Text breakdowns, essay structures, exam technique and the study habits that actually move study scores — written by tutors who've done it themselves.
From Substack
As exams get closer, most students respond in exactly the same way. They start doing more. More practice essays. More quote memorisation. More highlighting. More late nights. More panic. But more study is not automatical…
If you’ve got a child in Year 10 or Year 11, or know someone who does, this one’s for you. We’re heading into Term 3, which means subject selection is just weeks away. It’s one of the most common sources of confusion I s…
As we approach the end of the year, I notice the same question coming up again and again from students: What do I do with my ATAR? And more specifically: what happens if I don’t get the score I need? I wanted to write th…
Colour-coded systems, hour-long planning sessions, complicated dashboards, perfect streaks, and a hundred features. A student opens the thing once, feels overwhelmed, closes it, and never comes back. I have watched it ha…
It’s the question I get asked more than almost any other. What actually makes a student succeed in VCE? I’ve been thinking about this since my own Year 12. And after working with more than 50 students over the past two y…
This is one of the most common questions I get from parents. Their kid is in Year 9 or 10, things are going reasonably well, and they’re not sure whether tutoring is actually necessary yet. They’re not convinced it’s the…
This is my story. I feel like I’ve been tutoring a lot of you for a while now, and I’ve known many of you for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever really shared how I got here. So here it is. Arriving with nothing We…
Parents ask me all the time what score their child needs to get into a certain course, and there’s usually a gap between what they think VCE scores mean and what they actually mean. After tutoring for over 2 years, I’ve …
Last time I wrote about when to do your Unit 3&4 subjects — and why getting one or two out of the way in Year 11 is one of the smartest moves in VCE. This post tackles the harder question: which subjects to actually choo…
There's a topic I find myself explaining to parents quite often. To Year 11s, sometimes to Year 12s who've left it later than they'd like. And almost every time, I watch the same thing happen: a look of quiet surprise, f…
If you’ve gone looking for a tutor lately, you likely feel that the landscape is quite crowded. In fact, most parents who I have worked with have come to me already having gone through 3+ tutors because none of them move…
A high-scoring response does not just identify who an article is aimed at. It explains what that specific group believes, values, and fears, and then shows how the writer shapes their argument around exactly those things…
We have all opened our SAC papers, stared at the essay prompt for five minutes and froze! Stressed you hastily read it once, maybe twice, then start writing and only to catch a bad case of writer’s block when you start w…