About Me

I have over 25 years' experience of successfully tutoring students to achieve top grades at GCSE and A-Level, and of gaining places for my students in the best Russell Group universities, including Oxbridge, and also some of the very best selective schools in the country, including St Paul's Girls, JAGS, Godolphin & Latymer, Dulwich, City of London Boys, Eton and Westminster.

What makes me different is my ability to communicate subjects to students in ways that are uniquely easy to understand and remember. Even topics and subjects that you've previously struggled with, or simply found impossible to understand, are simple at heart: I'll simplify them for you, whilst retaining all of the important points, so that you'll master them and never forget them.

I've perfected a number of tools and techniques over the years to really help students understand and retain well.

One highly effective technique that deepens understanding, and thereby helps students attain the very highest grades, I call Socratic science. What this means in practice is that, when teaching you a topic, I'll sometimes play the role of a student years younger than you who has either never heard of the topic, or has completely misunderstood it, and I'll ask you to explain it to me whilst I pretend to be this other student. I'll be very slow to understand, and will make deliberate mistakes. If you can teach me the topic despite all of this then I'll know that you truly understand it. And as you attempt to teach me, we will be able to identify and fix any misunderstandings that you may have. This will greatly deepen your understanding and retention of the topic and subject. The big secret upon which the success of this method relies is the fact that when you learn something passively you retain only10% of that information long term, but when you have taught the topic to someone else your long term retention will be around 90%!

In my Study Gym classes, I use past examination papers, mark schemes, and reports of examiners, to precisely cover all of the major exam boards' specifications, through a question-based approach. It's only by tackling challenging questions that you can truly understand a subject. If there's any golden secret to examination success, it's completing lots of past examination papers, by researching the answers to the questions rather than simply guessing and writing down what's already in your head, and then by scoring the papers using the official mark schemes (to get you thinking like an examiner). Regularly attending my online Study Gym classes, for each subject where you want to boost your final exam grade, will take you a long way in this regard.

Multiple studies have shown [ref from Make it Stick] that when a group is split, and half are tasked with learning a topic by answer questions on it, whilst the other half are asked to learn it by reading their textbook and making notes, the group that used the question-based approach always does far better.

My Interactive Webinars are topic specific. I select the key topics from the A-Level and GCSE specifications that students regularly say they find the most difficult. Then I break these down into simple steps that I link together in an easy-to-remember way. And there's lots of opportunity to ask questions.

Learning should also be fun, and my aim is for my students to finish classes feeling more positive about themselves and their abilities.

It is my passion and greatest pleasure to enable students to reach their full potential (whether this potential has been spotted by their schools/colleges or not), and so maximise their life chances by my Full Potential Tutoring.