I spent years tutoring maths and physics alongside an engineering career, and the same conversation kept happening.

A student would tell me, quite calmly, that they weren’t a maths person. Not that they’d had a difficult term, or lost three weeks to a supply teacher, or never properly understood indices in Year 8 and had been quietly compensating ever since. Just that they weren’t a maths person — as though it were fixed, like eye colour.

It almost never was. Underneath there was usually a specific gap, two or three years further back than whatever they were failing now. And almost always, a subject that had never once been connected to anything real.

What I actually do

I’m a senior systems engineer working in warehouse automation. My job is designing and integrating the systems that move goods through large distribution centres — mechanical design, control systems, data, and a permanent negotiation between what the maths says and what a real building will tolerate.

So when a student asks why they’re resolving forces on an inclined plane, I don’t reach for an analogy. I describe the conveyor I was standing next to that week, the angle it runs at, and what happens when someone gets that angle wrong. The question stops being why are we doing this and becomes how do you work that out.

That shift is the entire point. And it isn’t specific to me — it should be true of whoever teaches your child.

Which is why this isn’t only me

One engineer can teach engineering, maths and physics well. He cannot credibly teach everything. A student who needs chemistry should be taught by someone who does chemistry for a living, and the same goes for biology, computing, economics.

So Beyond121 is built as a small platform rather than a personal tutoring page. Professionals working in the fields they teach can tutor here — and no one does so without being assessed by me first.

I still teach here. That isn’t a formality — it’s how I know the standard is being met.