Upper Primary
Computing

I am delighted to be a tutor for Wolsey Hall, supporting families and helping children reach their potential. Having been both a tutor and a Wolsey Hall parent, I believe that Wolsey Hall Oxford provides a wonderful, nurturing environment where students can thrive, and I strongly advocate for the flexibility and opportunities that homeschooling offers.

After leaving the pharmaceutical industry, I followed my heart into education, where I have been working for over 10 years, both in the UK and in British international schools in Sweden and Romania. My international school experience has given me a wonderful appreciation of cultural diversity, as well as extensive experience working with non-native English speakers within the British curriculum.

Maths, English, and Computing all build a solid foundation for students’ development. Through my teaching experience, I’ve worked with students in these subjects to build skills they can use every day: Maths encourages logical thinking and problem-solving, while English enhances communication and creativity. Computing combines these skills by applying logic through coding and developing precise, clear digital communication. I have particularly enjoyed running extra-curricular math games and coding clubs in the past and now love seeing my students’ creative computing projects, where they use various applications to develop their stories and coding skills!

Throughout my schools career, I have worked with students across the ability range, from gifted and talented learners to those with mild learning difficulties and social and emotional educational needs. At the heart of my teaching, I encourage students to embrace new challenges and maintain a positive attitude toward their learning by fostering a growth mindset. My goal is to support and challenge students through meaningful feedback that promotes their personal development.

Outside of teaching, I love spending time with family and friends and have an ever-growing list of interests: traveling, history, cultural activities, current affairs, tennis, walking, water-based activities, camping, and, most importantly, food!

Having grown up in Liverpool with most holidays spent in North Wales, I enjoy city living with nature on the doorstep. My family and I enjoy both the vibrancy and tranquility that Romania offers.

I did my degree in Accountancy at Exeter University, as I have always felt comfortable with numbers. They were either right or wrong and there was always a process to follow for getting something right.

After a while, that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to do something more purposeful, something which had an impact on people’s lives. I trained to become a Primary School teacher at Oxford Brookes in 2007. It was here that I found my vocation.

During my PGCE, and ever since, I have rekindled my love of learning. I found I enjoyed learning new concepts and new skills. I fell back in love with English: how one sentence can have the power to change someone’s view. I understood Science: how things can be explained while others still need explaining. I became fascinated with Computing: understanding how coding works and how to build a series of simple instructions into something beautifully complex. I fell further in love with Maths: making concrete learning become abstract. I spent hours researching and learning about History and Geography and its impact on the lives we live today. After studying French at school, I began to teach Year 6 groups in my spare time, and became the Modern Foreign Languages Co-ordinator at school.

I have also become fascinated in discovering how people learn. It’s interesting finding out how the same lesson could be received in completely different ways by two different students. I have spent many hours happily reading a variety of books on emotional wellbeing, on Psychology, on growth mindset, all to work out how to have the greatest positive impact on students.

Saying all this, nothing is better than really getting to know the student. It is the main reason I became a freelance Tutor. I enjoy talking with the student about their greatest successes and how they deal with their biggest failures. I enjoy finding out what turns them off learning, and what reignites it. I love teaching meta-cognitively; helping the student to learn about their own learning.

This love of metacognition, linked with an understanding for children to build up confidence outside of the classroom, was the reason I trained to become a Forest School Leader. In my spare time I still work as a Forest School Leader, and if not, I’ll probably still be outdoors, doing gardening or making up games with my children.

Following the award of my degree in Drama and Education, I trained as a Royal Academy of Dance ballet teacher going on to teach ballet for a number of years. The joy, delight and curiosity of my pupils, and of my own children, sparked my desire to become a Primary School teacher. I completed my PGCE in 2006 and have taught in a variety of schools across the Primary age range.

Teaching should ignite a questioning mind and I love to help children make connections to the world around them. I encourage a positive attitude to learning, resilience and confidence in their own abilities in every child I teach.

