Tom Whitfield

Tom runs the past paper courses, and the pupils who book him tend to arrive with a folder of finished papers and a list of marks they would rather forget. He treats a dropped mark as a question worth retaking rather than a score to worry about. A-level maths, chemistry, physics and biology papers all come his way, and he works through them one to one online, a question at a time.

Here is what a session looks like. The pupil brings a paper, finished or abandoned halfway. Tom reads the examiner's wording aloud and asks what the question was actually asking, which is usually the moment a pupil goes quiet. Then they rebuild the answer together, in the margin, in the pupil's own writing on their own page, because an answer copied from a tutor is not an answer the pupil owns. If the same slip shows up in three papers running, that becomes the topic they settle down to for the next fortnight.

Everything written during the lesson goes into the recorded notes we send home afterwards, so a correction made on a Tuesday evening in February is still sitting there in May when revision starts. Past paper review is where marks are cheapest to find. Nothing gets wasted.