Homework Help in Canada: What's Free, and What Actually Works

The short answer

Every one of those is real and running. The rest of this page is what they are good at, and the four questions parents ask that the free services cannot answer.

TVO Learn Mathify: the best free option in Ontario, if the problem is math

Mathify is funded by the Government of Ontario and run by TVO. It gives a student a one-to-one session with a live tutor, on a shared whiteboard, with voice or text chat.

Two things make it better than most paid help.

Its tutors are Ontario Certified Teachers. TVO states this plainly on its own site: "All tutors are Ontario Certified Teachers." That is the same licence a classroom teacher holds, and it is unusual for a free service.

Second, it is aligned to the Ontario curriculum. The Question Bank holds example questions mapped to the curriculum for Grades 4 to 12, so a Grade 9 student practising the sine law gets a tutor working from the same material the school uses.

The details a parent needs:

• Grades 4 to 12. TVO's wording is "FREE online math help for Ontario students in Grades 4-12."
• Cost: "completely free to use and features zero advertising."
• Sign-up: an Ontario Education Number is the only requirement. TVO's wording is "All you need is an Ontario Education Number (OEN) to create an account". The OEN is printed on your child's report card.
• No booking. Students log in during tutoring hours and connect to whoever is free.
• Regular hours: "Monday to Friday from 9 AM to 9 PM ET, and Saturday to Sunday from 3 PM to 9 PM ET."
• Right now it is on summer hours. TVO's site says: "our summer hours are Mon-Fri 11am - 9pm. We return to our regular service hours on Sep 1, 2026." There is no weekend service until then. Worth knowing this week, in the run-up to September.
• Sessions use anonymous usernames, and the recording, the chat and the whiteboard are saved in a section called My Stuff, so a student can go back over the explanation later.

Where it stops: it is math and nothing else. There is no Mathify for essay writing, for chemistry, or for French. If your child's problem is reading comprehension or a Grade 12 lab report, this is not the service.

Brainfuse HelpNow: the free help your library card already pays for

This is the most under-used free service in the country. Most large Canadian public libraries buy a licence for Brainfuse HelpNow and give it away with a library card. Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton, Waterloo, Brampton, Barrie, Oshawa and Middlesex County all offer it.

It covers most school subjects, from Kindergarten through Grade 12, which Mathify does not. There is also a writing lab where a student can submit a draft essay and get it back with comments. Some libraries map it to their own province's curriculum. Calgary Public Library, for example, describes live tutors in "Alberta curriculum (K to 12) subjects".

Check your own library's page for the hours, because they genuinely differ. Brainfuse says HelpNow is "available 24/7". Several Ontario libraries repeat that. Calgary still lists live tutors "from 2pm to 11pm daily". Do not plan an evening around a number you read on somebody else's library page.

Where it stops: the tutors are not certified teachers. Brainfuse's own description is that they "hold a bachelor's degree and complete an intensive onboarding process". That is a real qualification and it is fine for getting unstuck on tonight's worksheet. It is not the same as a teacher who has taught the course, knows how it is assessed, and can tell you whether your child is actually behind.

Alloprof, if you are in Quebec

Alloprof is free, backed by the Government of Quebec, and covers elementary 1 to 6 and secondary 1 to 5. It has an ask-a-question service, concept sheets, exercises, videos and exam preparation, and it works in both French and English. It is broader than Mathify and it is the strongest single free resource for a Quebec family.

The free help already inside your child's school

Ask before you pay for anything. Most schools run something, and almost none of them advertise it well.

Start with the subject teacher and ask one specific question: when are you available for extra help, and what does my child need to bring. Many secondary teachers hold a lunch or after-school slot that goes unused.

Then ask the office what the board runs. These programmes exist and they vary enormously. Avon Maitland District School Board, to take one example, runs a free learning support programme called xCEL for students in Grades 7 to 12. Your board may run something similar under a name you have never heard.

Three dead ends that still rank on Google

This is where an hour disappears. All three of these were checked on 17 August 2026.