As a Primary School teacher, I have an interest in many subjects with Reading and Writing the foundation stones for learning in them all. I am an avid reader and love to promote reading through my teaching, making links with authors, illustrators and opening children’s eyes to the wide range of amazing books that are available.

I have further specialised in Computing, which is a fantastic subject to explore as it develops logical thinking with imagination and creativity. I actively link the debugging of code to all other subjects – if you can spot, learn from and improve upon your mistakes you will go far in whatever you set your mind to.

In my free time I enjoy archery, representing my county at regional and national competition. I also love walking in the countryside around my home and taking photographs of the beauty around me. I have recently taken up the banjo, re-igniting my childhood passion for music.

I am looking forward to supporting your family through their learning journey here at Wolsey Hall Oxford.

I had considered teaching as a possible career for as long as I can remember, but it was not until my time as a University student that I seriously thought about it being my vocation. During my second year, I started a voluntary placement at a local Primary school as part of a University initiative to widen its engagement with the local community; from the start, I was hooked! Seeing teachers build their students’ confidence and nurture a love of learning was inspirational and incredibly powerful, and was something that I wanted to be a part of. After leaving University and realising that the teaching bug had not left me, I enrolled on a PGCE course with the University of Cambridge and became a qualified teacher in 2008.

Over twelve years, I worked as a Primary teacher in several urban settings; in that time, I was lucky enough to be offered a wealth of opportunities to develop my practice. I became a Mathematics Specialist Teacher in 2013 after studying with the University of Northampton for two years and this greatly developed my ability to ‘reach out’ to those pupils who struggled with the subject. Seeing that problems can be represented through pictures and that sweets – and even powder paint – can play a role in solving number problems greatly reduced their inhibitions, and gave them practical experiences that enabled them to retain new and forgotten concepts more easily. In 2015, I also became a Local Authority Key Stage Two Writing Moderator. In this role, I work with teachers from a number of schools to support and confirm their writing assessment judgements, and this has not only greatly increased my own subject knowledge but has also allowed me to ‘borrow’ many fantastic teaching ideas from other settings.

Currently, when I am not striving to inspire students in my work in schools and as a private Tutor, I enjoy walking and swimming. I like to see myself as a lifelong learner and have recently taken on the challenge of learning Italian as a beginner. I also love to travel: over the years, my wanderings have taken me to Iceland, where I worked to repair boardwalk trails in the Vatnajökull National Park, to China where I walked (part of) the Great Wall.

I gained my first degree from Sheffield Hallam University, and straight after that, I moved abroad to Spain, where I taught English in a Pre-Preparatory School for several years. It was here that I discovered that children teach you just as much as you teach them because I came away fluent in Spanish, having not taken one lesson and not knowing a word before working there!

Fast forward a few years and living back in England, I married and started working for the Open University as an IT Project Manager. I took advantage of being able to study for free with them and gained a BSc (Hons) in Psychology. I am therefore fully aware of the challenges presented when you are learning from home, the pressures associated with submitting assignments and the wait for that precious feedback. It is why I always try to return assignments promptly!

Becoming a foster carer was a turning point in my life and pointed me back to my passion for teaching children. Supporting children who have had trauma in their lives to regain the joys that learning can give makes everything worthwhile. I, therefore, gained my PGCE and have now taught in a variety of Primary School settings. I particularly love how technology can bring lessons to life, and it is here again that I frequently learn just as much as I teach. I love being amazed by the combinations that a child’s imagination mixed with technology can bring; a geographical biome being created and described in Minecraft being my favourite!

I am also the literacy lead in my current school and enjoy using different texts to promote the joy of reading, and I love encouraging those budding young authors amongst us. Science is also a passion of mine; I thrive on encouraging children to ask questions on how the world works and find joy in watching them discover the answers.

As well as being a Primary School teacher and foster carer, I also keep myself busy through learning new languages; endeavouring to make my morning shuffles more into a morning jog, and writing fiction stories.