About GCSE Maths Foundation

I'm Gavin. I've spent close to twenty years teaching and designing curriculum across the British curriculum in UK state schools, international British-curriculum schools abroad, and on teacher-training programmes. I'm PGCE-qualified with Qualified Teacher Status (University of Brighton) and hold a Master's with Distinction in education from the University of Leicester.

Most of that time has been spent watching students get the same questions wrong, not because they hadn't worked, but because no one had named the specific pattern they were stuck on. The same is true at scale: examiner reports flag the same misconceptions every series. "Revise more" doesn't fix them. Naming them does.

I built GCSE Maths Foundation because most Foundation students are perfectly capable of a confident Grade 4 or 5, but lose marks to the same handful of patterns every paper: treating a fraction as two integer streams, mixing additive and multiplicative ratio thinking, confusing place value when comparing decimals. Most "AI tutors" feel like a chatbot wrapped around generic practice. You get told to "revise more" when what you actually need is to be told which specific pattern is costing you marks.

As a teacher-trainer I spent years coaching other teachers through advanced diploma-level work: schemes of work, assessment design, learner diagnostics, and mentoring through complex pedagogy projects. That experience sits behind every misconception in this app. Each one is a real failure mode I've marked, named and seen recur across cohorts, paired with an intervention built to interrupt it rather than paper over it with another worked example.

The diagnostic content draws on 30 years of maths-education research (CSMS, ICCAMS, Hart, Küchemann) to catalogue the most common GCSE Foundation failure modes across number, fractions, decimals, ratio, percentages, and geometry. The diagnostic is designed to identify where you are going wrong, and guide you to an independent understanding of the concept.

Questions, feedback, or you're a teacher who'd like to talk about using this with a class? I read every reply. Drop me a line on the homepage form or via the email on the landing page.