What Actually Happens in a First Tutoring Session
Parents often come out of a first session slightly disappointed. Not much was taught, no topic was finished, and the student cannot say what they learned.
Blog
Practical writing for parents and students: what the syllabuses actually demand, where marks get lost, and how to fix it before the exam.
- 55 pieces
- 4 topics
Everything here is written by someone who teaches the subject, for a specific situation a family is actually in. Nothing is written to a keyword, which is why there are sixteen pieces rather than sixty.
If you are looking for worked solutions to specific exam problems rather than advice, those live separately in the worked answers, organised by subject.
Getting started
Tracking Progress Between School Reports
A school report arrives two or three times a year, carries a grade and a sentence, and tells you almost nothing you can act on. By the time one shows a problem, the…
One-to-One, Paired or Group: Which Kind of Tutoring to Buy
Tutoring is sold as a single product at different prices, which obscures the fact that the formats do genuinely different jobs. Choosing on price alone tends to produce…
Does Homework Work? What the Argument Actually Turns On
The public argument about homework is usually conducted as though it were one thing with one answer. It is not. The useful question is not whether homework works but at…
Time Management for Students Who Have Tried Timetables Before
Most students have already tried a timetable, kept it for nine days and stopped. Being told to make another one is not useful advice. The reason the first one failed is…
Supporting a Child Who Is Learning Online
Parents often ask what they should be doing during online lessons. The honest answer is less than most expect, but the few things that matter make a substantial…
Taking Notes in an Online Lesson Without Missing the Lesson
Online lessons shift the note-taking problem. The screen is doing more of the work — shared documents, annotated diagrams, often a recording — and students respond by…
Studying Across Time Zones: Gulf, UK and US Students
We teach students in the UK, the Gulf and the United States, which means most weeks involve working out whether a lesson time that suits one family is unreasonable for…
Studying Alone or With Others: Which Actually Works
Both work, for different things, and most study groups fail because they are used for the task that suits working alone.
Motivation Is Not the Thing That Gets Work Done
The common model is that motivation produces action: you feel like working, so you work. It mostly runs the other way. Action produces motivation — you start, it becomes…
Learning Styles Are a Myth, and What to Use Instead
You have probably been told that your child is a visual learner, or an auditory one, and that teaching should be matched to that style. It is one of the most widely…
How Often Should Tutoring Happen, and for How Long?
The honest answer is that frequency matters more than total hours, and most families get this the wrong way round — booking long sessions infrequently when shorter and…
Asking for Help Without Feeling Stupid
The students who most need to ask questions are usually the ones who have stopped. It happens gradually: one lesson you do not follow, you do not say, the next builds on…
Find Your Child's Syllabus Code Before You Do Anything Else
It is the first question I ask when a family gets in touch, and roughly half of parents cannot answer it. That is not a criticism: nothing in the school communication…
How Much Tutoring Does a Student Actually Need?
Almost every family asks this on the first call, and almost every tutoring service answers it badly, because the commercially convenient answer is "weekly, indefinitely"…
SAT, IELTS or GRE: Which Test Does Your Child Actually Need?
A surprising number of the test preparation enquiries we take start from a decision that was never really made. A student is booked onto SAT coaching because a friend is…
Choosing subjects and tutors
When Your Child Fails an Exam: What to Do in the First Week
The first week matters more than it feels like it should, mainly because decisions made in it are hard to unwind. Here is a sequence that keeps the options open.
What the GRE Actually Tests, and Who Needs It
The most useful thing to understand about the GRE is what it is not. It is not a test of advanced subject knowledge, and preparing for it as though it were is the most…
Taking the SAT From Outside the United States
A student on a British or IB curriculum preparing for the SAT is doing something their school day does not support. The content is mostly familiar; the format, the…
Six Signs Tutoring Is Not Working, and What to Do About Each
Most tutoring that fails does so quietly. Nobody complains, the sessions continue, and six months later the grade has not moved. These are the signals worth watching…
Maths Anxiety Is Real, and It Is Not the Same as Being Bad at Maths
A student who can do a question at the kitchen table and cannot do the same question in a test does not have a knowledge problem. Treating it as one — more practice…
IELTS: What the Bands Mean and Where Candidates Plateau
Most candidates who plateau do so for the same reason: they keep improving vocabulary, which is visible and feels like progress, while the thing holding the score is…
IGCSE vs GCSE: What Actually Differs, and When It Matters
Parents ask this question expecting a verdict, and the honest answer is that for most students the two qualifications are close enough that the choice is made by the…
IB or A Levels: Which One Suits the Student in Front of You
This decision gets made on reputation far more often than on fit, which is a shame, because the two qualifications suit genuinely different students and the difference…
Choosing A Level Subjects Without Closing Doors by Accident
The decision is made at sixteen, under time pressure, usually with incomplete information, and it constrains what can be applied for at eighteen. These are the things…
Does a Younger Child Need a Tutor?
We should say at the start that we do not teach primary-age students — our market begins at IGCSE — so there is nothing in this for us either way. That is probably a…
Does Online Tutoring Actually Work?
Worth saying up front: we teach online only, so we have an interest in the answer. That is a reason to be specific about the limitations rather than to skip them.
