About Me
Where I am now
I am a Mathematics specialist with over twenty years of teaching and tutoring experience, working with students online worldwide and in person at my home in Warfield, Berkshire. My practice runs under the name Zodiac Maths, and the students I work with span KS3 through to degree level, the British and international curricula, and a steadily growing network of families across the UK, Europe and the Gulf.
Alongside the tutoring, I am a serving examiner and assessor for Edexcel (UK and International), AQA, OCR and Cambridge International — at GCSE, IGCSE, A-Level and International A-Level. The examiner’s work is, in honesty, one of the most useful things I bring to my students. I know how each board’s papers are marked, where candidates lose marks, and how to convert a strong understanding of the content into a strong grade in the room.
How I came to teach
My route into teaching was a long one, and a deliberate one.
I began my career in India as a senior executive at LIC (the Life Insurance Corporation of India), where I spent a decade in commercial and operational roles.
In 1996, I relocated to the United Kingdom, retrained in IT, and worked as a Senior Analyst Programmer at a London software house specialising in banking software, and subsequently at HSBC Asset Management.
In 2004, after almost twenty years in commerce and finance, I left it all to qualify as a teacher.
It was an unusual move at that point in a career, and a deliberate one — I wanted work that mattered to me, and I wanted to spend my time helping young people understand a subject I cared about.
I have not for a single day regretted the choice.
I qualified through St Mary’s College, University of Surrey, gaining my PGCE and QTS, and joined St Bernard’s Catholic Grammar School in Langley, where I went on to serve as Head of Mathematics. I retired from the school in 2019. Private tuition has run alongside throughout, and continues now as my main practice.
How I teach
Mathematics is a subject that rewards patience.
Few of my students have transformed their grades in a single term; almost all of them have transformed them over a year or two of patient, structured work.
I begin every relationship by listening to the student, to their parents, to where confidence has been knocked and where curiosity is waiting to be lit. From there, the work follows a clear shape:
The order matters. Skipping straight to past papers is the most common mistake in tutoring; I avoid it.
What students tell me they value most is that I take the subject — and them — seriously. I expect them to think; I will not give them an answer they could have worked out themselves. But I also know that almost every student who struggles with mathematics has been told a story about themselves: that they are not a maths person, that their brain works differently, that they should aim lower. My job is mostly to dismantle that story. The grades, more often than not, follow naturally once the story has gone.
Continuing professional development
Online tuition
I have been teaching online since 2008 — long before it was the norm — originally using a document camera and Skype, and now with a four-screen multi-monitor setup, collaborative GoodNotes notebooks, live graphical calculator access, and real-time visibility of both my own working and the students’.
Online tuition is a core part of my practice rather than an afterthought, and I currently work with families based across the UK, Europe and the Gulf.
Most of my students shift their entire workflow to GoodNotes after starting with me — not just our lessons together, but their classwork, homework, exam paper practice, and revision.
The result is a fully searchable digital notebook for the subject that replaces the need for physical exercise books and printed past papers, and stays with them through to their final exams.
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