My wife and I have both run courses, and organized academic conferences. I have experience of teaching to virtually all exams – from 10 and 11 plus, through Common Entrance and senior-school scholarship exams, GCSE, A-levels and Oxbridge, to university finals. I am an experienced examiner, setter, and moderator. I finally decided to take early retirement from full-time school teaching in order to work in private practice as a tutor, consultant, course facilitator, and publisher of educational material.

With the benefit of long experience and substantial academic status to draw upon, I believe I can offer an almost unique service. In addition to conventional teaching, I am happy to provide educational support. Pupils of Croydon Academic have exclusive private access to my own learning web site. I have a wealth of written material, which I am adding to all the time, ranging from activities to teach grammar and punctuation up to commentaries on works of literature and annotated editions of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other texts.

Croydon Academic is an organisation run by, and consisting of, a husband and wife team: we are not an agency, and employ no one except ourselves. Drawing on my academic work (a total of eight years’ university study) and many years’ experience of teaching at all levels, I provide the educational services; my wife (an experienced educational administrator) will deal with your enquiries, take bookings, and generally run the practice. She is also an experienced school counsellor and a qualified social worker, having trained in child care: she will be on hand to receive pupils. (We can both, of course, produce evidence of our moral fitness for the work that we do.)

I have a first-class honours degree (specialising in English) and a doctorate (in aspects of comparative literature and literary theory, involving several languages) from the University of Wales. Having an insatiable interest in teaching to all age-groups and at all levels, I have been employed as a teacher in both preparatory schools and senior schools, and I also spent three years teaching at university level - lecturing as well as tutoring. I have also taught extra-mural classes.