Your child revises. You have watched them do it. They sit at the desk, they work through the questions, and they can talk you through a reaction mechanism over dinner. Then the paper comes back and the grade has not improved. Nothing you can see explains it, and neither can they. Most parents looking for an A Level Chemistry tutor arrive at exactly this point, with a child who clearly knows chemistry and a grade that refuses to agree.
Here is what is usually going on, and it is not laziness. There are topics on the A Level course that many students were never actually taught. Not taught badly. Not taught quickly. Never taught. So when a question comes up on one of them, your child does the only thing left: they guess.
The honest version
Your child is not guessing because chemistry is hard. They are guessing because nobody explained the idea in the first place.
The question a whole year group kept getting wrong
One of our chemistry tutors used to teach a Year 13 class. Year after year, the same thing happened on conjugate acids and bases. Almost every student got the question wrong. He assumed the topic was simply difficult, so he taught it slower and set more practice. The grades stayed flat.
Then he asked them what a conjugate acid actually was. Nobody could tell him. Not one of them. They had never been given a definition, so for two years they had been reading the question, recognising the words, and picking whichever answer looked most likely. The topic was not hard. It had simply never been covered, and no one had noticed.
“When my year 13s were doing exams, they would always get this question wrong. I was so confused why. But I realised they tried to guess.”
Jessica, A Level Chemistry tutor
This is why a good A Level Chemistry tutor does not start by teaching. They start by finding out what is missing. Because a child who is guessing looks exactly like a child who is struggling, and the fix for each one is completely different.
How we teach, and how you can check it is working
Our tutors work to your child’s exact specification and exam board, so nothing gets taught that will not be examined. After every session, they set follow-up practice on a shared board and send you a short written note on what was covered. As a result, you can see the work rather than take our word for it. Most importantly, your child takes the method back into school the following week and uses it there.
That last part matters more than anything else. A lesson that only works inside the lesson has not worked. If you want the wider picture on this, we have written separately about how to get an A in A Level Chemistry.
Three students, and what an A Level Chemistry tutor changed
These are composites. The names are invented and the details are blended, because these are real children from real families. The teaching is exactly as it happened.
Dara, who had been guessing for two years
Dara could balance equations and explain bonding without notes. On acids and bases, however, she went quiet. Her tutor asked her to define a conjugate acid and she could not, so she had been picking the answer that looked right. Ten minutes on the definition fixed it. She had not been behind. She had been missing one sentence.
Femi, who lost marks he had already earned
Femi did the chemistry correctly and still lost marks. His pH answers were right but written to the wrong number of decimal places, and pH is always given to two. Then his tutor taught him a check that takes three seconds. If you have an acid and your answer comes out at 13, it is wrong. If you have a base and you get 2.5, it is wrong. You know before you check the working. Consequently, Femi stopped handing back marks he had already done the work for.
Ines, whose problem was not chemistry at all
Ines came to us after a disappointing mock. Asked what school had covered since, she said: nothing. Her teacher had been away and the cover lessons went nowhere. Her tutor expected a knowledge gap and found something else instead. Ines understood strong bases perfectly well. What she could not do was rearrange the equation to get to pH. The chemistry was fine. The algebra underneath it was the block, and once that was fixed, so was the topic.
Ines is not unusual. A great deal of what looks like a chemistry problem turns out to be a maths problem wearing a lab coat. This is why we teach the maths underneath the science rather than around it, and it is why our four step maths method often ends up fixing a chemistry grade.
What the first lesson actually looks like
There is no lecture. Your child’s tutor works out where they actually are, which usually means asking them to talk through a question rather than answer it. Next, they find the weak topics, including the ones nobody has taught. Finally, the two of them agree what to fix first. You get a short written summary the same day. If you want the full picture, we have written about what happens after you book a first lesson.
Find out what your child was never taught
One lesson is usually enough to show where the real gap sits.
Meet three of our A Level Chemistry tutors
Karol
Karol read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and is finishing a teaching qualification in Chemistry there. He has spent his training studying how chemistry is actually taught in schools, which makes him unusually quick at spotting the topic a class was rushed through or skipped. He teaches Chemistry, Maths and Further Maths from KS3 to A Level and IB.
Morgan
Morgan is reading Chemistry at Oxford, where he won an academic scholarship after First Class results in his first year. He took A* Chemistry, Biology and Maths at A Level and nine grade 9s at GCSE. He is calm with students who have lost confidence, and he is very good at showing them the reasoning rather than the trick.
Jessica
Jessica is in her fourth year of Medicine at Cambridge, having taken A*A*A*A* at A Level in Maths, Further Maths, Chemistry and Biology. She knows exactly where the maths inside chemistry catches students out, and she teaches the two together rather than pretending they are separate subjects.
Worth reading next
Ready to find the gap?
If your child knows chemistry and the grade still will not improve, something specific is missing. An A Level Chemistry tutor can find it, usually in the first hour.
Improve your child’s chemistry grade
START WITH A DIAGNOSTIC LESSON
Our tutors find the topic nobody taught, then teach it. Most parents see the difference within a term.
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