Why students think they're bad at physics
In fifteen years of walking into other people's classrooms, I saw the same pattern almost everywhere. A student says they can't do physics. You sit with them for twenty minutes and it turns out they understand the physics perfectly well. What they can't do is rearrange an equation with the unknown on the bottom, or handle standard form without a calculator, or keep track of units through a multi-step calculation.
That isn't physics. That's algebra, wearing a physics costume. And because nobody names it, the student concludes they're not clever enough for the subject and starts avoiding it — which is how a fixable gap becomes a permanent one.
So the first session is diagnostic. I work backwards through what they can't currently do until we reach the last thing they genuinely understood, and we rebuild from there. It is almost never where they think it is.
The three things that actually cost marks
The maths underneath. Rearranging, standard form, significant figures, unit conversion, reading a gradient. Fix this and a whole grade often appears without touching any new physics.
The required practicals. Every board examines them, every year, and students revise them last because they feel like something that already happened. Method, variables, sources of error, how to improve it — these are predictable marks and most students throw them away.
Extended response. The six-markers aren't testing whether your child knows more. They're testing whether they can build a logical chain in writing, in order, using the right vocabulary. That's a technique, it's teachable in a handful of sessions, and it's worth a lot of marks across a paper.
What we cover
GCSE: forces and motion, energy, waves, electricity, magnetism and electromagnetism, particle model, atomic structure and radioactivity, space (where your board includes it), plus the required practicals and the maths skills that run through all of it.
A-Level: mechanics, materials, waves and optics, electricity, fields (gravitational, electric, magnetic), capacitance, nuclear and particle physics, thermal physics, and the practical endorsement. Plus the thing nobody prepares students for — the jump in algebraic and graphical demand between GCSE and Year 12.
All UK exam boards: AQA, Edexcel, OCR (A and B), WJEC/Eduqas and Cambridge International. Tell me the board on the first call and we work to that specification.
How I teach it
I was trained in a system that starts from the assumption that every student can learn this, and that if they haven't, the teaching is what needs to change. There is no comfortable category called "not a physics person" to file a struggling child into.
In practice that means: fewer topics per session, done properly. Explanations tested on hundreds of classes rather than read off a slide. Short, specific work between sessions instead of a pile of past papers. And a written note to you after each session saying what we did and what's still shaky.
Common questions
Can you help with the required practicals if the school rushed them?
Yes, and it's more common than you'd think. We can go through the method, the variables, the expected results and the standard sources of error without a lab — because what the exam actually tests is whether your child understands the experiment, not whether they can perform it.
My child is doing Combined Science, not Triple. Is that a problem?
Not at all. The physics content in Combined Science is a subset of the Triple content, so the teaching is the same — there's simply less of it. Tell me which they're taking and I'll work to the right specification.
Is A-Level physics much harder than GCSE?
Yes, and mostly not in the way students expect. The concepts get deeper, but the real step change is mathematical: much more algebra, much more graph interpretation, and far less scaffolding. Students who coasted through GCSE physics on good recall often struggle in Year 12 for exactly this reason.