The rationale for creating this website was simple – to level the playing field when it came to the teaching of Economics, Oxbridge applications, and university preparation. Every year I get emails from both pupils and teachers, within the UK and from abroad, asking for guidance and helps on a range of Economics teaching related issues. These range from more advice on the Oxbridge process for Economics-related disciplines, to more simple requests such as the teaching of a specific Economics topic. Some of these come from very driven individuals who may not receive the guidance in-house, and for whom I will chat on the phone, prepare a resource or do a mock Oxbridge interview on the phone or in person. I have also gone into schools' Economics departments to do INSET with staff and discuss teaching strategies, as well as offered more longer term guidance and act as a sounding board in their longer term strategic decisions. 

Oxbridge preparation is a particular strength of mine and probably what the most queries are about - it dawned on me that the Oxbridge application game still remains a game of asymmetric information, and incredibly biased towards those schools that have Oxbridge teachers (or have had scores of past applicants). The Sutton Trust released a report in July 2011 with the following stark conclusion: “Four schools and one sixth-form college sent more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge between them over three years than 2,000 schools and colleges across the UK...Westminster, Eton, St Pauls, St Pauls Girls School and Hills Road sixth form college, a state school, produced 946 Oxbridge entrants from 2007-09. In the same period, 2,000 schools and colleges sent 927 pupils to Oxbridge.”
I refuse to believe that this is purely due to the best intellectual brains being in these few schools. Being a successful Oxbridge applicant, will be a function of many variables, including (though not limited to), the intellect of the pupils, their own drive (or the ambition of their parents), academic or income background, but it will also be a function of how much guidance the applicants are given internally. And this is where I feel many pupils are being let down. These ‘guidance factors’ can vary from extension classes, to other forms of enrichment such as attending Public LSE lectures, to mock Oxbridge interview practice and feedback, and of course entrance test preparation.

This website, whether offering guidance on Oxbridge or on A-levels, is not meant to (and indeed doesn’t) provide a ‘cheat guide’. I don’t believe you can ‘beat the system’, (even if I don’t believe the system is always allocatively efficient). What it does is provide the insight that I offer to a handful of pupils (be they my own pupils or teachers/pupils who have got in touch via email), available to all. I would argue (hope) that Oxbridge colleges are not so naive to think that when pupils from the Schools named above enter the interview room, they have not been prepped better than those from schools without an Oxbridge culture. I hope this website and its associated services means that all the applicants who want to give it their best chance, have a fair chance – at the very least turning a game of asymmetric information to one of imperfect information. Whatever the actual defining reason, currently the playing field is very uneven – and it is this that this I am trying to remedy - and I am doing this by providing this a heavily discounted service to state school Oxbridge applicants. A simple policy of price discrimination between independent sector applicants to cross-subsidise my work for state school economists. 

For more wider academic and intellectual curiosity, I recommend https://www.exponentialminds.academy/