A-Level
An AI tutor built around A-Level.
Your board's specification, your own past papers, and an explanation drawn out in front of you that changes when it does not land.
- 8 coursesAQA & Edexcel, reviewed
- 8+ hrsA month on Plus
- £0To start
What actually makes A-Level hard
It is not that the content is harder than GCSE, although it is. It is that the gap between recognising something and being able to produce it gets much wider, and almost nothing you did at GCSE tells you which side of that gap you are on.
At GCSE, reading the topic and doing some questions is roughly enough. At A-Level, you can follow every line of a worked example, agree with all of it, and then be unable to start the same question with the numbers changed. That is not a memory problem and more revision of the same kind does not fix it. It means a step in the reasoning was never yours, and the only thing that finds it is somebody asking you to explain the bit you have been quietly stepping over.
Why the usual tools stop working here
Revision platforms are built around retrieval: quiz you, schedule it back, quiz you again. That works well on content you understood once and are trying to keep. It does very little for a topic you never understood, because a quiz can tell you that you got it wrong and show you the right answer, but it cannot work out why you got it wrong.
You end up in a loop that feels like revision. The question comes back in a fortnight, you guess better, the app records progress, and in June the question is phrased differently and nothing transfers.
What a tutor has to do about it
- Find the actual gap. Not the topic you named — the step underneath it. That means asking you questions before explaining anything.
- Draw it. Most of A-Level maths, physics and chemistry is spatial or procedural: a curve, a force diagram, a reaction pathway, a titration curve. Prose describing a diagram is a worse diagram.
- Explain it a different way when the first way fails, rather than repeating it more slowly.
- Work to your specification. Boards differ on what is in the formula booklet and what you are expected to recall, and revising the wrong side of that line costs marks.
- Make you produce something before you leave, so you find out now rather than in the exam hall.
How Lumi does it
You say what is not landing, out loud or typed — or you attach the paper, the photo or the YouTube link it lives in, and Lumi reads or watches it first. Then it explains while drawing on a board as it talks: the curve, the force diagram, the working written line by line. You can interrupt it mid-sentence, point at a part of the diagram and ask what that bit means, or say it still does not make sense and get it as an analogy instead. Ask for a quiz at the end and the questions land on the board — it sees what you picked and goes back over the ones you missed. It can also set homework and mark it, and it remembers between lessons which explanations actually worked.
Subjects
Each of these has its own page with the topics students get stuck on and how Lumi teaches them.
- A-Level Maths & Further Maths
- A-Level Physics & Chemistry
- A-Level Biology & Psychology
- A-Level Economics & History
What it does not do
It does not replace past papers under timed conditions, and it does not replace your teacher. It will not write your coursework, and you should not want it to — the essay you did not write is the topic you cannot answer on in June. And like anything of this kind it can be confidently wrong, so check anything that decides a mark against your specification.
Common questions
For the part where you have read something three times and it has not gone in, yes — that is the specific job. It is less useful for the parts of A-Level that are about stamina and technique: sitting a full paper under time, marking yourself honestly against a mark scheme, and learning what a particular examiner rewards. Use it for understanding and use past papers for everything else.
Tell it your board and it teaches to it — including which formulae you are given in the exam and which you are expected to recall, a distinction that costs marks every year and differs between boards. The courses checked line by line against the actual specification are eight AQA and Edexcel qualifications, 471 objectives in all: Edexcel GCSE Maths Higher, AS and A-level Maths, and AQA GCSE Biology, Chemistry and Physics Higher plus AS and A-level Economics. On any other board it will still teach the topic; the packs are the part verified against the spec.
The subject pages go into detail on Maths & Further Maths, Physics & Chemistry, Biology & Psychology, Economics & History. It is not limited to those: it will teach anything you bring it, including subjects with no page here yet.
Cheaper and more available, not better at everything. A private tutor at £30 to £60 an hour gives you accountability, someone who knows your school and your teacher, and a person who notices what you are avoiding. Lumi gives you the explaining, whenever you want it, at roughly £2 an hour on the yearly plan. Plenty of students use both.
Yes, on any plan — at the start of a lesson or mid-way through one. Attach the paper, the mark scheme or a photo of the question you are stuck on, and it starts from that rather than from the top of the topic.
120 minutes a week on Plus, resetting every Monday — over 8 hours a month — with lessons of up to 120 minutes, subject to the remaining weekly allowance. The free plan is 3 lessons of up to 10 minutes in total, which is enough to find out whether it explains things in a way that works for you.
Read next
No card. No countdown.
Ready to understand something new?
Bring the thing you got stuck on today.