Summer Tutoring in Switzerland — catching up over the holidays

There is no national answer, and the range is larger than most people believe. In 2026: Ticino from 18 June to 30 August; Vaud 27 June to 16 August; Basel-Stadt 27 June to 9 August; Geneva 29 June to 14 August; Lucerne, Zug and Bern from 4 July, returning 17, 17 and 10 August respectively; the city of Zurich finishing on 10 July and returning on 17 August. In 2027: Ticino 17 June to 29 August; Vaud 3 July to 22 August; Geneva 5 July to 25 August; Zug, Lucerne, Basel-Stadt and Bern from 3 July to mid-August; canton Zurich 19 July to 21 August. Zurich dates have to be checked at municipal level rather than cantonal, because for the Volksschule the communes confirm them.

Because Switzerland has no national school calendar and several cantons delegate part of the decision further down. Aargau fixes only three of the summer weeks cantonally and leaves the rest to municipalities, taking account of traditional district dates. Schwyz publishes its plan with an explicit disclaimer that the binding dates are those issued by the individual school boards — and in 2026 the first day back differs by a full week inside the canton, 10 August in Einsiedeln, Höfe and March against 17 August in Schwyz, Küssnacht and Gersau. Zurich sets only the start of the year and the Christmas break cantonally. Zug, by contrast, fixes its dates five years in advance.

Between five and eleven weeks depending on where you live. In 2026 it is thirty-seven days in canton Zurich, Bern and Aargau, forty-four in Zug, Lucerne and Basel-Stadt, forty-seven in Geneva, fifty-one in Vaud and about seventy-four in Ticino. Ticino’s break is precisely double Zurich’s. There is also a calendar quirk worth knowing in Bern: the break is normally five weeks, but in the year following a 53-week year it runs six — which is why Bern has five weeks in 2026 and six in 2027.

No, and the divergence is substantial. For 2026/27, ISZL finishes on 18 June 2027 and starts on 18 August 2026; International School Basel finishes on 17 June 2027 and starts on 12 August 2026; Inter-Community School Zurich finishes on 17 June 2027 and starts on 17 August 2026; Ecolint finishes on 25 June 2027 and starts on 31 August 2026. So in summer 2027, ICS Zurich finishes nearly a month before canton Zurich’s state schools, and in August 2026 Ecolint returns two full weeks after Geneva’s state rentrée. International School Basel prints the Basel-Landschaft state dates alongside its own in its published calendar, which is a fair admission that families need both.

More than families expect, and this is the practical reason to plan in June rather than August. The Cambridge International November 2026 final entries deadline is 16 August 2026 — a date on which state schools in Vaud, Zug, Lucerne and Ticino are still on holiday, and canton Zurich returns the following day. Cambridge’s late deadline, which is also the deadline for retake entries from the June 2026 series, is 21 September 2026. The Pearson Edexcel International A Level October 2026 entry closes on 28 August 2026. The IB November 2026 examination period runs from 23 October to 13 November, with results to schools on 16 December — and because the IB publishes no single global candidate registration deadline, the operative cut-off is your own school’s internal one, which is set over the summer.

That the promotion conditions were not met and the school year ahead is conditional. In canton Zurich the gymnasium promotion regulation requires that twice the sum of all grade shortfalls below 4 does not exceed the sum of all surpluses above it, and that no more than three grades fall below 4. A pupil failing those is either provisionally promoted or not promoted at all, and the regulation sets out exactly when a second failure ends the placement — a pupil already once provisionally promoted in the Obergymnasium, for instance, is not promoted again. Realgymnasium Rämibühl states the constraint plainly: a pupil may repeat only once in the entire Mittelschulzeit. If a provisional promotion is on the report in July, the summer is the only uncommitted block of time before the semester that resolves it.

The trial semester after entry, lasting one semester, in which pupils must confirm the performance shown at the entrance examination. The cantonal figures are published and worth knowing before assuming it is a formality: in 2021/22, 91.5 per cent of Langgymnasium entrants stayed and 8.5 per cent left, while for the Kurzgymnasium the figures were 87.9 per cent staying and 12.1 per cent leaving — both improved on 2018/19. Roughly one in eight Kurzgymnasium entrants does not survive it. Since the Probezeit runs the first semester from August, the summer beforehand is the last uncommitted stretch of time before that clock starts.

