The Students Who Surprised Me
Every few months I get an email that stops me in the middle of whatever I'm doing. A parent writing to say their daughter has just picked up an A in the subject she was ready to drop eighteen months earlier. A student, now at university, thanking a tutor they worked with for two terms in Year 11. We've been matching students with tutors since 2004, and I still find these moments genuinely moving. What strikes me most, looking back over two decades of this, is how rarely the students who go on to surprise everyone are the ones you'd have picked out at the start.
There's research that backs up what I've seen anecdotally for years. A UCL study following 16,000 young people found that those with the greatest belief in their own academic ability were 18 per cent more likely to achieve five good GCSE passes than those with the least confidence, and gained on average 41 more points across their GCSEs, the difference between six A grades and six Bs. Ability alone doesn't explain that gap. Confidence does a lot of the heavy lifting, and confidence is precisely the thing that's hardest to teach and easiest to knock out of a teenager.
Eva, who came to us in Year 12 convinced she simply "wasn't a maths person." Their parents had tried after school classes, and nothing had really shifted the story the student was telling themselves about their own ability. Within a term of working with one of our tutors, something changed, not because the tutoring covered new content faster, but because that individual help, really taking the time to understand what Eva didn't understand, reset the way she approached the subject. By the time exams came around, Eva achieved an A*, and more than the grade itself, what stayed with me was the change in the way Eva and her parents spoke about her studies.
That pattern repeats more often than I expected when I started this. A student arrives with a school report full of words like "underperforming" or "lacks confidence," and everyone, including the student, has quietly accepted a ceiling on what they're capable of. The tutoring relationship works best not when it simply drills past papers, but when a tutor spends the first few sessions doing something closer to detective work, working out exactly where the confidence broke and why.
This is part of why matching matters so much more than people expect before they've been through it. We work mostly with Oxbridge graduate tutors, and the temptation is to assume the value there is purely academic firepower, someone who knows the syllabus inside out. Sometimes that's exactly what's needed. But just as often the more useful quality is that the tutor is close enough in age and experience to remember what it felt like to be stuck on a topic, and confident enough themselves to sit with a struggling student without any trace of impatience. A mismatched pairing, even between two perfectly capable people, rarely produces the turnaround. The right pairing does it in weeks.
I remember Christopher, who had been asked to stop physics at AS Level after a run of poor results, and arrived for his first session almost apologising for wasting the tutor's time. Our tutor, Claire, didn't start with the syllabus. She started with a conversation about when Chris started to feel this way, and what they can do to turn things around. It took a few weeks before the student would attempt a question without being asked twice. By June, he'd gone from a D to a B, and told us afterwards that the thing that had actually changed wasn't his intelligence, it was that he'd stopped assuming he would get it wrong.
Exam anxiety plays a bigger part in this than most people outside education realise. A recent survey found 85 per cent of UK students experience some form of exam anxiety, and one in four rate it above eight out of ten on a scale of unmanageable stress. Most never ask for help with it, which matches what I see in the students who come to us describing themselves as "just not good at exams," when what's actually happening is that fear is getting in the way of showing what they know. A tutor who can separate the two, who can say clearly that this student understands the material and the problem is what happens to them in the exam hall, changes the entire trajectory.
One of the stories I come back to often is Nicole, whose predicted grades in English were consistently lower than her actual understanding, because she would sit in exams without writing anything, frozen by the prospect of the next hour. We paired her with Robin, who focused as much on exam technique and essay planning as on content. The turning point, according to the Nicole, was realising that there was a structured approach to each question; a checklist she could go through. Her final result was an A, well above what the school had predicted, and the parent's email afterwards said something I still think about: that her life would be different as a result of Robin's help.
There's a quieter version of this story too, one that doesn't always end in a dramatic grade jump but matters just as much. Neha came to us not failing anything in particular, but so anxious about history that she had stopped putting her hand up in class and had started avoiding homework altogether rather than risk getting it wrong. Our tutor, Nikki, spent the early sessions discussing history, reminding Neha that it was subject she genuinely enjoyed and had opinions on, before touching anything resembling exam content. The change wasn't really visible in a results table. It showed up in Neha's happiness during class and how she spoke about history with friends and family. Those are the surprises nobody puts in a prospectus, but they're often the ones I'm proudest of.
None of this is to say tutoring is magic, or that every student who lacks confidence at the start ends up outperforming expectations. Plenty of the students we work with make steady, unremarkable progress, which is exactly what they need, and that's a perfectly good outcome too. But the ones who surprise me, who genuinely surprise me, tend to share something in common. They weren't short on ability. They were short on someone believing in them consistently enough, and patiently enough, for that belief to become their own.
If you're a parent reading this because your own child is the one currently insisting they "just aren't a maths person" or "can't do exams," I'd say this. That story is rarely the whole truth, and it's very often changeable. It usually takes someone sitting with them for long enough to find out where the belief actually broke, rather than just pushing harder on the same spot that already hurts. That's the part of this job that keeps me doing it after twenty years, and it's why, whenever one of those emails lands in my inbox, I still stop what I'm doing to read it properly.