Aisha Karim

Aisha teaches GCSE Maths and the number work that sits underneath it, so her week moves between Year 5 fractions and Higher tier algebra without much warning. She opens every lesson with two questions she is confident the pupil can answer. It settles the nerves, and it means the harder question that follows lands on someone already warmed up.

Number work takes up most of her timetable. Place value, times tables that still need a beat of thinking, fractions that flip when you least expect it. She writes on screen while the pupil writes on paper, and she waits, because a wrong answer said out loud tells her far more than a right one copied down. When a method goes wrong she returns to the last point where it was still working and builds forward from there rather than starting the whole topic again.

Lessons are one to one, online or at home, and the working from each session is written into the recorded notes we send afterwards. Mocks in January. Real papers in May. Both get the same treatment: what the question wanted, where the mark went, and the one change worth making next time. Parents see all of it in our progress reports.