In the cantons we checked, no — and we would rather correct this than let you plan around it. Canton Zurich’s gymnasium promotion regulation provides no August resit; the remedy for failing the conditions is provisional promotion, resolved by the following semester’s report. Geneva’s secondary-II regulation provides for non-promotion and repeating the year rather than a summer session. Vaud publishes only the May gymnase admission session, and Schaffhausen only its March examinations. The German word Nachprüfung causes much of the confusion: in Swiss schools it generally means a make-up test for an assessment a pupil missed, not a promotion resit. We did not check all twenty-six cantons, so treat this as “in the cantons we checked” rather than as a national rule — and confirm with your own school.

Canton Zurich’s central entrance examination is on Monday 8 March 2027, for both the Langgymnasium and the Kurzgymnasium, with registration open from 1 January to 10 February 2027 and a non-refundable CHF 50 fee charged once per school year. Gymnasium Kunst und Sport Rämibühl closes on 15 January. As for timing: the established preparation courses in Zurich start at the end of August and run through to February, so the summer is the pre-cycle window rather than the cycle itself. That makes it well suited to groundwork — closing the gaps that would otherwise slow the autumn course down — and poorly suited to being the whole preparation. Published pass rates in 2022 were 50.9 per cent for the Langgymnasium and 42.1 per cent for the Kurzgymnasium.

Yes. The November 2026 examination period runs from 23 October to 13 November 2026, and results are issued to schools on 16 December from 21:00 GMT. Since 2023 the IB has removed the three-session rule across the Diploma, Career-related and Middle Years Programmes, so there is no longer any cap on the number of retake sessions. Where a subject is retaken, the highest grade for that subject or core requirement counts towards the award. The one thing to be careful about is registration: the IB publishes no single global candidate deadline, and the General Regulations refer only to schools completing registration by the relevant deadlines — so the date that binds you is your own school’s, and it is usually set while everyone is away.

The honest answer is more interesting than the marketing one. The classic “summer slide” finding — roughly a month of lost ground, from a 1996 meta-analysis — has been seriously challenged: a 2023 replication study across multiple assessments found that most summer learning patterns did not generalise beyond a single test, and one of the field’s own prominent researchers has published on losing faith in the classic result, tracing it to a scaling artefact in an old test. A very large study of over 200 million test scores did find average summer losses of roughly a fifth to a third of the preceding year’s gains, but with enormous variation — a substantial minority of children gain over the summer. What is better established is the other half of the question: a meta-analysis of thirty-seven experimental and quasi-experimental studies found summer programmes improved mathematics achievement by about 0.10 standard deviations, roughly four percentile points, and that programmes focused exclusively on mathematics rather than on general academics were about 0.18 standard deviations stronger. Heavy reliance on textbook exercises was actively negative. That is the case for a narrow, subject-specific summer block rather than a broad holiday course, and it is the shape we recommend.

CHF 95 per 60 minutes with Good Tutors Finder from age 11, Higher Level and university-entrance work included, and CHF 85 for a learner aged 10 or under. Ten hours are CHF 810, which is CHF 81 an hour. Distinction, our most accomplished tutors, is CHF 130 an hour and you choose it on any work. On comparing: the single most useful thing to establish about any Swiss quote is the unit. In this market holiday tuition is sold at, for example, from CHF 65 per 45-minute Lektion for one-to-one, from CHF 27 per Lektion in a group, from CHF 900 per week for a holiday course, and as residential summer-school packages running from roughly CHF 4,100 to CHF 16,750 for a course. A national comparison site puts the range at CHF 20 to CHF 157 an hour without defining a lesson length at all. Ask every provider the same question — how many minutes — and half the field becomes comparable. See the full price list.

Yes, and in summer that is usually the point. Online lessons are the same price as lessons at your table, so a block bought in July can run from a holiday address in another canton, or another country, without anything being re-priced or rescheduled around travel. The best-rate window also pauses over your own school’s holidays, and the package is valid for twelve months — which is what makes it reasonable to buy hours in July for a retake that is actually sat in November.

Tell us the date. Not the subject — the date. A 16 August entry deadline, a 8 March examination, a first day back on 17 August, a November session: the fixed point is what determines whether a summer block is worth buying and how it should be shaped. Send that and the last report, and we will come back with a tutor who has taught it, typically within 48 to 72 hours, and with an honest view of whether the summer is the right moment at all. Sometimes it is not — for Gymi preparation, for instance, the autumn course is the main event and the summer is groundwork, and we would rather tell you that than sell you the whole thing twice. Nothing is charged to enquire and nothing is charged to be assigned. Book a tutor, or send a WhatsApp message on +41 76 213 1843.