Do You Actually Need A Level Maths?
Two mistakes get made here, and they pull in opposite directions. Some students take A Level maths they do not need and find it dominates two years. Others drop it at 16…
Choosing IGCSE Options in Year 9: What Actually Matters
The options form arrives in the spring of Year 9, usually with an evening at the school and a booklet. Families treat it as a decision about the next two years. It is…
Computer Science or ICT? Choosing at IGCSE
Every year, a group of students picks the wrong one of these two subjects, and almost none of them find out until Year 11. The subjects sit next to each other on an…
Eight Questions Worth Asking Before You Book a Tutor
Choosing a tutor is hard because almost every signal available to you is unreliable. Reviews can be bought. Qualifications do not predict teaching. Hourly rates vary by…
When Tutoring Is Not the Answer
This is an odd thing for a tutoring practice to publish, so let me be direct about why it exists. A reasonable share of the enquiries we take describe a situation that…
Moving up a level
Why University Maths Feels Like a Different Subject
A student arrives with an A in maths and further maths and finds the first analysis course bewildering. This is extremely common, it is not a sign they were overrated…
Resitting an Exam: What Actually Changes the Second Time
The most common resit strategy is to revise the same way, harder. It produces a similar grade, which is demoralising and avoidable, because the first attempt generated…
The Step Up to A Level Maths, and Why Grade 8s Struggle
Every maths department sees it. A student with a grade 8 or 9 arrives in September confident, and by half term is finding the work genuinely hard for the first time…
Why Year 12 Is Harder Than Year 11 Suggested It Would Be
The call comes in late October or early November, and it is almost word for word the same every year. She got eight 8s and 9s. She has always been near the top. She came…
The IB Internal Assessment Problem Nobody Warns You About
Ask an IB parent what they are worried about and they will usually name a subject. Higher Level Chemistry, or Analysis and Approaches, or the one where the teacher…
The Maths Gap Between A Level and a Degree
A student finishes A Level Mathematics with an A, or Higher Level Analysis and Approaches with a 6 or 7, starts an engineering or economics degree in September, and is…
Exam technique
Where the Top Grades in GCSE Chemistry Are Won and Lost
Students aiming for the top grades in chemistry usually know the content. What separates a 7 from a 9 is almost never another topic — it is three specific areas where…
The Week Before an Exam: What Still Helps
Most revision advice is written for the months before. The last week is different: the returns on content learning have mostly gone, and the returns on a few specific…
Keeping a Life During Exam Season Without Losing the Grades
The instinct in April is to clear the calendar — drop the sport, cancel the music lesson, stop seeing friends, and revise. It sounds like commitment. It usually produces…
How to Read a Mark Scheme, and Why Most Students Never Do
Awarding bodies publish, for free, a document stating precisely what you must write to get each mark. Most students use it as an answer key — tick, cross, move on — and…
The Mental Maths Shortcuts Actually Worth Knowing
Most mental arithmetic tricks are party pieces. A few genuinely save time in an exam, and a few more catch errors you would otherwise hand in. These are the ones worth…
Most Revision Notes Are Useless. Here Is What Makes One Work
A student can spend forty hours making beautiful notes and learn very little. The activity feels like work, produces a visible artefact, and is close to the least…
Managing Coursework and Long Deadlines
Coursework, an EPQ, an IB Extended Essay or a dissertation fails in a different way from an exam. There is no single moment of difficulty — just a long period in which…
Where the Marks Really Are in GCSE Creative Writing
Students assume creative writing is marked on whether the examiner liked it. It is not. It is marked against published criteria, and those criteria reward specific…
How to Study Physics When Reading the Textbook Is Not Working
Students who are good at memorising often struggle in physics, and the reason is structural. Physics examines whether you can apply a small number of ideas to situations…
Exam Stress: What Actually Helps, and What Just Sounds Caring
Some exam nerves are useful. A moderate stress response sharpens attention and improves recall — students who feel nothing before a paper often underperform. The problem…
A Method for English Literature Exams That Does Not Rely on Luck
Literature feels like the subject where you either get a good question or you do not. It is less arbitrary than that. Most of the mark difference comes from a method…
Building a Revision Schedule That Survives Contact With Reality
Almost every student builds a revision timetable, and almost every one abandons it inside a fortnight. The failure is usually designed in from the start, and it comes…
How Essay Subjects Are Actually Marked
There is a particular kind of frustration that only happens in essay subjects. A student revises properly, knows the material, writes what is by any reasonable standard…
How to Use Past Papers Properly
Ask a student how their revision is going and a fair number will tell you they have "done loads of past papers." Ask what they scored on the last one and the answer is…
Passing a Language Exam Is Not the Same as Speaking the Language
Every language teacher has seen this and few parents believe it until it happens to them. The student who speaks the language at home, who converses easily, who spent…
Where Science Marks Are Actually Lost
Science papers produce a particular pattern in marked work: the student clearly understands the topic, the final answers are broadly right, and the mark is a grade below…
Why Strong Coders Lose Marks on Cambridge Paper 2
There is a conversation I have with parents several times a year, and it always opens the same way: he's been programming since he was eleven, he built a game last…