By the second week of July, most senior students are tired. By the first week of September, most are about to begin the most decisive year of their school career. The eight weeks between those points are the most leveraged hours in a school life - and the most commonly misspent.

Misspent, in our experience, in two ways. The first is by doing nothing: a holiday genuinely earned, taken at length, and an academic muscle that softens enough to make the first half-term a recovery instead of a beginning. The second is by doing too much: a punishing schedule of online tutoring booked at the parents' anxiety, not the child's curiosity, that arrives at September already weary.

The shape of a useful summer

The summer that pays back, in our experience, has three quiet parts.

First, rest - properly

For the first three weeks, no academic work. Not a textbook, not a single exam paper. The brain a child brings back to school is a brain that has been allowed to be bored.

Second, a small, deep project

Not a course. Not a programme. A book the child wants to read; a piece of writing they want to make; a question they have wondered about. Two or three hours a day, three or four days a week, for a fortnight. A senior tutor, if engaged at all, is in the room as a reader and an interlocutor - not a teacher.

Third, a careful re-entry

The fortnight before term, light and structured: the syllabus skimmed, the year ahead mapped, the first essay or problem set drafted in pencil. Not to get ahead. To arrive on the first day awake.

The summer is not the place to fix a year that has already gone wrong. It is the place to make sure the next year does not.

What a tutoring engagement looks like in this season

Most of our summer engagements are short, residential, and built around a single tutor who has known the child for at least a year. The tutor travels with the family, or arrives for a fortnight in a study chosen for the work. The hours are few - never more than four a day, often two - and the conversation extends into the meals.

It is, in other words, the opposite of the boot camp. We have never seen a boot camp produce a senior year a family was glad of. We have, regularly, seen a careful summer produce one.