Phillip Irving English Tuition

And that’s this year’s GCSE exams done. Nice to have a few younger tutees to see out the end of the school year with than last year, when GCSEs all but signalled the end of my year’s work. Now my attention turns to exam marking by day and by evening preparing my other learners for the year to come. Fortunately, as ever, one activity inevitably inspires the other. It’s a good mix.

If anyone is considering tuition for the next academic year, now is a good time to get in touch. I’ll be revising my rates over the summer to incorporate, among other things, the steep rise in fuel costs, but I always honour existing rates for at least a full academic year when adjusting, so booking a few sessions this side of summer will see you on a lower rate than I’ll be advertising in the Autumn.

In the meantime, here’s to a fruitful last month, and a relaxing break to come :)

Bit of odd news: First Tutors, the tutor catalogue site I was using, has ceased operating with no notice. So, as I reach the time of year at which my year 11s finish, freeing up timetable slots for new tutees, I’m currently solely operating out of FB. Will update this going forward as I explore my options! In the meantime, if anyone is in need of f2f or online English tuition, Y8 up to Y13, £40p/h (dependent on distance), please do drop me a DM.

I've had two slots open up starting next week - a Wednesday afternoon and a Sunday early evening. Currently £40/hr, though rates for new tutees will be going up after summer (thank you, cost of living!). Drop me a message if interested🙂

Actually fully booked at the moment (though I do have daytime availability).

Not entirely surprising given the time of year, but given that it’s only been just over a year since I made the decision to try to make tuition a full-time business, it feels slightly surreal now to have achieved that; to have a waiting list and to have had to sadly turn some queries away.

It’ll all change come June, of course, when most of my current cohort will be saying goodbye to me and taking what they’ve learned into their GCSEs. But it’s all building a (so far!😅) successful track record to take forward into 2026-27.

Have been very busy mock marking for the past couple of months, so haven’t posted very much. A brief recap:

Seen mock and working grades rise by at least two GCSE grades across all my tutees, both at the lower end - trying to get over the grade 3/4 boundary and ending up with high grade 5s - and at the higher end - looking to push up from grade 6 to grade 8/9. This is in both language and literature, and in a couple of cases has been after just a month or so. Onwards and upwards.

Separately, as mentioned above, marking mock papers has been hugely helpful as a training tool for me, seeing pitfalls to advise tutees to avoid as well as great exam technique clearly being taught by teachers that I’m able to take note of!

Big piece of advice on the back of this for now is for language section B - avoid structuring work using lists of language techniques to include. Focus on clarity of communication, and then edit responses where appropriate to expand vocabulary if better words or devices fit (and not where they don’t!). Don’t cram loads in at the start to the point where it gets clumsy!

Also, the sky is blue. There’s only so much you can say about that before making your opening line sound like a cryptic crossword clue. Let it be blue!

(and endless, rimed with cloud…)

Interesting to see the rise in AI for assessment purposes. As an examiner, I have sometimes thought that AI would be better at assessing creative work than people - it should be objective rather than subjective, grading to assessment criteria rather than how a piece of writing makes us feel.

In practice, having had a couple of tutees use it to mark their reading responses, it’s clear it’s a long way off usable for this purpose. It awarded one of my students top of level three - three quarters of the available marks - for a piece that was almost certainly worth full marks. The issue, unsurprisingly, was one of nuance. Top level essays for AQA are “perceptive” - they notice subtle details of texts that many of us might miss - and AI is just not yet able to identify these subtleties.

That and the fact that, despite having been fed the mark scheme, its feedback was applicable but generic, with little reference to the mark scheme it was supposed to be using, surprised me.

So perhaps the time when AI eases teacher workload is further off than we might hope. And if teachers are using it for this purpose already, they might want to double check their results…

Still genuinely buzzing to have received the news that one of my Conexus tutees got a grade six in her English GCSE November resit after just two months of small-group tuition.

Accepted wisdom in teaching is that most resit students will improve by a grade a year in the classroom; as much work as I put into it, I’m still constantly surprised by how much tuition outpaces this.

Particular thing I make a point of teaching tutees who are working toward GCSE AQA English exams is how to approach the structure question (paper one Q3).

Structure isn't about the effect of how something is presented in a text, but about *where* it is presented, and the effect of putting it there in relation to everything else.

What impression does it leave a reader with *at that moment* due to the fact that it comes after what's gone before it, and precedes what will come after?

What will it leave a reader thinking about as the focus shifts to what follows it? What have they read before this that affects how they read this bit at this moment? Does it contrast with other parts of the text, or reinforce them? What effect on the reader does disclosing it *here* have, not on account of how it's written, but because it's written *here* as opposed to anywhere else?

I think it's the most consistently misunderstood question on the whole exam, which is why I always make sure to cover it.

As of November exams, I’ve got the following availability:
Sunday afternoons (1.30, 4.15)
Monday early evenings (5.30)
Tuesday late evenings (7.00)
Wednesday late afternoon/early evenings (3.00-8.00)

£40/session (within 5 miles/online)

Drop me a message if interested 🙂