The old "Homework Help" is now Mathify. Ontario used to run a free math tutoring service called Homework Help, at homeworkhelp.ilc.org. That address now redirects to TVO Learn Mathify. Same idea, new name. If a page tells you to register for Homework Help, it is telling you to register for Mathify.

Board pages are quoting hours that no longer apply. Several boards still tell families they can log in "Sunday to Thursday, 5:30-9:30 p.m." The District School Board of Niagara says it. Peel District School Board says it, and that page currently ranks third on Google for "free homework help canada". Those were the old Homework Help hours. Mathify's real hours are on Mathify's own site, and they are wider. A parent who reads a board page on a Saturday afternoon in October concludes the service is shut when it is open.

The Ministry of Education link is a stub. The Toronto District School Board's Learning Help page sends families to the Ministry's e-learning homework page. The entire content of that page is now one sentence, telling the reader the site "is being migrated to Ontario.ca/curriculum, Ontario.ca or the Virtual Learning Environment". The page still returns a normal 200 response, so no automated link checker flags it as broken. Thames Valley District School Board's own homework help page is a straight 404 and still ranks on page two.

One more, because parents keep asking about it. Ontario's $175 million Tutoring Supports Program, announced in February 2022, has ended. It ran from April 2022 and was extended to 31 July 2023. The separate Catch Up Payments of $200 to $250 per child closed on 31 March 2023. There is no successor programme on ontario.ca today. The 2022 announcement still ranks near the top of Google, which is why the question will not die.

While checking this, one of the listicles ranking on page one for "free homework help ontario" states that Mathify is for Grades 6 to 10. TVO says Grades 4 to 12. Check the service's own site before you rule your child out.

What free homework help is good at

Getting a student unstuck. That is the honest scope, and it is worth a lot.

A child sitting at the kitchen table at eight in the evening with one question they cannot start is exactly the case these services were built for. Free, immediate, no appointment, no commitment. For that job they are excellent, and a family that pays for tutoring without trying them first is usually paying for something they could have had.

They are also good for a student who is basically fine and hits an occasional wall. Two or three sessions a term, on the hard chapters, is a sensible way to use Mathify.

Where free homework help stops

These are on-demand services. A student connects to whichever tutor is available, explains the question, gets it answered, and disconnects. Nobody is tracking the pattern across sessions.

That matters because four common questions cannot be answered inside that model:

Is my child actually behind, or is this one hard unit? Answering that needs somebody who has seen the whole course and knows what Grade 8 is supposed to look like in March.

Which gap is causing this? A Grade 10 student failing at quadratics is often failing at fractions. A drop-in tutor solves the quadratic. Finding the fraction problem takes several sessions with the same person.

Which courses does my child need for the programme they want? This is course planning, not homework, and it is the question with the largest consequences. Getting the Grade 11 choice wrong closes doors in Grade 12 that nobody notices until the university application.

What happened in the session? Anonymous, on-demand help gives a parent no record. You know your child logged in. You do not know what they understood.

When a child needs a teacher instead

The line is roughly this. If the problem is a question, free help is the right answer and you should use it tonight. If the problem is a pattern, a subject, or a plan, it needs someone who works with the same child every week and knows where they are going.

That is the work Genie does. Genie works only with Canadian Certified Teachers, licensed by a provincial governing body such as the Ontario College of Teachers. Before a teacher sees a student profile, their certificate number and issuing body are checked against the provincial registry, with a live government-ID match. Genie calls this the Trust Engine. Students are matched by course, pace and personality, and parents get a per-lesson record of what was covered and what their child understood, which is the thing an anonymous drop-in session cannot give you.

A certified teacher also does something a homework service is not set up to do. They can chart which courses a student needs to reach a target programme, then focus the teaching on the subject areas that get them there. Teaching and planning together, not just tonight's question.

Subject support sits under math and English. If you want the real numbers before you go further, we set them out in how much a tutor costs in Canada.