Teaching not what to think,
but how to think.
One-to-one tuition in the humanities, sciences and social sciences. We take pupils from 11+ through to undergraduate work and beyond, and adults of any age who want to study properly.
Tuition across the disciplines, at every stage.
11+, 13+ and Common Entrance
Preparation for entrance examinations to selective and independent schools. We teach the reasoning these papers test, rather than drilling answers to last year’s questions.
GCSE and A-Level
The full range of humanities, languages and social sciences. Hard sciences and mathematics are taught by specialist tutors as our network grows.
Oxbridge and Russell Group
Interview preparation, subject-specific admissions tests, and the longer-term work of developing the habits of mind that selective universities tend to reward.
Personal Statements and Editing
UCAS personal statements; supplementary admissions essays; academic editing of undergraduate and postgraduate work; supervision of EPQs, dissertations and independent research projects.
Home Education
Tutored sessions and full curricula for families educating outside the school system, designed with the parents and shaped by the interests and pace of the pupil.
Adult and Later-Life Learning
For those who missed formal education first time round, those reading seriously in retirement, and those pursuing scholarly interests on their own terms.
An empathetic rigour.
Empathy in teaching has come to mean indulgence, and we mean something more demanding by it. The empathetic teacher pays close attention to the particular pupil in front of them: to what they have understood, what they have not, where their argument has gone slack, and what they actually find interesting under the apparent dutifulness. From that attention, real teaching becomes possible. Without it, what passes for teaching is largely delivery.
We try to teach the disciplines as they are. History is the weighing of evidence and the building of explanations from it. Literature is the close, patient reading that good criticism requires. Philosophy is the honest examination of one’s own thinking. The sciences and mathematics are accounts of how things actually behave. None of these subjects are taught well by being made comfortable; they are taught by being taken seriously, which is what most pupils and most adults secretly want.
Parents looking for confirmation of their own views will not necessarily find it here, and neither will pupils. What we will try to do is teach a pupil to read carefully, write clearly, follow an argument, weigh counter-arguments, change their mind when the evidence requires it, and stand their ground when it does not. That is what we mean by teaching them how to think.
A teacher of twenty years.
I founded and lead Empathetic Education, a small but growing practice of like-minded tutors. What my Cambridge education gave me, more than any particular subject, was the ability to learn quickly across unfamiliar ground — which is most of what good tutoring actually asks of a teacher. I have been teaching for twenty years.
In that time I have supervised undergraduate and Master’s work in fields ranging from law to the history of the Shoah, led Pre-U Art History classes at Cambridge, and prepared a great many candidates for Oxbridge interviews and the personal statements that go before them. My students have gone up to Oxford, Cambridge and across the Russell Group — UCL, King’s, Imperial and others — and a good number have become people I still hear from years into their degrees, whether reading history at UCL or Human, Social and Political Sciences at St Andrews.
The work I am proudest of is rarely the most glamorous. I have taught neurodivergent and so-called difficult students and watched them flourish on their own terms; taught children in Sebenta schools in Eswatini; mentored those who asked for it; and worked with students from all over the world, particularly from China and Korea. One pupil, told to her face by a teacher that she was “rubbish”, went on to earn the highest marks in English literature in her county. Another, predicted grade 5s in GCSE English Language and Literature, was awarded 9s. Neither was a miracle. Both had simply been misjudged, and then taught properly.
Away from teaching I read more or less constantly, am writing a fantasy novel, cook, follow the cricket, play several instruments and compose a little, and am slowly learning Slovak and Farsi. I mention it not as ornament but because a teacher who has stopped being curious has very little left to teach. The appetite is the lesson — and if it sounds like the kind you have been looking for, do write.
A growing circle of tutors.
Every tutor at Empathetic Education is chosen for the same two things: a genuine command of their subject, and the patience to teach it to the particular pupil in front of them. The practice is growing carefully, one well-judged appointment at a time — profiles of new colleagues will appear here as they join.
Cambridge-educated, with twenty years' teaching across the humanities and social sciences — from 11+ through to postgraduate supervision and Oxbridge preparation.
Full profile →If you know your subject or your craft and can teach it well, wherever you learned it, we would be glad to hear from you.
Apply to tutor →A wide range of learners.
Younger Pupils
Children working towards 11+, 13+ and Common Entrance, where good early teaching does more for a child than almost anything else.
Secondary School Pupils
GCSE and A-level candidates who want to learn their subject seriously, whether for the exam, for university, or for the sake of the thing itself.
University Applicants
Oxbridge and Russell Group hopefuls, and international applicants, who need rigorous preparation for interviews, admissions tests and personal statements.
Undergraduates and Researchers
Students who want a careful reader for their work, supervision of an independent project, or the kind of structured guidance that overstretched university departments increasingly cannot give.
Home-Educating Families
Parents who want a serious teaching partner alongside what they are already doing at home, whether for a particular subject or across a whole curriculum.
Neurodivergent Learners
Pupils with high-functioning autism and related profiles. We teach them as they are, which often means recognising that the intelligence is fully present and the problem lies elsewhere.
Adult and Third-Age Learners
Adults studying for qualifications, for research projects, or simply because the appetite for serious reading and discussion has never gone away.
Those Who Were Failed First Time
Pupils, often working-class boys, who left school knowing less than they should have. We take this work seriously, and reduced-fee places and scholarships are available.