A new casual tutor teaches your program slightly differently from the last one, and the parents notice before you do. The fix isn't a better tutor. It's a fortnight with a shape, and one question at the end of it.
Before day one
Most of what goes wrong in a tutor's first month was decided before they walked in.
The Working with Children Check, or the equivalent where you are, sighted and recorded before anything else. Not "bring it on Tuesday". Before.
Then access. The new tutor gets your material for their classes only, not the whole drive. A Year 6 tutor doesn't need the Year 11 folder, and a tutor who leaves in Term 3 shouldn't leave with fifteen years of your work on a laptop. On the platform that's the default: tutors see their own classes and the owner sees everything. By hand, it's a folder, not the cabinet.
Send the non-negotiables in writing before day one. Child safety. Phones. Parent contact, which is: parents talk to the centre, not to the tutor's personal number. And your material, which is: we teach from this, in this order, with this method, and we don't improvise a different one from a video.
The tutor onboarding checklist has all of this as a page with boxes.
Day one
Day one is not a teaching day. It's three things.
Shadow one class. Yours, ideally, or the most senior tutor's. They watch how the material is used in the room, not how it looks on paper.
Read the folder end to end. The whole year level, every worksheet, every note, every key, in the order you teach it. It takes a couple of hours and most centres skip it, which is why a new tutor teaches week 8 without knowing what happened in weeks 1 to 7. A tutor who's read the folder knows your method before they've taught a minute of it.
Mark one set against the key and compare. Give them a completed student set and your answer key. They mark it. You mark it, or pull last term's marked copy. Compare. Where they differ is where the tutor's standard differs from yours, and it's much cheaper to find that on day one than in a parent's email in week 6.
Week one
The first class, with you in the room for the first twenty minutes. Not to take over. To see the opening, the way the material is introduced, whether the method matches what's in your notes. Then leave. A tutor who's watched a class and read the folder will mostly get it right, and the twenty minutes is for the part they'd most easily get wrong.
The first marking comes back this week. On the platform most of it is done the moment a student submits, against your key, and the tutor's job is the extended responses, where a suggested mark is waiting and the final call is theirs. By hand, check the first set they mark. Same idea as day one: compare.
The first parent question also lands in week one, and the answer is the one from the non-negotiables. Parents talk to the centre. The tutor passes it on, the same day, in writing.
Week two
A fifteen-minute review. Not a performance conversation. One question, and it's the one that pays for the whole fortnight.
"What confused you about our material?"
A new tutor reads your folder the way a student does: without the context you carry in your head. The worksheet where the instructions assume something from a lesson they didn't see. The key with a typo. The set that's out of order because someone moved it two years ago. What confused a tutor in their first fortnight will confuse a student in Term 2, and they're the only person who'll ever tell you.
Write the answer into the folder. Fix the typo, reorder the set, add the missing sentence to the instructions. Then the next tutor doesn't hit it, and neither does the next student.
That's the sign-off. Checks done, material read, marking compared, first class observed, one improvement to the folder. Two weeks.
Why this is a material problem, not a people problem
Casual tutors change every term. That's the job. If your program's consistency lives in the tutors' heads, it leaves when they do, and every fortnight like this one starts again from nothing.
If it lives in the material, in the folder, the keys, the method in the notes, then a new tutor inherits it by reading, and the review question makes the folder a little better each time. The guide to keeping casual tutors consistent goes into this properly. The short version is that the folder is the thing you're onboarding people into, so the folder has to be worth reading.
On the platform, the folder is the program. Every tutor sets work from the same converted material, the marking is against the same key, and the tutor dashboard shows the owner every class on Monday morning, whoever's rostered. The parent relationship and the results stay with the centre when the tutor moves on.
What to do this week
Open the folder your next casual tutor will teach from and read it end to end yourself. Write down what confused you. Then fix it before they arrive, and put the fortnight above on paper so the next hire, including the friend of a friend, gets the same two weeks.