Helen Ashworth

Helen runs the science side of our online sixth form work and teaches A-level Chemistry and Biology herself. Most of her week goes to Year 12 and Year 13 students who are close to their target grade but not quite producing it under exam conditions, and lessons begin with the specification open on screen: which paper, which question types keep costing marks.

She built the lesson format the rest of the team uses. Every session runs on a shared whiteboard with the student's own past paper beside it, and Helen annotates as she talks, so the screen ends up as a worked example rather than tidy notes nobody revisits. Each lesson is recorded with written notes attached, which means a student can return to the exact minute where a mechanism stopped making sense instead of asking to go over the whole topic again.

Expect her to ask why. A student who can draw a nucleophilic substitution but cannot say what the curly arrow represents will be asked to explain it aloud, twice if needed, before anything new is introduced. She will not move on early. Chemistry rewards precision in wording, and Helen spends a good share of each hour on the difference between what a student means and what the mark scheme will accept, which is often the gap between a B and an A in the summer exams.

She also drafts the progress reports parents receive each half term, and she reads the other tutors' lesson notes so the science teaching across the team holds together.