About GCSE Maths Higher

I'm Gavin. I've spent close to twenty years teaching and designing curriculum across the British curriculum in UK state schools, international British-curriculum schools abroad, and on teacher-training programmes. I'm PGCE-qualified with Qualified Teacher Status (University of Brighton) and hold a Master's with Distinction in education from the University of Leicester.

Most of that time has been spent watching students get the same questions wrong — not because they hadn't worked, but because no one had named the specific pattern they were stuck on. The same is true at scale: examiner reports flag the same misconceptions every series. "Revise more" doesn't fix them. Naming them does.

I built GCSE Maths Higher because I feel that many higher-ability learners, although perfectly capable, still struggle at times, and there are fewer resources that aim to support these students. Also, most "AI tutors" feel like a chatbot wrapped around generic practice. The patterns examiners flag in their reports every single series — slope-intercept reversal, gradient-as-total-change, sign-blindness on descending lines — aren't named by any other tool. Students are told to "revise more" when what they actually need is to be told which specific pattern is costing them marks.

As a teacher-trainer I spent years coaching other teachers through advanced diploma-level work — schemes of work, assessment design, learner diagnostics, mentoring through complex pedagogy projects. That experience sits behind every misconception in this app: each one is a real failure mode I've marked, named and seen recur across cohorts, paired with an intervention built to interrupt it rather than paper over it with another worked example.

The diagnostic content draws on 30 years of maths-education research (CSMS, ICCAMS, Stump, Küchemann) to catalogue the most common GCSE Higher Algebra failure modes. The diagnostic is designed to identify where learners are struggling, and guide them to and independent understanding of the concept.

Questions, feedback, or you're a teacher who'd like to talk about using this with a class? I read every reply — drop me a line on the homepage form or via the email on the landing page.