SINGAPORE – On the eve of the A-level mathematics examinations in November 2024, Mr Lim Chuan Li received more than 800 WhatsApp messages.

Some were panicked requests for clarifications on particular equations. Others asked to review challenging questions.

The 36-year-old former Ministry of Education (MOE) teacher, who now tutors at Zenith Education Studio in Tampines, spent the entire day in front of his laptop responding to each one.

To the rest of his junior college (JC) students who did not reach out, he sent them encouraging messages in the week leading up to the national exam, such as “Every flower endures a tough storm before it blooms with beauty, you have survived a very challenging period and now is the time for you to shine”.

Enter the emotional support tutor-therapist. Beyond academic guidance at the secondary school and JC level, a large part of his or her job is to provide round-the-clock support to anxious students and, sometimes, their parents.

In education-obsessed Singapore, such tutors command eye-watering sums of money. Families in Singapore spent $1.8 billion on private tuition for their children in 2023, according to the latest household expenditure survey, marking an increase from $1.1 billion a decade earlier.

“What really distinguishes me is that I’m always there to support the students, in terms of the different kinds of help they need,” says Mr Lim, who is often glued to a stylus, annotating students’ work on his phone, when he is not teaching 10 classes a week.

The help needed ranges from short questions over WhatsApp requiring brief responses to more complex problems needing handwritten explanations or video recordings. A timely response is crucial, even outside exam season. The bachelor tries to respond within the hour, so his charges do not “feel stuck” in their learning process.

Although he teaches only in the afternoon, his first task of the day, starting at 7am, is to respond to late-night messages from students. He lays down his phone to rest at 11pm, and the cycle repeats the next day.

“As a general rule, I tell my students if I don’t reply to them in 24 hours, I must have missed their messages. It gets buried under the other million questions I get,” he says, adding that they should ping him again.

He teaches about 260 students a y...