A-Level Maths
A maths tutor that shows the working.
Pure, statistics, mechanics and Further Maths, drawn out line by line on a whiteboard you can stop mid-step. Upload a past paper, or your own attempt at one.
- 3 papersPure, stats, mechanics
- 8+ hrsA month on Plus
- £0To start
Three papers, three different subjects
A-Level Maths is taught as one subject and examined as three, and almost everyone is quietly much better at one of them. Being good at maths, for most students, means being good at pure: you can differentiate anything, you can integrate most things, and algebra holds no fear. Then mechanics turns up and the hard part is not the calculus at all, it is drawing the forces correctly before any calculus starts. Then statistics turns up and the hard part is neither: it is writing a conclusion in the context of the question, in the specific language a mark scheme accepts.
This is worth naming because it changes what revising means. If your mechanics is weak, doing another twenty differentiation questions is not revision, it is comfort. The three need different work, and the first useful thing a tutor does is tell you which one you are avoiding.
Marks live in the method
Maths mark schemes hand out marks for the method separately from the answer. Get the approach right, slip a sign, and the answer is wrong while most of the marks are still there. Do it in your head, write down a wrong answer and nothing is there at all. Every maths teacher in the country says show your working, and every year students lose marks on questions they could genuinely do.
A tutor that draws is aligned with this in a way a chat window is not. You watch the method appear a line at a time, in the layout you are meant to reproduce, rather than reading a finished answer and reverse-engineering how it got there.
Where A-Level Maths actually breaks
- Integration where the difficulty is choosing the method. Substitution, by parts, partial fractions — the technique is fine once you know which one; the exam does not tell you which one.
- Mechanics before any algebra happens. Most lost mechanics marks are a missing force or a wrongly resolved component, decided in the first thirty seconds on a diagram.
- Trigonometric identities under pressure. Knowing them is not the same as spotting which one turns this expression into something you can integrate.
- Proof. Induction and contradiction have a required shape, and a proof that is mathematically right but skips the closing statement drops marks.
- Hypothesis testing conclusions. The arithmetic is the easy half; the marks are in stating what it means for the thing the question was about.
- Graph transformations, where the whole difficulty is spatial and prose describing a curve is a worse curve.
What a session looks like
You say what is not working — out loud or typed — or you attach the question. The topic you name and the step you actually lost are usually not the same thing, so it works back to where your version broke. Then it explains while drawing: the substitution written out, the force diagram built up arrow by arrow, the curve sketched and then shifted. You can interrupt mid-sentence, point at a line and ask where that came from, or say it still does not land and get it a different way. At the end it puts a similar question on the board, which is the part that decides whether any of it stuck.
Bring your own paper
Attach past papers, mark schemes, your teacher notes or a photo of the page you are stuck on — at the start of a lesson or mid-way through one. Your own attempt is the most useful thing you can bring: draw your working on the pad and it reads the handwriting, marking what is right, what is wrong and the exact line it went wrong on. A tutor looking at your working can see that you have understood integration by parts perfectly and are losing every question to a sign error in the same place, which is a two-minute fix that no amount of re-teaching the topic would find.
Also worth knowing
It does not sit papers for you, and it should not do your homework. It can be confidently wrong, so anything that decides a mark gets checked against your specification and your mark scheme. And it is not a replacement for doing full papers to time, which is the only thing that builds the stamina a three-hour paper asks for.
The full Maths and Further Maths breakdown lists every topic, board by board.
Common questions
For explaining a method and finding where your version of it breaks, yes, and maths is the subject it does this best in — every step is checkable, so a wrong turn shows up immediately rather than three paragraphs later. Where it is weaker is judgement under exam pressure: which method to reach for when the question does not tell you, and when to abandon a line that is not going anywhere. That comes from doing papers, not from being taught.
Pure, statistics and mechanics across the full A-Level, and Further Maths on top of it: complex numbers, matrices, polar coordinates, differential equations, proof by induction, hyperbolic functions. Bring a topic and it teaches it. The Maths and Further Maths subject page lists what students most often arrive stuck on.
Tell it your board and it teaches to it. This matters more in maths than in most subjects, because the boards differ on what is printed in the formulae booklet and what you are expected to have memorised, and revising the wrong side of that line is a way to lose marks on content you actually knew. The reviewed teaching packs — checked line by line against the specification — are Edexcel's: GCSE Maths Higher, AS Maths and A-level Maths.
Yes, on any plan. Photograph the question, the mark scheme or your own attempt with the working in it, and it starts from that. Uploading your attempt is the more useful of the two — or draw your working on the pad and it reads the handwriting and names the line where things went wrong, which is a different conversation from being taught the topic again from the start.
Because a worked solution is somebody else being fluent at you. Following one feels exactly like understanding it, right up until you meet the same question with different numbers. The difference here is that it asks you to take the next step before it does, which is uncomfortable and is the entire point.
A private maths tutor in the UK typically runs £30 to £60 an hour, usually as one hour a week in a fixed slot. Lumi is roughly £2 an hour of tutoring on the yearly plan, available at eleven at night the day before a mock. A tutor who knows you and your teacher is worth paying for if you can; the honest comparison is availability and price, not that one replaces the other.
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