What ‘physics and maths tutor’ usually means in practice
When someone searches the phrase, nine times out of ten they’re a parent of a Year 11 or Year 12 student who’s struggling — the maths teacher’s good but rushed, the physics teacher’s leaving in July, mocks came back with a 5 in physics and a 4 in maths, and GCSEs are six months away. Or it’s a sixth former hitting the wall at A-Level. The jump from GCSE to A-Level Maths is brutal: suddenly you’re expected to handle calculus, manipulate logarithms fluently, and prove things. A-Level Physics adds vector resolution, circular motion, capacitors, and the particle physics chapter that nobody seems to teach properly.
A tutor who handles both subjects is doing something specific. They’re treating the maths as the toolkit and the physics as the application. When a student can’t do a SUVAT question, the issue is rarely physics — it’s not being able to rearrange s = ut + ½at² for t. A combined tutor sees that immediately. They’ll spend a session on algebraic fluency, then come back to the mechanics question, and suddenly it works. That’s the value. You’re not paying for someone who knows the syllabus — you’re paying for someone who can diagnose where the wheels actually came off.
Most tutors on our books have either a STEM degree from a Russell Group university or current teaching experience in a UK school. Several are ex-examiners who’ve marked AQA or Edexcel papers and know exactly what costs marks (working not shown, units missed, significant figures wrong on the final line).
How the GCSE and A-Level specs actually break down
For GCSE Maths, students sit three papers — two calculator, one non-calculator — across AQA, Edexcel and OCR. The grade 7-9 questions cluster around algebraic proof, circle theorems, vector geometry and trigonometric identities in non-right-angled triangles. GCSE Physics is dual-tier: Foundation caps at grade 5, Higher goes to 9, and the equation sheet is provided in the exam from 2023 onwards (a big change — students no longer need to memorise 23 equations, but they do need to use them under pressure).
A-Level Maths is now a linear two-year course with three papers: two Pure (worth 67%) and one Applied (split between Statistics and Mechanics). Grade boundaries for A* have been hovering around 75-80% raw across boards. A-Level Physics has three papers plus a Practical Endorsement — the practicals don’t carry exam marks but the techniques (uncertainty calculations, error bars, log graphs to find power-law relationships) come up in the written papers constantly.
A few things a good tutor will drill specifically:
- AQA Physics Paper 2 Section B — the 25-mark long-answer questions on fields and capacitance that students dread
- Edexcel Pure Paper 2 — proof by contradiction and parametric equations consistently catch students out
- OCR A Mechanics — the variable acceleration questions involving integration
The point of bringing a tutor in isn’t to re-teach everything. It’s to find the three or four sticking points that are costing two grades and fix them.
Where students typically go wrong
A typical case: a Year 12 in Reading, predicted A in Maths and B in Physics, gets a U in the January Physics mock. Panic. The school suggests a tutor. The parent finds someone, books ten sessions at £45/hour. The tutor’s first move isn’t to start at the beginning — it’s to mark the mock paper line by line and identify where marks were lost. Usually it’s not knowledge gaps. It’s:
- Not reading the question properly (a common 3-mark loss)
- Not stating the equation before substituting numbers in
- Forgetting units, especially when a question gives data in mixed units (cm and m, or kJ and J)
- Treating vectors as scalars in resolution problems
- On graph questions, not using the full extent of the axes when drawing a line of best fit
What good tutoring looks like is targeted. Two sessions on equation discipline. One session on vector resolution. One on uncertainty propagation. By session five the student is sitting another past paper and the same mistakes aren’t reappearing. You don’t need 30 sessions. You need the right ten.
How TheTutorLink works and what it costs
You filter for ‘physics’ and ‘maths’ (or both), pick your level — GCSE, A-Level, Further Maths, IB — and message the tutors who fit. The first 30-minute session is free, so you can check whether your child clicks with them before spending anything. Hourly rates are set by the tutor and visible upfront, usually £25-£55 for combined physics and maths tutors.
We charge a 5% commission on lessons booked. That’s it. No subscription, no agency mark-up, no hidden monthly fee. Compare that to Tutorful (25%), MyTutor (around 22%) or SuperProf (up to 20% plus a parent membership fee). On a £40-an-hour booking, the tutor on our platform keeps £38 — on a competitor at 25%, they keep £30. Tutors who care about that maths often charge less here than they do elsewhere, because they don’t need to inflate their rate to cover the agency cut.
If the first tutor isn’t right, swap. There’s no contract, no cancellation fee, and no pressure to commit to a block of sessions before you know it’s working.