A-Level Economics · Methodology · DRAFT
How I teach A-Level Economics: the method
I am George Chantry, an A-Level Economics tutor with a First in PPE from Oxford, three Oxford prizes in economics and the best mark in my year in Game Theory. I teach a four-part method: measure first, then question-to-topic mapping, then chains of reasoning, and I sort whatever is still going wrong into three diagnostic categories — knowledge gaps, application failures, or exam technique. Across 7,000+ hours and 145 students, that method produced 18 A/A* grades in the official 2024 and 2025 A-Level Economics exams, with 82% of my Edexcel students achieving A or A* in 2024–25 and an average improvement of two grades.
What follows is the method itself, in the order I actually use it, with a link to the full explanation of each part. None of it is a secret. Parents deserve to know what they are buying before they buy it, and students who apply this on their own will do better than students who do not. The part you cannot copy off a page is the judgement about which of these four things a particular student needs on a particular Tuesday evening.
Why a method at all
Most tutoring is content re-delivery. The student is behind, so the tutor teaches the syllabus again, slower. Sometimes that is exactly right. Very often it is the single least useful thing you could do, because the student already knows the content — they knew it before the lesson started — and the marks are being lost somewhere else entirely.
The hallmark of a professional is that, like a doctor, they diagnose before they prescribe. A doctor who prescribes before examining is guessing. So is a tutor who opens by re-teaching market failure to a student whose actual problem is that they cannot tell a market-failure question from a competition-policy question. The method below exists so that I am never guessing.
Measure first, then solve
Every student I take on gets tested before they get taught. Not a formal assessment — a fast, conversational set of questions in the first lesson that finds the edge of what they can already do. I want to know where they stop being fluent, because that edge is where the lesson should be.
This is not a stylistic preference. Testing is not just a way of measuring learning; it is one of the more effective ways of causing it, and teaching aimed just beyond what a student can already do alone is far more productive than teaching aimed at the middle of a class. The research page sets out precisely which studies support that, and which popular claims about it are overstated.
Test first, then study: the research behind measure-then-solve →
Question-to-topic mapping
This is the biggest single source of lost marks I see, and it is the thing I am best at fixing. A student reads an exam question and does not recognise which part of the specification it is actually about. Everything they then write may be perfectly correct economics — and completely irrelevant to the question. The mark scheme gives nothing for irrelevant material, however good it is.
One worked example
A student came to me with a school essay he had scored zero on: “How can the government solve the problem of congestion?” He had written at length about traffic lights. Traffic lights are not economics. Mapped properly, that question is a government intervention question — road pricing as an indirect tax on a negative externality, subsidies for public transport, regulation — and the whole answer should have run through the externality diagram. Nothing was wrong with his knowledge. He had simply walked into the wrong topic. He gained four grades with me in six months.
The fix is a habit, not a trick: before writing a word, name the topic. Then the right diagram, the right chain and the right evaluation all follow almost automatically. I first built this for myself revising for Oxford finals, categorising every past-paper question by type and drilling the types rather than the papers.
Question-to-topic mapping: how to know what an economics exam question is really asking →
Chains of reasoning
Once a student is in the right topic, the marks come from the quality of the reasoning inside it. Edexcel and AQA both reward developed chains: point, cause, consequence, and then the next consequence, and the next. A good analysis paragraph on a 25-marker runs six or seven explicit links and ends somewhere that matters — usually at welfare, living standards, or a real firm or household.
The most common failure is not being wrong. It is stopping after two links, where the student thinks the answer is obvious. It is never obvious to an examiner who can only credit what is on the page. Roughly half the marks sit in analysis and application and half in evaluation, so the same discipline applies to the counter-argument as to the argument.
Chains of reasoning: the method behind A* economics essays →
The three diagnostic categories
When a grade is stuck, the cause is almost always one of three things, and they need completely different lessons. Knowledge gaps — the content genuinely is not there, so we teach it properly, in depth. Application failures — the content is there but never reaches the question, which is the mapping problem above. Exam technique — the content and the application are both there, but time, structure or mark-scheme awareness is throwing marks away.
Parents usually assume the first. In my experience it is most often the second. Telling them apart takes one lesson, and getting it right is the difference between six months of slow progress and a jump in a fortnight.
Why your child’s economics grade is stuck: the three diagnostic categories →
How the four parts fit together
They are not four separate services. They are one loop. I measure to find the edge; the measurement tells me which of the three categories I am dealing with; the category decides whether the next hour is spent on content, on mapping, or on technique; and whichever it is, the work itself is done through chains of reasoning, because that is the currency the mark scheme actually pays in. Then I measure again.
The order matters. Mapping before measuring means drilling a skill the student may not need. Chains before mapping means beautifully argued answers to the wrong question. And technique work before either is the classic waste of a term — polishing the presentation of an answer that was never going to score.
What this looks like in a first lesson
I do not lecture. Lessons are conversational, and the student does most of the thinking out loud, because I cannot diagnose someone who is silent. I put a past-paper question in front of them and ask one thing first: what type of question is this? Where the answer stalls I do not supply it — I ask a narrower question, then a narrower one, until they get there themselves. An answer a student reaches under their own steam is retained; an answer handed over is not.
By the end of a first hour I can normally tell a parent which of the three categories their child is in, what the fastest available gain is, and roughly how long it takes. I would rather say that plainly than sell a package.
What it has produced
Eighteen A/A* grades across the official 2024 and 2025 A-Level Economics exams, an average improvement of two grades, and the A* the most common grade in both years. 82% of my Edexcel students achieved an A or A* in 2024–25. One student went from a C to an A* on the mapping work alone, in a handful of lessons. Over 118 five-star reviews, across nine years and 145 students, say much the same thing: the gaps got found quickly, and then the lessons were about those gaps.
None of that is magic, and none of it is charisma. It is a diagnosis, followed by the right prescription, delivered in chains an examiner can follow.
The four pages in full