The step up is real, and nobody warns you properly
Students arrive in Year 12 having done well at GCSE and assume A-Level will be more of the same, harder. It isn't more of the same. Three things change at once, and the combination is what catches people out.
The mathematical demand jumps. This is the big one, and it's the reason most Year 12 physicists struggle. GCSE physics can be survived on recall and one-step calculations. A-Level cannot. Algebraic fluency stops being helpful and becomes the load-bearing skill.
The scaffolding disappears. At GCSE, questions tell you what to do. At A-Level they frequently don't, and a student who has only ever answered signposted questions has no method for starting an unsignposted one.
Independent study becomes the actual job. Contact hours drop and the expectation of what you do between them rises sharply. Students who never had to build a study system because GCSE didn't demand one now need one urgently, and no one teaches it.
Which subjects I teach at A-Level
Physics and maths. That's it, and it's deliberate.
I trained as a physics teacher — a five-year degree, in Spanish — and I've taught physics and maths for twenty years. A-Level chemistry and biology deserve specialists in those subjects, so I don't take them. I teach all four sciences at GCSE, where the depth is well within my range, and I stop at the point where I'd be doing your child a disservice.
All UK exam boards: AQA, Edexcel, OCR (A and B), WJEC/Eduqas and Cambridge International.
Year 12 or Year 13?
Year 12 is where tuition does the most good and where I'd most want to catch a student. Almost every Year 13 crisis I see started as an unaddressed Year 12 gap — usually algebraic. Fixing it in Year 12 is straightforward. Fixing it in Year 13, while also covering new content and preparing for finals, is considerably harder.
Year 13 tuition is a different job: consolidating two years of content, building exam technique, and working on the synoptic questions that pull several topics together. Very doable, but the earlier gaps still have to be paid for, so we usually spend the first few sessions going backwards before we can go forwards.
If they're applying for a science or engineering degree
Grades matter, but so does whether they can still do the subject in October of first year. A student who got the grade through drilling past papers and a student who got the grade through understanding look identical on results day and look nothing alike three months later.
I teach for the second outcome. It's slower in the short term and it's the only version that survives contact with a university course.
The bit people don't mention
A-Level is where I see the most exam anxiety, and it's where it does the most damage, because the stakes are visible and immediate — offers, places, a plan for next year that suddenly looks fragile.
I'm a registered mental health nurse as well as a teacher, so I recognise it early and I'm calm about it. What I provide is structure and realistic expectations, not therapy. If a student needs more than that, I'll say so plainly rather than let it drift.