A tuition centre that teaches children not to need one.

The centre

Preparing children for grammar and independent school entrance since 2006. The Solihull centre since 2014. Online nationally, and for families overseas returning to UK schools.

The live course runs across both weekend days in Solihull and over Zoom. Year 4 lays foundations; Year 5 takes the child to GCSE Foundation level in maths and English, so they arrive at secondary school ahead of their peers and, by design, without needing tuition again. Alongside the weekly teaching there are monthly mock examinations with review, mandatory one-to-ones with an elite 11+ tutor to pin down each child's weaknesses, subject workshops, scholarship maths lessons, and a professionally produced explainer video for every mock and workshop question so a child who is stuck midweek never has to wait until Saturday.

Two things families mention most. The first is the annual post-exam pizza party, run for ten years, where effort is celebrated rather than outcome and every child writes down what the exam felt like before anyone talks about results. The second is that every child Mr Rashid teaches can contact him for the rest of their education: GCSE choices, A Levels, university, careers. It is the main reason families come back with a second, third and fourth child.

Pupils have won scholarships to Eton and Westminster, and academic scholarships at King Edward VI High School for Girls and King Edward VI School for Boys. Those children did the full Solihull Tuition programme, which uses these books alongside live teaching; no book on its own can promise a result, and we do not pretend otherwise.

Mr Fiaz Rashid

Mohammed Fiaz Rashid did not plan to run a tuition centre. He planned to retire.

He trained as an Electronic and Electrical Engineer, one of two sixth-formers in the country sponsored through university by Shell. He qualified as a chartered accountant at Deloitte, where he passed an exam that only two people in the world passed that year, then moved into investment banking at Credit Suisse. He founded a software company, built it, sold it, and stopped work at thirty-eight.

His mother asked him what he had actually done for the world. Not long after, he bought a struggling tuition centre in Solihull as a going concern. What he found inside it was a method that did not work: two grammar-school teachers whose answer to every weak child was to drill harder, which in practice meant more worksheets and a more serious face. He let them go and started again from the question that mattered, which was not how to teach a child the 11+ but how to teach a child to teach themselves.

He had already made every mistake a parent can make. For his eldest son's 11+ he hired seven tutors at once, on the theory that you could prepare a child the way you build software, by taking the best of each. It backfired. The night he wrote his son's homework story for him, and his son was removed from a strict tutor's course for it, is the night the method was born: a child who is rescued from struggle learns that struggle is something to be rescued from. Five children later, the youngest passed last year, and the system in these books is the one that came out of those mistakes.

He has since completed executive education at Cambridge Judge, Oxford Saïd and MIT, is a Founders Institute graduate and a founder member of the Association of Professional Tuition Centres, and mentors older students for GCSE, A Level, UCAT and Oxbridge entry using the same 90% Standard that runs through every book here.

“I made every mistake in this book with my eldest. By the fifth child I had a system. These books are that system.”

What we actually believe

The exam is not the point. The exam is the excuse to build something that outlasts it.

Independence, not dependency

The tutoring industry's incentive is a permanent arrangement. Ours is the opposite: help that works to remove itself. The child marks their own work, finds their own broken step, and keeps their own mistakes book. A child who is brilliant beside a tutor and collapses in a solo mock has learned dependency, not maths. Struggle is the rep. We do not lift the barbell for them.

Method over volume

Parents count finished papers because papers are countable and counting soothes anxiety. But coverage seen once evaporates. Ten question types owned beat forty half-seen, so every book teaches the method for a type, ladders the difficulty, and brings the type back on rotation before it fades. It is not what a child covers that passes the exam; it is what they keep.

The 90% Standard

Practice is not performance. Every child drops under pressure, so we train to the ceiling and treat 90% as the floor below which nothing is called mastered. The buffer is what passes. The standard is also a rule about when to stop: eight out of ten is not the bar.

Top-down from day one

Most tutors teach content first and look at the exam last. We start with what the exam demands and rewards, which is speed and accuracy under a format that barely changes, and train those demands from the first week. We know what the exam rewards; we do not know the questions, and nobody honest does.

The best version of yourself

At the start of the year each child agrees, with their parent, to become the best version of themselves: in this, and therefore in everything, whether that is music, sport or art. When the work gets hard, that agreement is what we return to. Effort is celebrated, not just outcome. Rewards are given in the currency children actually want, which is attention. Development books go home with them, because education alone will not make anyone successful, and we tell them so.

Your calm is the child's weather

A parent is the thermostat, not the thermometer. The most important thing we teach parents is to protect the child's belief in themselves ahead of any single session, to meet “I can't do this” with the word “yet”, and never to let their own fear leak onto a ten-year-old. A bad day is only ever weather, unless a reaction turns it into climate.

It carries on

The same engine, pointed at bigger machines: GCSE Foundation competence by the age of ten, then our 10×9 GCSE programme and 4 A* A Level pathway for the families who stay. One girl who came to us very slow at mental maths, told by her school that a top school was near impossible, drilled one page of thirty-six sums a day until she could do them in fifteen minutes with thirty-three right; she passed into King Edward's, took all 9s at GCSE and is now at medical school. Another arrived from India thirteen months before her exam with weak English, worked a dictionary two letters a month, scored the maximum in English, and is now reading English at Oxford. Neither story is a promise. Both are what the method looks like when a family runs it all the way through.