The tutor is paid.
The hour is gone.
In a group class an absence changes nothing: the tutor and the room are paid whether one student is there or not, and the class runs. In one-to-one the session is the student, and a cancellation on the day, or a no-show, is an hour of a tutor's time that the centre pays for and cannot sell to anyone else. Families do not see this, because from their side a missed session is a missed session. From the centre's side it is the difference between a business with a margin and one without.
As an illustration with round numbers: a centre that runs 200 one-to-one sessions a month at €40, paying tutors €25 an hour, earns €8,000 and pays €5,000 in tutor time. If six percent of sessions are cancelled late or missed and not charged — twelve sessions — the centre loses €480 of revenue and still pays €300 of tutor time, which is €780 a month, or most of the margin on the whole one-to-one book. Charge the no-shows and the late cancellations, as the policy allows, and the same twelve sessions cost the centre nothing. The policy is worth more than the marketing budget.
Seven things the policy says,
differently for one-to-one and groups.
One policy for both formats is the most common mistake, because the economics are opposite: in one-to-one the missed hour is the whole cost, in a group it is nothing. Write two columns and give each family the one that applies to what they bought.
State notice in hours, not in "reasonable notice", because reasonable is what the family thinks it is at the time. Define a make-up precisely: for one-to-one, a rescheduled session at the next free slot within the term; for a group, a place in another group at the same level if one exists, never a private lesson. Make make-ups expire, at the end of term or the package, because a make-up that can be claimed next year is a liability you carry into next year, and it will be claimed in the last week into a slot that does not exist. And say what happens when it is the centre that cancels: rescheduled at no charge, never expiring within the term. That asymmetry is the difference between your obligation and theirs, and families respect a policy that states both.
One word
does most of the work.
The clause that changes behaviour is not the notice period; it is the word "charged". A policy that says sessions missed without notice are charged in full produces very few missed sessions, because families who would cancel a free hour on a whim do not cancel a paid one. The charge is rarely applied, because the behaviour it prevents rarely happens. Centres that soften it to "may be charged" or leave it out of embarrassment get the behaviour they were embarrassed to prevent.
Apply it in week one, politely, every time, because the first exception becomes the rule and the second family will cite the first. When you choose to make an exception — a hospital admission, a bereavement — make it in writing as an exception, so that it is received as a kindness and not as the policy. The centres that families describe as fair are not the lenient ones; they are the consistent ones.
Sell the slot,
not the session.
Pay-per-session makes every cancellation a refund conversation and every no-show a debt collection. A package — ten sessions paid in advance at a lower rate than one, with an expiry date — changes the shape of the problem: a late cancellation is a session deducted from the package under the policy the family agreed to when they bought it, and a no-show is the same. Nothing is refunded, nothing is chased, and the renewal, when the package runs out, is a natural moment to talk about progress and the next block.
Expire packages. A package that lasts forever is a liability that lasts forever, and a family that has banked four sessions from last year will want them in June. Three months for a ten-session package is typical; a term is the natural unit for a centre that runs on school terms. The billing cluster covers packages in full, including pricing; the scheduling point is that a family who has paid for the slot turns up to it, and the diary gets easier the moment the money is in front of the sessions rather than behind them.
At enrolment, where the money is,
and where the sessions are.
The policy is announced when the package is bought, because that is when the family is paying attention and when the agreement is made. It is a short page linked from the checkout and the confirmation, and it lives where the family looks for the sessions themselves — on SprintUp the student portal shows a student's sessions and what is due, and the policy belongs alongside them so that a parent looking for Thursday's session finds the notice rule in the same view. A policy sent once as a PDF in September has stopped existing by November.
Tutors need it too, in a sentence: what they do when a family cancels late (mark it, do not argue it), what they do when a student does not arrive (wait fifteen minutes, mark it, do not chase), and that they never negotiate the policy with a family directly. A tutor who waives a charge to be kind has just changed the centre's policy for that family, and the front desk will find out at the invoice.
A template
to adapt, not adopt.
These are operational templates, not legal advice. The refund and withdrawal wording must be checked against consumer law where you operate, which sets minimum rights a policy cannot remove, particularly for contracts made online. Everything else — notice, make-ups, expiry, the charge for a no-show, what happens when the centre cancels — is yours to decide, and the only mistake is deciding it after the first family has asked.