Where to Buy Tutoring Resources: Teachers Pay Teachers, Twinkl, Publishers and Past Papers
Where can a tutoring business buy resources?
Tutoring companies buy tutoring resources from four places: marketplaces of teacher-made material (Teachers Pay Teachers), subscription libraries (Twinkl), publishers (textbooks and workbooks), and exam authorities (past papers, usually free). The cheapest option is not automatically the right one, because a licence written for a classroom teacher may not allow a for-profit company to use the material with paying students.
Last updated: October 2026.
What does the licence let a tutoring company do?
Check the licence before the price. Read the terms for three things before you buy: who may use the resource (one named person, or an organisation), where (a classroom, or any teaching), and whether commercial use is allowed.
Teachers Pay Teachers is the clearest example. Its Terms of Service say you may not use a resource “for commercial purposes”, which means you “can’t sell it, use it for advertising or marketing purposes, or use it in any other way in connection with a business or profit making activity”. Its Individual Licence “may only be assigned to a single specific individual user”, and sharing a resource with another educator means buying “an additional license for each additional educator you will share it with”. The Terms say the commercial-use restriction applies to both Individual and Classroom licences. [Source: TPT Terms of Service, read 5 October 2026.]
For a tutoring company, that has two consequences. A resource bought on an Individual Licence is for one person, not for your whole team. And a for-profit company teaching paying students may fall under the commercial-use restriction. The Terms do not mention tutoring, so whether it does is a question for TPT or the seller, not something to assume.
The four sources compared
| Source | Best for | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Teachers Pay Teachers | Niche topics, quick fixes, template ideas | Individual licences, the commercial-use wording, which curriculum each seller wrote for |
| Twinkl | Broad subject coverage from one subscription | Licence scope for a business: ask Twinkl before relying on a personal membership |
| Publishers (textbooks, workbooks) | Depth, answers and marking schemes aligned to a course | Copying limits in copyright law and the book’s own terms; per-student cost |
| Exam authorities (past papers) | Authentic exam practice | Each authority’s own terms of use; marking schemes and reuse |
Marketplaces and subscriptions
Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace of material made by individual teachers. Many listings are written for a school classroom. The upside is the long tail: if you need one worksheet on one narrow topic, someone has probably made it.
Twinkl is a subscription library with broad coverage. It markets to private tutors directly: its blog has a post on starting a private tuition business and its tutor resources include a membership guide. That page does not set out licence terms for a tutoring company, and we could not retrieve Twinkl’s terms and conditions page to check them. Before several tutors use one account, read the current terms and ask Twinkl’s support whether a tutoring company needs a different plan.
I should be upfront: I have never paid for questions or resources at EquateIt. About half of what we use I make myself with AI and ClassQuill, matching questions from the question bank to each student’s weak topics. The other half I find online for free by searching the topic. So this is not a review of what is worth buying. It is how I would judge a paid option.
What goes wrong is quality. A free worksheet usually has one or two good questions and the rest are weak or the wrong type, and you lose time sifting. Any paid source has to beat that, so ask three things before you pay: how many of the questions would I actually use, are they the right type and level for my students, and can I keep and reorganise the good ones by topic afterwards? If the answer to the last one is no, you are renting a worksheet, not building a library.
Publishers
Publisher workbooks and textbooks suit a student working to a specific course, because answers and marking guidance line up with the syllabus. The trade-off is that copying pages is restricted by copyright law and by the book’s own terms. Buying one copy per student is the clean route. Copying excerpts is a licensing question, so ask the publisher or a copyright body before you do it.
Are past papers free to use?
Past papers usually come free from the exam authority: the VCAA in Victoria, and the exam boards in England and Wales (AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC). Whether you may reproduce them depends on the authority’s own terms, and those differ. In Victoria, the VCAA’s past exams page says “Schools may use these past VCE examinations in reliance on the VCAA’s allowance for educational institutions”, and that the exams are copyright material owned by the VCAA that may contain third-party material (VCAA past examinations). The page does not address private tutoring, so a tutoring company should ask the VCAA Copyright Manager before using past exams commercially. We have not checked the other authorities’ terms, so check each one before you reproduce its papers. “Past papers” is mostly a student search, so you are competing with free official pages: buy a pack only when someone has added something you cannot get free, such as worked solutions you have checked.
Does buying beat making?
Often not for core subjects. A bought resource has to be checked, reformatted and aligned to your students. Buy when the topic is rare, the quality is obviously good, and the licence clearly covers you. Make when it is your method or your students’ repeated gap.
Australia, the UK and the United States
- Australia: material written elsewhere often needs rewording (spelling, terminology, year levels, measurement). Check alignment to the Australian Curriculum or your state authority, such as the VCAA in Victoria.
- United Kingdom: for GCSE and A-level, the exam board’s specification decides what counts as aligned.
- United States: standards vary by state, so check what a resource was written for.
Where ClassQuill fits (and where it doesn’t)
ClassQuill is not a marketplace and does not sell or supply resources. You can store files you have the right to use in the Library, attach a file from Google Drive, and keep individual questions in a question bank that filters by topic, difficulty, maximum marks, maximum parts and question type. Students open shared files inside the software. ClassQuill does not check whether a file’s licence allows you to use it. That is yours to confirm before you upload. If you attach from Drive, our guide to organising a tutoring company’s resources in Google Drive covers the structure and the “anyone with the link” setting.
The biggest pain, for me, is that worksheet questions are often poor quality or not the right type. That is why I keep a question bank I can filter by topic, difficulty, marks and number of parts. Whatever you buy, load the good questions into a bank like that, so you only sift once.
Related reading: How to organise a tutoring company’s resources in Google Drive
