Jason - English specialist

I am a fully qualified  English teacher and full time private tutor, specialising in GCSE and A-level English Language and Literature.  . I also teach KS2 and KS3 English and prepare students for 11+ and 13+ entrance examinations.

I have worked as an AQA examiner for ten years, giving me a detailed understanding of how exam responses are assessed, where marks are won and lost, and what students need to do to move confidently through the mark bands.

Before becoming a teacher, I spent fifteen years as a criminal defence barrister. It might seem an unusual route into English teaching, but the two careers have rather more in common than you might think: close reading, careful use of evidence, constructing a convincing argument and communicating complex ideas clearly. These are precisely the skills I now help students develop in their own writing.

I retrained as a teacher in 2014 and taught first at a state school in West London and later at an independent girls’ school in Buckinghamshire, where I spent the final six years of my classroom teaching career. I now tutor full-time.

My lessons are highly individual. Some students come to me because they have lost confidence or find English difficult; others are already strong students who want to turn good responses into top-band ones. We might work on essay structure, close language analysis, unseen texts, exam technique, timing or simply making sense of a text that currently feels impenetrable.

I teach the major exam boards, including AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas and Pearson Edexcel IGCSE, and I have extensive experience of working with students with learning differences and processing difficulties. I break difficult tasks into clear, manageable stages without lowering expectations.

My approach is supportive but straightforward. I don’t believe that generic praise or vague feedback helps students improve. I want students to know exactly what they are doing well, where they are losing marks and, most importantly, what they can actually do about it.

Whether the aim is to secure a pass, rebuild confidence or push towards the very highest grades, the tuition is shaped around the individual student, their course and their ambitions. 

Qualifications:

BA (Hons) Classics

University of Leeds 1992

Bar Practising Certificate 

Inns Of Court School of Law 1995

QTS English 

Oxford Brooks 2015