Gareth

I am a highly experienced private tutor and former maths teacher offering one-to-one tuition in Milton Keynes and online up to GCSE level, or any equivalent qualification.

I have been helping students to learn maths since I was at school myself, over 20 years ago and have lots of very positive reviews. If you are in Milton Keynes, you will almost certainly live within easy walking distance of someone who can recommend me.

Tutoring Experience

I have been tutoring and teaching maths since 1997, at which time I was still an A-level student. My first formal experience came as a volunteer tutor at Denbigh School in Milton Keynes, and quickly led to the offer of regular paid tuition work (as well as a Community Service Award). I eventually returned to Denbigh as a maths teacher after gaining a degree in Maths and Statistics from the University of Warwick.

I have had my own independent tuition business for several years and have been tutoring full-time since 2011.

I have tutored adults online for many years, and so I can offer a tried and tested system of online tuition where students use a tablet and both student and tutor write on the screen as if it was a whiteboard. Students can upload photographs, screenshots or PDFs of questions, and can then write on them as if they were writing on a paper version.

Tutoring Approach

I am professional without being overly formal. I only tutor in my specialist subject of mathematics and numeracy, and I know my subject extremely well. I deliberately trade under my own name as I'm proud of what I do, and the unique way in which I do it.

I focus on developing fast, fluent students. In particular, I expect all students to memorise all of their single digit times tables, supported outside of my sessions by a free online resource that I have helped to develop. This accomplishment alone makes students much faster to teach, and is in line with the practices in many other countries around the world where numeracy levels are higher than those in the UK.

Alongside developing basic numeracy, I also focus heavily on developing mathematical literacy. Once a student knows the meaning of words such as "factor" and "multiple" I'm able to teach them other concepts more quickly using that terminology, and they gain confidence through being able to talk about maths properly.

I also work on developing a number of good habits in my students. For example, reading questions carefully, doing the maths involved, and then reading the question again to check what the task was, and how it was supposed to be done. Students often forget to do something very simple at the end of a question. Another habit I encourage is for students to recognise when they say that they don't know (or words to that effect) that often they do know something. So students are encouraged strongly to catch themselves saying they don't know and say to themselves instead "what's this question about?" and then "What DO I know about that?" This isn't guaranteed to work all the time, but very often leads students to gain more marks, and sometimes allows students to get started on a question and eventually get all of the marks.

Whilst I'm acutely aware of the importance of marks, I focus on developing good mathematicians with good habits and good attitudes. I don't waste time making targets and predictions and learning what the minimum you can do to get each grade is, I just develop better mathematicians, secure in the knowledge that better mathematicians get better grades.

I have an up-to-date enhanced DBS check (I’m signed up to the update service), and all face-to-face tuition takes place in clients' own homes in an open, public area whilst a parent or guardian remains within the household.