rather than a clean one.
Good answer: identity verification, references taken up, and a criminal record certificate from the country of residence, with a date.
Bad answer: "Fully vetted." Vetted how, by whom, against what?
3. Is the teacher's camera on for the entire lesson?
The answer must be yes, always, with no exceptions. Rule out any academy that permits camera-off lessons with children.
If you are told cameras are off to save bandwidth, that is a technical problem with technical solutions, not a safeguarding policy.
4. Can I join any lesson without giving notice?
An unqualified yes is the only acceptable answer. Any suggestion that your child concentrates better without you is a warning sign, not a teaching philosophy.
You do not have to sit in on every lesson, and most parents do not. What matters is that you could, at any moment, and that everyone involved knows it.
5. Can teachers contact my child directly?
They should not be able to. No phone numbers, no messaging apps, no social media. Every arrangement should go through the academy.
This is the single most common failure point in online tuition of any subject, and it is entirely preventable by policy.
6. Who exactly do I contact if I am worried about something?
You want a name and a direct line, not a contact form and a promise of a reply within 48 hours.
Follow up with: what happens then? An academy that has thought about this will describe a process. One that has not will describe a feeling.
7. What qualification does my child's teacher hold, and from where?
"Qualified" means nothing on its own. Ask for the institution. An Ijazah names the teacher who granted it and the chain behind it - that is checkable.
Match the qualification to the need. A beginner on Qaida needs patience and clear pronunciation far more than a certificate. A child heading into serious memorisation needs a teacher with formal Tajweed credentials.
8. Exactly how long is a lesson, and how many are in a month?
Compare like with like. A £25 monthly price for eight 20-minute lessons is not cheaper than £35 for eight 30-minute lessons.
Work out the cost per minute of teaching, and ask whether the month means four weeks or a calendar month. Over a year that distinction is worth roughly a month of fees.
9. What happens when we miss a lesson?
Children get ill and school events overrun. Rescheduled with reasonable notice is fair; lost is not.
Ask the same question in reverse: what happens when the teacher misses a lesson? The answer should be at least as generous.
10. How will I know whether my child is making progress?
The answer should involve something written that you receive regularly. "You can ask the teacher" is not a system.
A useful report says what was covered, what improved, what is still weak, and what comes next. A report that only says "excellent, mashallah" is a pleasantry, not information.
Three questions worth adding
- Will my child keep the same teacher? Rotating teachers is cheaper to staff and worse for a child building trust.
- What is the notice period to cancel? A month is reasonable. Longer, or no refunds on prepaid terms, deserves a second look.
- What platform do you use? A purpose built classroom with an annotatable Mushaf does more for Tajweed than a shared screen.
Two things to watch for in the answers
Vagueness. An academy that gives precise answers to seven questions and vague ones to three is telling you where the problems are.
Overclaiming. If an academy claims something that cannot be true - overseas teachers with UK DBS checks, hundreds of five-star reviews on a site with no reviews page - assume the same standard applies to claims you cannot check.
What to do with the trial lesson
The questions tell you about the academy. The trial tells you about the teacher, and they are not the same thing.
Watch the trial rather than leaving the room, and look for three specific things: whether your child is doing most of the reciting rather than listening, whether corrections are made gently and immediately, and whether the half hour ends with your child willing to do it again. Take trials with two or three academies before deciding. It costs nothing but an hour and a half.
Common questions
Is it rude to ask all of this?
No. A good academy is used to it and will answer briskly. Discomfort at reasonable safeguarding questions is itself an answer.
What if the answers are good but the trial is poor?
Ask for a different teacher before writing off the academy. Teaching quality varies within any organisation, and a good one will offer this without being pushed.
How many academies should I contact?
Three is enough. More than that and the comparison stops being useful.
Should price be the deciding factor?
Only between two academies that answered these ten questions equally well. The gap between a good academy and a cheap one is usually a few pounds a month and several years of your child's recitation.
A quick scoring table
If you are comparing three academies, score each answer 2 for precise, 1 for partial, 0 for evasive. Anything scoring 0 on questions 3, 4 or 5 should be removed from the list regardless of its total.
| Question | What a 2 sounds like | What a 0 sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher location | A named country and city | "International team" |
| Background checks | Named documents with dates | "Fully vetted" |
| Cameras | "On, always, no exceptions" | "Usually" or "if the child prefers" |
| Parent access | "Any lesson, no notice" | "Let us arrange a time" |
| Direct contact | "Never, everything through us" | "Teachers may share a number" |
| Safeguarding contact | A person's name | A web form |
| Qualification | Named institution or Ijazah chain | "All highly qualified" |
| Lesson length | Exact minutes and monthly count | "Around half an hour" |
| Missed lessons | A written policy | "We are usually flexible" |
| Progress | Written reports on a schedule | "Ask the teacher" |
Before you pay
Three practical checks that have nothing to do with teaching quality but will save you trouble:
- Check what currency you are billed in. If it is dollars, your bank may add a conversion fee and the monthly amount will move with the exchange rate.
- Use a payment method you can reverse. A card or PayPal gives you recourse. A bank transfer to a personal account gives you none, and an academy asking for one is a serious warning.
- Read what happens at renewal. Ask whether the subscription rolls over automatically, how much notice you get before a price change, and how you cancel. Get the answer in writing.
The pattern that matters most
Across every academy worth using, one thing is consistent: they answer questions about safeguarding faster and more precisely than questions about price. The reverse pattern, where the pricing is crystal clear and the safeguarding is a paragraph of reassurance, is the one to walk away from.
What these questions cannot tell you
A good set of answers means an academy is organised and honest. It does not mean your child will enjoy the lessons, and enjoyment is what determines whether they are still learning in two years.
The things that decide that are smaller and harder to ask about: whether the teacher remembers what your child struggled with last week, whether they notice when a child is tired rather than lazy, whether the lesson has any warmth in it. You will learn more about all three from twenty minutes of watching a trial than from any answer on this page.
So treat the ten questions as a filter rather than a decision. They remove the academies you should not be considering. What is left is a shortlist, and the shortlist is settled by watching your child in a lesson.
If you are switching academies
Ask two extra questions. First, will the new academy assess where your child actually is rather than restarting from the beginning? A quick assessment lesson is standard practice and saves months. Second, can you overlap by a week or two before cancelling the old one? Any academy confident in its teaching will say yes.
Tell the new teacher plainly what went wrong before. "He stopped wanting to go" is more useful information than the page number he reached.
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