Triquetra Education: Teaching and Support

09/09/2026

Once a family chooses tuition with us, they stay. This is why.

08/09/2026

If you want proof that the world is a product of perception, there really is no better image than the geological structure of the Devil’s Chimney near Cheltenham.
It is, according to local legend, an eternal prison.

The Devil, they say, tormented the town. Enraged by its churchgoing population, he would sit on Leckhampton Hill and throw stones at the faithful on their way to worship each Sunday. Eventually, the townspeople rose up against him, collected the stones he had hurled, and threw them back. They forced him underground, where he remains trapped to this day. The pillar above is his chimney, venting the heat, smoke and flames of his subterranean prison.

And this, of course, as mythologists will know, is absolutely true.
It is also true, of course, that the structure stands at a nexus of narrative, history, mythology and engineering. The rock itself is Jurassic: around 170 million years ago, this part of England lay beneath a warm, shallow sea. Much later, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Charles Brandon Trye developed the quarries on Leckhampton Hill. Around 1800, he constructed an inclined tramway to move stone down the steep hillside; the cutting of this incline appears to have isolated the pillar that became the Devil’s Chimney. By 1810, the tramway connected the quarries with Cheltenham. And yet, by 1803, the Devil’s Chimney was already appearing in print as a place of supernatural construction.

But why? The history of the area perhaps offers us an idea. In the 1800s, as the tramway was constructed and quarrying expanded, this ancient landscape was increasingly being reshaped by industrialisation. The Chimney perhaps represented something unsettling about that transformation; it became a landscape that was no longer quite what it had been. The story of the Devil perhaps offered a way of making sense of that change. The Devil is embedded underground; the landscape above him is altered. In the story, it is not humanity that creates the strange structure, but the Devil himself. And as this metaphorical Devil challenges traditional ways of being and worship, the town confronts him, overcomes him, and buries him forever in a dark chamber. Perhaps the narrative allowed the town to embrace change whilst simultaneously giving form to its anxiety around it.

The Chimney becomes, then, not simply a mythologising of engineering, but another chapter in Gloucestershire’s long tradition of taking on the Devil… and winning.

17/08/2026

And so A-Levels complete! We are proud to announce that once again we have achieved a 100% high pass rate, with every single student who received tuition through Triquetra gaining offers to their first choice universities.

Sending congratulations as well to all those globally who received A Level results last week, whatever they may have been and whatever plans you have. The perseverance and resilience required to sit A Level examinations is immense, and getting through the two years is no small feat! Wishing everyone every joy and success in the next part of the adventure (which is likely to be even more fun than A Levels - as if that were possible!).

06/08/2026

Light, geometry, architecture, memory, and poetry all meet in this one image taken in a restaurant in Bangsar.

It reminds me of the T.S. Eliot poem 'Little Gidding' (on the image) (and maybe even a little Dante: 'And then we came forth to see again the stars' (Inferno ###IV)!)

02/08/2026

Kavita Bhupta Ghosh reads like the classics. One day, I have no doubt, she will be. For now, she stands on the shoulders of the classical thinkers.

Aristotle argued that education is not simply the acquisition of information, but the cultivation of character and intellectual virtue over time. Learning is a process of becoming, he thought, not a single moment of arrival.

A different but complementary strand of classical thought emerges in the Stoic philosophers, particularly Epictetus and Seneca, who reminded their students that setbacks do not define a person’s worth. What matters is the response to the setback: whether we learn, adapt, and continue the pursuit of wisdom.

Socrates, too, warned against the illusion of final knowledge. The Socratic tradition suggests that the more we understand, the more aware we become of how much remains to be explored. Achievement is therefore not a conclusion, but an invitation to further growth.

And now we have Ghosh, combining, reframing, and developing these ideas about education in a profoundly classical way. She shifts the focus away from a single grade or result and towards the lifelong development of judgment, resilience, curiosity, and self-knowledge.

The ancient world would not have seen education as a race to a certificate. It would have seen it as the ongoing formation of the person. On the one hand, it is therefore never complete; on the other, failure is never final (and perhaps not even entirely real)....

28/07/2026

This has the marks of classical Vitruvius architectural principles all over it. Vitruvius was a Roman architect who argued that successful design should work in harmony with natural principles. That way of thinking has echoed through centuries of scientific and architectural development, with nature repeatedly serving as a source of inspiration for human innovation.

For example, in 1839 the French physicist Alexandre Edmond Becquerel discovered that light could produce an electrical current in a chemical system. More than a century later, in 1954, researchers at Bell Laboratories in the United States developed the first practical silicon solar cell, laying the foundation for modern solar power. Both of these breakthroughs were connected to the photovoltaic effect - the process by which certain materials convert sunlight into electricity.

The Supertrees harness this photovoltaic effect and express it through a structure that embodies biomimicry: learning from nature’s designs rather than attempting to impose entirely artificial solutions. Their branching form maximises surface area, supports vertical planting, and helps manage energy and environmental systems in ways inspired by living trees.

The Supertrees themselves may, at first glance, appear to be isolated futuristic imaginings, but they are rooted in discoveries that stretch back nearly two centuries. They are not the rejection of the past that they might initially seem; rather, they are firmly rooted within it even as they reach towards the future, an amalgamation of classical observation and modern technology.

22/04/2026

Welcome to the season that gets you where you want to go!

20/04/2026

Go to: https://triquetraeducation.com/contact-for-tuition to book your free trial.

13/04/2026

10/04/2026

One of the challenges of accessing higher levels in GCSE English is the heavy value assessment criteria put on a student's ability to think symbolically. But not all students excel at this skill. So how can we support access to higher levels for these students?

Read the newest blog post on Substack here: https://open.substack.com/pub/circlz/p/accessing-symbolic-thinking-for-students?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web