Calvin F.

A-level and GCSE examiner for OCR and Edexcel. LSE graduate in Mathematics and Economics. Practising economist at a credit investment firm in the City.

I take a small number of students each term alongside a full-time role. I'm best suited to three kinds of student: those applying to Oxbridge or LSE, those who understand the material but can't convert it into marks, and those who want economics to feel like something more than a syllabus.

I mark the papers you'll sit. As an active examiner I know precisely where marks are awarded and where students lose them — and it is almost never a knowledge gap. It's undeveloped chains of reasoning, evaluation that asserts instead of weighing, and diagrams drawn but never referenced. I'll show you exactly which of these is costing you, because I've seen it several hundred times. One student moved from a C to an A* in a handful of lessons on technique alone.

Teaching by questioning. I guide your thinking rather than lecture, so you leave able to reproduce the reasoning yourself rather than having watched me do it. Nothing is rote-learned.

Quantitative economics and data response. A Mathematics and Economics degree and a job building forecasting models means the quantitative papers — the part most economics tutors are weakest on — are the part I'm strongest on. This matters most if you're applying to read economics: the top departments are mathematical, admissions tests, and interviewers care far more about whether you can reason quantitatively than whether you can recite a diagram.

Economics as a live subject. I work as a professional economist, so the syllabus isn't abstract to me. Students who find A-level economics dry usually find it stops being dry once it's attached to something real.

Oxbridge and LSE applications. Most of my tutoring has been with students targeting Oxbridge and LSE, including international applicants navigating the UK system for the first time. I've taken students into both, and I cover personal statements, admissions tests and interview preparation alongside the A-level itself. 

The first thing we fix is technique: decoding command words, building evaluation that reaches a justified judgement, integrating diagrams into prose rather than parking them beside it. These are the differences between a B and an A, and they move quickly. Usually sessions start with your work, not my explanation. As an examiner I need to see how you're actually writing before I can tell you what's costing you marks — and it's rarely what students assume.

Beyond that, I teach you to think like an economist rather than to reproduce one. Most students learn economics as a list of separate topics. I teach the whole macro syllabus off a single page: once you can see how the parts link, you stop memorising chains and start deriving them. So I ask more than I explain, and you'll be defending your reasoning rather than receiving mine. This is deliberate — an Oxbridge or LSE interviewer will hand you an unfamiliar problem and watch how you attack it, and no amount of memorised structure survives that.

I bring the subject in from where I use it. As a practising economist I work with the same ideas the syllabus covers — pricing risk, modelling behaviour, reading policy — and students who find A-level economics dry tend to find it stops being dry once it's attached to something real.