Foci Education

27/07/2026

A. Leung is in Year 10 at St Aloysius College. For his exam, he was asked to compare how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Adam McKay’s The Big Short represent the impact of the American Dream.

His argument was that both texts depict the Dream as an exploitative fiction — one that uses the illusion of meritocracy to delude the working class and protect the elite. Gatsby mourns its victims from the inside whereas The Big Short exposes the machinery from the outside. Together, they form a single indictment. His concluding line — the impact is a tragedy. 19 out of 20.

Congratulations Mr Leung

19/07/2026

Last term, we had a room full of Year 10 parents and students in for a conversation about subject selection and the different levels of English available for the new HSC.

We talked about scaling, what the difference between Advanced, Standard and Extension actually means in practice, and how to make the decision that suits the student — not just the one that looks impressive on a subject selection form.

If you missed it and have a child entering Year 11 in 2027, this is a conversation worth having before the form is due. Reach out and we’ll find a time.

16/07/2026

We hear this more than you’d think. And we get it. Parenting a teenager isn’t easy — managing your expectations from theirs is a whole new minefield and we’re finding ourselves becoming experts at helping families navigate it. “getting him across the line” and “teaching him to think” are different jobs. We can help with both. coffee soon at our office ☕️

29/06/2026

David and Emma are in Ho Chi Minh City for the term break. The studio is closed from 28 June and reopens 14 July. If it’s urgent, it can wait two weeks. If it genuinely can’t, you already have our numbers. See you in Term 3 ;)

28/06/2026

stay in school, kids. as with everything, consistency is key. you cannot go gym once per week and expect a six pack, or pick up a camera once and expect to be a pulitzer prize wining photographer. go to your lectures, ask questions, engage in discussions, take notes, draw the visuals, circle back via email, revise, rinse and repeat.

11/06/2026

Year 11 exams don’t count toward your ATAR. Your habits do.

English tuition for K–12 students in Burwood, Sydney. Group classes, private sessions, and expert essay feedback. Dare to think.

08/06/2026

Lydia is in Year 11 Extension 1 English at Marist Sisters College.
For her first assessment task, she wrote a short story that opens with Jane Austen’s most famous line — and then immediately subverts it. The protagonist is a girl who has mastered algorithms, perfected the , and built an entire system for finding love. She is completely blind to the fact that she is already in it.

The piece is a study in compulsory heteronormativity — how the social scripts we inherit about who we’re supposed to want can make us illiterate to our own desire. Lydia mapped this onto Austen’s free indirect discourse deliberately: the narrative voice knows Grace is in love with her best friend before Grace does. The reader figures it out. Grace doesn’t.

She drew on Song of Achilles, Clueless, and Bauman’s Liquid Love. She ranked first in her year.

01/06/2026

There’s a tension that doesn’t get talked about enough in communities like ours. To be a good Christian, you have to confess your failures. To maintain ‘mianzi’, you have to conceal them. These two things cannot coexist — and for many young Chinese Australians navigating both identities simultaneously, the result is performance rather than faith. W.G. is in Year 12. She wrote about this tension with the kind of clarity that most adults won’t allow themselves. She ranked first in her year.
That’s the education we’re trying to build — literary command to say what kids already know.

26/05/2026

A study published this year by the European Journal of Education examined the effects of private tutoring here in Sydney, Australia. Unsurprisingly, the findings were uncomfortable.

Researchers found that most tutoring— the ones that are household names— prioritise getting to an answer over developing the critical thinking behind it. Students walk away knowing formulas, patterns, and acronyms without fully understanding why. Students read text not for meaning but for answers to questions they have to attempt. One teacher in the research described this kind of tutoring as the kind that crushes curiosity. Another said she could instantly tell from reading a student’s work whether they had been coached or not.

However, the research did also show something which the critics of tutoring don’t often acknowledge — that families (especially those new to Australia) turned to tutoring not out of anxiety alone but because schools aren’t competitive enough. There’s not enough challenge, there’s not enough feedback. There’s not enough preparation. There’s not enough monitoring of progress for when it matters.

We originally started Foci Education 6 and a half years ago because we believed that both things could be true at once — that the landscape of tutoring has a real problem, and that the answer isn’t less support (as some teachers would like to believe), but better support.

We don’t drill, hand out templates or teach students to perform understanding they don’t have. We teach them to actually think, and it’s bloody hard. The results just happened to follow.

Ho, C.2026. “Undermining Classroom Teaching? Teachers’ Perspectives on the Impact of Private Tutoring on School Education in Sydney, Australia.” European Journal of Education61, no. 2: e70597. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70597.

22/05/2026

all enquiries addressed to David at [email protected]