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Private tuition vs group courses
Private tuition is not simply the expensive option. For some people it is the only one that works.
Group courses for most beginners — cheaper, and crewing with others is part of the skill. Private tuition if it is your own boat, your own schedule, or a specific problem to fix.
Private tuition
One instructor, you, and often your own boat.
Group course
Three to six students on a school boat, sharing the roles.
| Private tuition | Group course | |
|---|---|---|
| Priced by | The day, regardless of how many of you there are | The head |
| Helm time | All of it | A share of it |
| Pace | Yours | The group’s |
| Boat | Can be your own | The school’s |
| Crew experience | None — you never crew for anyone | Built in |
| Scheduling | Flexible | Fixed dates |
| Best for | Owners, couples, specific weaknesses, nervous sailors | Beginners, people who want the certificate and the company |
| Cost for two people | Often comparable to two group places | Two places |
- you already own the boat
- you have one specific problem — berthing, usually
- a group would move too fast or too slowly for you
- there are two of you, which narrows the cost gap sharply
- you are starting from nothing
- you want the certificate at the lowest cost
- you want to learn to work as crew
- you would rather learn alongside other people
Private tuition is usually dismissed on price, and the arithmetic is less lopsided than it looks — particularly for two people, since private tuition is charged by the day rather than by the head.
Where private tuition genuinely wins
On your own boat. A group course teaches you to sail a school yacht; your boat has a different rig, different prop walk, an unfamiliar reefing system and a berth with its own peculiarities. An instructor aboard your vessel addresses all of it at once.
It also wins on specific problems. Somebody who sails competently but cannot berth in a crosswind does not need another five-day course — they need an afternoon of doing nothing but berthing.
What a group gives you that private tuition cannot
Crewing. On a group course you spend time taking instructions as well as giving them, working with people you did not choose, in roles you did not pick. That is what sailing with other people is actually like, and it is a skill.
The couples case
For a couple, private tuition has a particular advantage: an instructor can insist that both of you take the hard jobs. Group courses are where one partner quietly ends up on the foredeck for five days.
Decided? Now find a school.
Three questions — your experience, the boat you want to sail, and your goal — give you a starting course and the schools that teach it near you.