About Us

After more than two decades as a primary school teacher and senior leader, education has always been far more than a profession for me. It is something I care deeply about, and that experience now sits at the heart of how we run Core Ambition Tutors.

Throughout my career, I held a range of leadership roles, including Senior Leader and Head of Key Stage 2, with responsibility for curriculum development, assessment, staff development and supporting individual pupils. After more than 20 years in the classroom, I stepped away from full-time teaching to focus on building Core Ambition Tutors and creating the kind of tutoring agency I would have wanted to recommend to families when I was working in schools.

As Co-Founder, my role is not simply to find tutors. It is to make sure we work with exceptional, qualified teachers who understand how children learn and know how to build confidence as well as improve academic outcomes. Having spent so many years teaching, leading and mentoring other teachers, I know what excellent teaching looks like – and I believe families should be able to expect that same standard from private tuition.

I am also a parent of two sons, so I understand the pressures parents face when trying to make the right decisions about their child's education. Whether a child needs help rebuilding confidence, closing gaps, preparing for an important examination or stretching themselves further, our role is to listen carefully, understand what they need and connect them with the right teacher.

Seeing the difference that the right support can make to a young person is ultimately why we created Core Ambition Tutors – and it remains at the heart of everything we do.

My route into education was slightly unconventional. After graduating in journalism in 2002, I worked as a freelance reporter in Afghanistan before returning to the UK to work in regional newspapers. A few years later, I followed my parents into academia and teaching – and education has remained at the centre of my professional life ever since.

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Over the past 20 years, I have gained a PhD from the University of Leeds and a PGCE from the University of Cambridge, taught in international schools overseas, and worked with hundreds of students in the UK and internationally. That experience has given me a particularly broad understanding of education: different school systems, different cultures and, most importantly, the very different ways in which young people learn.

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Emma and I founded Core Ambition Tutors because we wanted to create an agency built around educational expertise rather than simply matching names on a database. As Co-Founder, much of my role is focused on selecting and interviewing teachers, understanding what families and students need, and ensuring that the tutors we introduce have both the academic expertise and the teaching ability to make a genuine difference.

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Having spent so many years in education, I know that the most academically impressive teacher is not automatically the right teacher for every student. The relationship matters. Personality matters. Confidence matters. Our job is to understand the young person in front of us and find the teacher who will bring out the best in them.

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Once a teacher, always a teacher. There are few things more rewarding than seeing a young person develop confidence and enthusiasm and then go on to achieve more than they thought possible. Building a team of teachers who can make that happen is what Core Ambition Tutors is all about.