The things families ask us most, from availability and waiting lists to what equipment you need. If yours is not here, just ask us.
Availability, trial lessons and when to begin.
The only slots we have available are the ones listed on our Availability and Fees page. If a slot is not shown there, it is not available. We are not holding spaces back.
If none of them suit, get in touch anyway and we can add you to a waiting list. We cannot guarantee when a slot will become available, and we would rather say that plainly than leave you waiting on a promise.
Demand is high, particularly close to exam season, and there are weeks where we have to turn away a large number of enquiries simply because we have nowhere to put them.
In general our tutors do not offer trial lessons, but most do offer a free initial consultation so you can talk things through and see whether they would be a good fit before committing to anything.
The consultation is free and carries no obligation. Lessons themselves are charged from the first one.
Not before a consultation is booked. We receive hundreds of enquiries a year and many do not proceed, so booking a consultation is what tells us a family is ready for us to hold a space.
Once your consultation is booked, we will normally reserve the slot you are interested in until you have spoken. Before that, slots go to whoever books first, and popular times do go quickly.
As soon as possible is generally the best time to start, but starting later in the year is far from hopeless. The difference is simply how much we can do: the longer we are working with you, the more ground we can cover.
In honesty, the majority of our students join us in Year 13. What often happens is that students reach the end of Year 12, receive mock results that are lower than expected, and then start looking for support. That can still be very effective, but it does mean spending time catching up on Year 12 content before properly moving on to Year 13 work.
Starting in Year 12 gives us far more room to work with: time to fill gaps before they compound, and time to build exam technique across the whole course rather than squeezing it into the final months.
We generally offer weekly lessons rather than fortnightly.
A weekly slot is reserved for your student for as long as they are attending regularly, which is what lets a tutor plan properly and keep track of how things are going between sessions. In our experience students get noticeably more out of a weekly rhythm.
There is no minimum term and no long-term contract. You can stop at any time.
Group or one-to-one, exam boards, and who we are not for.
One-to-one tuition is generally more effective, which is what you would expect given that it costs more than twice as much. A one-to-one tutor can focus entirely on one student's gaps and keep closer track of what they are doing between lessons.
The Exam Practice classes are better value if the student is willing to put the work in independently and use the sessions to sharpen their exam technique and guide their revision.
Group sessions work very well for many students, but they are not the right environment for everyone, particularly where the format involves a lot of collaborative work.
Exam Practice groups meet once a week with a maximum of six students, and run as a weekly subscription during term time. Full details are on our Group Classes page.
Two things people often ask that are not on that page:
What happens to the work afterwards? Most of our tutors make an individual copy of the questions and the worked solutions for each student and keep them on that student's own classroom board, rather than emailing them out, so everything stays in one place.
Do students get through everything? Almost never, and that is by design. We deliberately provide more questions than anyone needs, so students can pick the topics they most need to work on and carry on with the rest during the week.
Yes. We find that students working below a grade C often struggle to access the material, because the classes focus heavily on exam-style questions and those need a solid foundation in the basics of each topic.
That said, an assessment result is not always an accurate reflection of where a student actually is. If your child has been placed below that level and you are not sure the picture is right, tell us and we will look into it properly rather than turning you away on a number.
Where a group is not the right fit, one-to-one tuition usually is, sometimes alongside a group later on.
Maths is a little different from many other A level subjects, as the actual course content is around 95% the same across all four main boards. There are some minor differences in content and some variation in how questions are structured, but exam questions from one board are usually very similar to questions from another. Over 70% of students nationally study Edexcel.
In general most of our tutors are able to work with students from most exam boards. If you want to check a specific board, just ask.
International Edexcel is absolutely fine and familiar to us. The content is very similar to the standard Edexcel A Level Maths specification, although there are some differences in the structure of the exams and the style of some questions.
A Level Maths is a significant step up from GCSE, which is why many schools require at least a grade 7 to start the course.
It is quite common for students who achieved a grade 7 to struggle with that step, particularly if they had to work hard to secure it. In most A level Maths classes you will find a mix of grade 7, 8 and 9 students, and teachers understandably pace lessons so that the highest-attaining students remain challenged. Students who started at grade 7 can find that pace difficult, and if gaps appear early they snowball as new topics build on earlier ones.
Here is what actually happens, counted from the day a student starts the course. Pick the grade you are aiming for:
What this chart cannot tell you
It covers every student in the country, and the great majority of them study A level Maths with no individual support at all. It is a picture of the national average, not a forecast for any one student.
A GCSE grade sets the starting point, not the destination. What moves a student up a chart like this is finding the gaps early, learning how to revise properly, and building real exam technique. Those are the three things we work on.
