Tutoring

For olympiad work, comfortably strong at school maths and enjoying it — a good Senior or Junior Maths Challenge score is a useful sign, but not a requirement. For MAT, STEP and TMUA, being on track for an A* in Maths is the usual starting point. If you are unsure, the introductory call is mostly me giving a student a problem and watching how they think about it.

Online. I teach from Oxford during term, and the whiteboard-and-problem-set format works as well remotely as it does in a room — better, in some ways, since everything written in a session is saved and sent on afterwards.

For BMO1 in the autumn, the summer before is the natural time to begin — olympiad technique is slow to build and does not respond well to being crammed. For the MAT, three to four months is usually enough. For interviews, a handful of sessions close to the date is often the right amount.

Yes, and this is worth doing separately from the test. I write bespoke mock interview questions rather than reusing a bank, because the point is to be asked something you have not seen and to think out loud well while you do it.

A student works on problems while I watch, and I find out where the band is — what they reach for first, where they stop, what they do when a problem does not open. Everything after that is chosen from what I see there.