Callum Fraser

Callum teaches key stage 3 maths, mostly years 7 to 9, and he spends a fair amount of the first lesson undoing a sentence a pupil has heard somewhere: I am bad at maths. He does not argue with it. He puts a question on the page that the pupil can definitely answer, and lets the evidence do the talking.

Fractions, negative numbers, ratio, early algebra. He builds each topic from what a pupil can already do, even if that means going back to something from year 5 for a week. Lessons move between a worked example on the whiteboard and a short set of questions the pupil talks through aloud, because saying the steps out loud shows him exactly where a rule has been half-learned. Mistakes get circled, not rubbed out, and they come back at the start of the next lesson.

He is patient with the long route. A pupil who has decided they are bad at maths is often protecting themselves from another wrong answer in front of a class, and a one-to-one lesson is a good place to stop performing. Callum keeps notes for the lead tutor and writes the parent progress report in the same plain language he uses with the pupil.