Where these come from. Grade outcomes are Edexcel entry data for 31,107 students, GCSE Maths 2017 to A level Maths 2019, published via the Maths Emporium. Combining grades 8 and 9 gives 88.8% reaching at least a C, within a percentage point of the 89% found independently by Cambridge University Press & Assessment for a later cohort. Those figures count only students who sat the exam, so we have scaled them by how many finish the course, which runs from about 92% for the strongest starters down to about 74% for the weakest (FFT Education Datalab, 2026). That last step is our own estimate, so treat the exact numbers as a guide rather than a measurement. The shape of the picture is not in doubt.
So from a grade 7, fewer than one in ten students who start the course come out with an A, and a little under half reach a C. From a grade 6 it is around one in thirty for an A, and about one in five for a C.
We would rather show you that than pretend it away. It is not a prediction about your child, and it is not a reason to give up on the subject. It is the reason we would rather start working with a student early in Year 12 than late in Year 13.
This is one of the most common reasons families come to us, and it is very fixable when it is caught early.
Yes. Many of our tutors have experience of working with adult students, private candidates and resitters, and we can point you towards one who does.
We want to be upfront that studying as a private candidate is a demanding route. A student in school receives around four to five hours of direct instruction each week, followed by another four to five hours of independent study.
From our experience, the biggest hurdle for private candidates is not the content but building and maintaining the study routine needed to do that work independently. Without the framework of school, that is where students most often need support, and it is something we can help with.
If you are an adult paying for your own tuition, you do not need a parent or guardian at the consultation.
Yes. All our tuition is online and we teach students outside the UK.
Every time shown on our site is UK time, on both the availability page and the consultation booking, so it is worth converting before you book.
How far outside UK hours a tutor is able to teach varies from tutor to tutor. Ask us and we will tell you what is possible.
We would rather tell you now than after you have booked.
Specialising this narrowly is a deliberate choice. It is the reason we can offer the depth we do, but it does mean turning some people away, and we try to do that quickly and point you somewhere better where we can.
Equipment, work between lessons and school holidays.
Nothing to install. We use Miro as an online whiteboard during lessons and it runs directly in your browser. You will need a free Miro account to open resources in lessons.
The one thing that matters is having a way to write onto the whiteboard.
Many of our students already have a device that does this, typically an iPad or a Surface Pro with a stylus, and they simply use that. If you have one, you are already set up.
If you do not, the least expensive way to get started is a graphics tablet. The cheapest entry-level model we have found that works well is the GAOMON S620, usually around £20 to £25, though any graphics tablet will generally do. If you have never used one, expect it to take a couple of hours of practice, as writing without looking at your pen feels unnatural at first.
If you are using an iPad, we usually suggest joining the video call on a separate device such as a laptop or phone and using the iPad as the whiteboard, so you can see the questions and your own writing at the same time.
This varies a great deal from student to student. Some students do not really need to do much between lessons at all.
In general, though, most of our tutors set work to complete between sessions, and that work tends to be very important in getting the most out of the tuition. The students who make the best progress are usually the ones who use the support we provide to make their own independent study more focused and effective.
Live lessons run during term time only. These are the weekly sessions from A Level Maths Academy.
Exam Practice groups run as a weekly subscription during term time, and we expect students to attend regularly throughout. Outside term time we generally run additional sessions in the holidays, which students can choose to attend on a pay-as-you-go basis rather than as part of the subscription.
One-to-one lessons are arranged directly with your tutor. Most tutors do teach during the holidays, but they are not required to, so it is worth agreeing with yours what you would like to do.
Many of our tutors follow the term dates we publish as standard, so that is the best place to look when you are planning ahead.
Who teaches you, and how online tuition works.
Our tutors are experienced A Level Maths teachers and tutors, and several are current examiners who mark A level scripts for at least one board each year. That gives them detailed knowledge of the specifications and of the exams themselves, and we share what they learn across the team.
You can see each tutor's own background, subjects and reviews on our Tutors page.
In almost all cases, yes. The majority of our students stay with the same tutor over a long period, and that is how our tutors and students generally prefer to work.
The great thing about online tuition is that you don't have to settle for the services of your local tutor. Online tuition allows access to the best tutors, wherever you live.
A large scale survey conducted by Bramble found that "84% of students found online tutoring to be more effective or as effective as the in person alternative."
In today's digital world, the majority of students feel comfortable communicating online and the transition from in-person learning to online learning comes easily.
Yes, some of our tutors do offer A Level Further Maths tuition. However, as the specification is different for each exam board, only some of our tutors are able to offer a comprehensive further maths tuition service.
You can see which of our tutors offer Further Maths tuition on our Tutors Page.
We teach online, and that is what we offer. Our tutors are self-employed, so a tutor who happens to live near you may be willing to teach in person by arrangement, but it is not something we offer as standard and it depends entirely on where your tutor lives. Ask us and we will tell you honestly whether it is a possibility.
Where in-person tuition is arranged, the safeguarding conditions that apply to it are set out in section 7 of our Safeguarding Policy.
If your question is not answered here, ask us. We would rather tell you honestly whether we can help than have you find out later.