How my economics tuition can improve your grades

Written by Tom Furber, economics tutor. | Published 12th August 2026. | Updated 16th August 2026.

If you are interested in improving your A-Level Economics with my tuition, please get in touch!

Sessions designed to help you improve

Personalised to help you:

My session plans are based on what you need.
This could be a focus on topics you find challenging.
It could also be a discussion of an exam technique issue or particular questions.

Interactive so that you learn and remember more:

During the sessions, I ask lots of questions and get students to do things.
Occasionally teaching can be more direct where it suits the student and where they are not used to the question style. But my objective is to get students talking as much as possible during the sessions.
In my experience, this question and answer approach makes students more likely to remember the content.

Sharing deep expertise on course content and exam technique:

Grasp the course content, both at a surface level and deeper understanding.
Based on years of study, both of the syllabus and of deeper foundations in undergraduate economics.
Master exam technique with an exam technique expert. I have accumulated expertise during my own school experience and have spent years writing economics-specific resources.
Use of my own resources, such as practice questions and notes, to help students get ahead.

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Before sessions start

Before the first session, I ask students and/or parents to send over some information. This includes:

Current grade and target grade for A Level Economics.
Any particular content topics or exam technique areas that the student finds difficult.
Critically, samples of the student’s written work. This can include school homework tasks and full tests.

This way, before we even start the first session, I can review your initial work in detail and prepare comments. This allows me to assess your level, your strengths and weaknesses.

This means that from lesson one, I can focus the tuition sessions on the biggest wins to improve your own answers specifically.

What my weekly economics tuition can look like – six steps

Tom's economics tuition structure, within and outside of the sessions.

While the plan may differ depending on the student, here is an example of how my weekly economics tuition can work.

Step 0, before the session:

I will review your homework attempt and prepare a session plan accordingly.
This will take into account your homework, your level, your schoolwork and the degree of progress you are making.

Step 1, the start of the session:

I will start by reviewing homework attempts.
I discuss with the student how they found the work.
This includes discussing the comments prepared before the session, highlighting the key points for improvement.

Step 2, the main focus of the session:

Where exam technique work is needed, we can focus on building exam skills.
For example, learning how to structure a 25 mark response, how to evaluate, level up chains of analysis or how to integrate real world examples.
Other times, a student may need to focus on a particular unit of course content, a difficult topic or important fundamentals to master.
Then, through a question and answer approach, we can help fill in gaps in knowledge.

Step 3, practice

We can practise by discussing how to plan an essay on the topic we are covering.
Alternatively, we can do exam technique practice. This could be a paragraph in timed conditions, evaluation practice or writing a chain of analysis.

Step 4, concluding the session:

Setting homework tasks that work for the student and push them to improve.
Where time allows, quick review questions to hit home the key points from the session.

Step 5, outside of the session:

Students should be putting in more work outside the session hour, particularly in attempting the homework task from the session.
This is in addition to their standard A-Level Economics schoolwork and revision.
I am also available outside of session time, should students have any questions.

Each stage is personalised and the structure of sessions can vary depending on requests.

Throughout the sessions, I encourage my students to ask questions. The tuition sessions are interactive and this helps students to remember what we cover.

My sessions are also adaptable. If a student has just found out about an upcoming test or has just come across a difficult topic, we can pivot the session to focus on that instead. My tutoring and resource creation experience allows me to cover any topic at any time.

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The importance of the feedback loop and extra practice

This process can generate sustained improvements for tuition students.

It gives students a focussed and individualised practice and feedback loop, with a subject and exam technique expert, that is difficult to get elsewhere.

Extra practice and feedback

Extra practice is important.

For maths GCSE or A-Level, students are taught the importance of doing lots of practice questions. I contend that the same is true for A-Level Economics.

Albeit with one condition: Students need to get feedback on each question they attempt.

This can be difficult for economics essay writing. However it is exactly what I offer as part of my tutoring process.

This happens through the year with homework set using practice questions.

Nearer exams or mock tests, this process levels up. I set my full practice papers written in the style of your exam board. This is a real differentiator from other tutors. Indeed it has helped students ratchet up their scores significantly in the run up to exams.

There is academic evidence that taking practice tests improve average scores. A literature review by Adesope, Trevisan and Sundarajan (2017)¹ found that:

Students taking practice tests do better than students who revise without taking practice tests.

If you are looking for one-to-one support to improve your economics grade, please check out my A-Level Economics tutoring page.

Interesting and relevant exam-style questions

From my experience, students engage more with questions relevant to:

Their interests. For example, are football players paid too much? Should the government ban social media for young people? Is fast fashion a good thing or a bad thing?
Current affairs. The latest UK Government policies and how it will affect them.
Their future. What determines wages? What are the economic benefits and costs of worker training or going to university? Will AI replace workers or augment their skills?

I try to set questions that students find engaging. While I believe in the importance of lots of practice, I also think practice questions should be interesting and/or relevant to students, not outdated, repetitive, distant textbook practice.

Bringing economics to life by setting my own practice questions enables students to understand and remember the content and to perform better in the exams in my experience.

Ultimately almost all Economics A-Level exams are based on current affairs, giving my tuition students a jump on others who may not have considered as many current issues. In essays where the student needs their own real world examples, the practice extracts from the papers are transferrable to these questions too.

About the author

Tom Furber

Helping economics students online since 2015. Previously an economist, I now provide economics resources on this site. I also tutor A Level (AQA and Edexcel) Economics as well as a few undergraduate economics students. Read more about me here.

¹To see the paper Adesope, Trevisan and Sundarajan (2017), click here.