AS and A Level · Years 12-13
A Level Finance tutors
Appears as investment appraisal and sources of finance within Business Studies and Accounting rather than as a separate subject. The calculations are straightforward; the marks are in interpreting what a payback period or net present value actually means for the business in the case study.
- USD 28-34 per hour
- One-to-one, online
- Free 1-hour trial class
What AS and A Level actually demands
Three or four subjects studied in real depth, and the grades universities actually offer against. The jump from IGCSE is larger than most students expect: questions stop testing one topic at a time and start combining several.
The mathematics of money over time, valuation, risk, portfolios and capital structure. Almost everything reduces to discounting future cash flows, and students who genuinely internalise that find the rest far more coherent.
Where A Level Finance students lose marks
- Present value applied as a formula without any feel for what discounting represents
- Risk and return discussed qualitatively when the assessment expects quantitative reasoning
- Capital structure and cost of capital confused with one another under exam pressure
- Spreadsheet models built correctly and then interpreted without checking whether the output is plausible
Is this the right subject at this level?
Undergraduates in finance, economics and business, and A Level students meeting investment appraisal inside Business or Accounting. It suits students willing to be quantitative: almost everything reduces to valuing future cash flows, and the students who accept that early find the rest unusually coherent.
What it costs
USD 28-34 per 60-minute one-to-one lesson at AS and A Level, the same rate in every city we teach in. Billed monthly against lessons actually taught, with no prepaid blocks and no minimum commitment.
Paired lessons (2 students) are USD 20-24 per student. Small group lessons (up to 6 students) are USD 14-17 per student. What each format is good for is here.
How we teach it
One-to-one, online, with a shared whiteboard. The first thing we establish is the exact syllabus the student is entered for: schools do not always publish the version they actually enter, and preparing for the wrong paper structure wastes a term.
After that the work is diagnostic: a past paper under timed conditions, marked together against the published scheme, to find out where the marks are genuinely going. That is almost always more useful than covering the syllabus again more slowly. The full process is here.
Finance: questions parents ask
Is Finance a separate school subject?
Not usually. At school it appears as investment appraisal and sources of finance within Business Studies and Accounting. It becomes a subject in its own right at university.
What single idea unlocks most of it?
Discounting. Nearly everything in finance reduces to valuing future cash flows today, and a student who genuinely internalises what that means finds valuation, appraisal and capital structure far more coherent than one applying formulas.
Why do business students struggle with it at university?
Because it is more quantitative than the rest of a business degree. Portfolio theory and valuation assume comfort with statistics and algebra that many students have not used since school.