Sarah Whitfield

Sarah teaches maths from Year 6 up to GCSE, and she works mostly with pupils who can follow a method while it is being shown to them but lose it the moment the page is blank. Her lessons run on a simple rule: before a pupil attempts anything independently, they explain the method out loud to her, step by step, as if she were the one learning it. That habit exposes the half-understood fractions and the skipped sign long before an exam does.

She covers number work, algebra, ratio and proportion, geometry and the data topics that appear in the crossover papers. A typical session starts with two or three questions on last week's ground, then moves into new material, then ends with a mixed set so the pupil has to choose the method rather than being told which one to use. Homework is short on purpose. She would rather see six careful questions returned than thirty rushed ones.

Her philosophy is that confidence in maths comes from being able to say why, not from speed. She is patient with the pupil who needs a concept drawn three different ways, and she keeps parents in the loop with progress reports, so nobody is guessing about how it is going.