Master dynamics, waves, electricity, particles and quanta with a Glasgow physics specialist. One-to-one tuition with SQA-style technique drills.
Physics has a way of making bright kids feel stupid. I've watched it happen for two decades — a student who reads voraciously, debates at the dinner table, takes the toaster apart to see how it works, and then comes home with a prelim mark that doesn't match the person you know. The subject didn't beat them. Something specific did.
I'm Mohammad Raza, and I've taught Maths, Physics and Chemistry across Glasgow for over twenty years. In all that time I have never once met a student who was genuinely "bad at Physics." I've met students taught a topic too fast, students carrying one buried misconception from third year, students who lost marks because nobody showed them how the SQA actually awards them. That second kind of problem is exactly the kind I can fix.
Excel in MathSci exists for that work. We tutor National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher Physics one-to-one — in person from our Glasgow Southside centre, and online to students anywhere in Scotland. If you've landed here because a prelim went badly, or because Higher is looming and you can feel the difficulty curve steepening, you're in the right place. This is the page where I explain what's actually going wrong, and how we put it right.
In twenty years I've never met a student who was genuinely bad at Physics — only one taught too fast, or carrying a single buried gap nobody had time to find. — Mohammad Raza, Founder & Physics Tutor
Most families wait too long. A student is "managing" — homework done, jotter fine, class tests passable — until the January prelim turns a B into a D and nobody saw it coming. "Managing" in a class of twenty-five means staying afloat on the easy questions while the hard marks quietly slip away. Here is what changes when the attention is finally aimed at one student.
Students almost never have a broad weakness. They have one specific fault — a wrong kinematics equation reached for under pressure — and everything downstream just looks worse than it is.
A Higher class divides one teacher's attention into roughly two minutes per student. A session gives them sixty — no hiding at the back, no moving on before they're ready.
The SQA awards method marks for sound working even when the final number is wrong. I train students to set reasoning out so legibly an examiner can reward every correct step.
Once we find the real fault, belief returns before the marks do — and then the marks follow. Borderline-pass to routine-paper in a handful of sessions is common.
National 5 is where a student's lifelong relationship with Physics is quietly decided. A student who scrapes through by memorising just enough arrives at Higher with no foundation and spends the year feeling behind. The difference between surviving N5 and understanding it doesn't show in the result — it shows twelve months later. So we're not just chasing a grade; we're building understanding that holds weight when more is stacked on top.
Here's where the marks are won and lost across the three units. Full National 5 Physics tutor Glasgow guide →
Forces, Newton's laws, motion and projectiles — the unit that feels intuitive and trips students for exactly that reason. Marks leak on velocity-time graphs and projectile questions; I drill the habit of treating horizontal and vertical motion as two separate problems until it's automatic.
Ohm's law, series and parallel circuits, resistance and power. Reciting V = IR doesn't help when a question hides which quantity stays constant in a parallel branch. We reason through circuits instead of guessing, so students deduce the right tool every time.
Wave properties, the EM spectrum, refraction and nuclear radiation. The waves half feels familiar; the radiation section rewards concepts, not formulas. I teach half-life, activity and dose as ideas first and calculations second — so a feared section becomes reliable marks.
The jump from National 5 to Higher is the most underestimated step in Scottish secondary Physics — a step change in depth, not just volume. A five-mark question can ask you to recall a principle, apply it to an unfamiliar situation and evaluate your own result, all at once. The exam is sat in mid-May each year, so counting back from it the February break leaves roughly three clear months — enough to close two or three significant gaps properly, provided we start soon. A good higher physics tutor Glasgow families can rely on doesn't sell panic; we turn that date into a workable plan.
Kinematics, gravitation, the Doppler effect, Hubble's law and stellar physics. Approachable as a story, unforgiving in the marks. We separate the idea you can describe at the dinner table from the precision the exam demands — source and observer motion, the right equation, what a gradient physically means.
Wave-particle duality, the photoelectric effect, interference and diffraction — the unit students fear most. Taught as a strict sequence from simple to complex, the photoelectric effect becomes one of the most predictable, reliable questions on the whole paper.
Internal resistance, EMF, potential dividers and capacitors. Internal resistance is the worst-handled topic in the paper, year after year. A fixed checking routine — identify what's actually being measured before touching a formula — turns it into a repeatable pattern.
Advanced Higher Physics is a different animal, and it's meant to be. It moves into rotational dynamics, gravitation, quantum theory and electromagnetism, with mathematics — calculus especially — woven through the physics rather than bolted on afterwards. It's built for university-bound students heading for engineering, physics, medicine or any competitive course, where the UCAS points and the demonstrated rigour both matter. A specialist advanced higher physics tutor treats the course as genuine pre-university work.
Where able students most often underperform isn't the physics at all — it's the investigation project. I've watched strong physicists lose marks they should never have lost because the write-up had no structure. That's a specific, fixable problem, and one I spend real time on — my role runs from the first decision to the final full stop:
Ambitious enough to score well, contained enough to actually finish within the time and equipment you have.
Uncertainty analysis built in from the start — never reverse-engineered in a panic the night before the deadline.
Structure, evaluation and the honest discussion of limitations markers reward — until it reads like university-lab work.
Online tutoring with us is not a watered-down version of the real thing — it's the same teaching, delivered differently. We work over video call with a shared digital whiteboard, so a student watches a problem unfold in real time exactly as they would on paper beside me. When we work through physics past papers, I share my screen and we annotate the actual SQA question together so the student sees precisely where each mark is earned or lost.
Location stops mattering. The SQA curriculum is identical wherever you sit it — so a student in the Highlands gets exactly the teaching a student in Glasgow gets.
Here's something I didn't expect when I started teaching online: for anxious students, it is often more effective than sitting in a room with me. Some students freeze when a teacher is physically leaning over their work — the social pressure swamps the physics. On a screen, in their own room, with their own notes spread around them, that pressure eases and the thinking flows. I've watched quiet students who barely spoke in person become genuinely talkative online. For them the screen isn't a barrier — it's the thing that finally lets them ask.
If the thought of a first session is making your stomach turn, let me take the mystery out of it — the anxiety is almost always worse than the reality. There is no test waiting, and nobody is put on the spot about what they don't yet know.
No test, no spotlight. We start with how Physics actually feels — what's working, what isn't, and what a good outcome looks like for this student.
A jotter, a returned prelim, a class test. Twenty years means I can usually spot the specific gap inside the first half hour.
Not "revise more" — one clear, specific thing to work on. And no contract: we book week to week, and I'll tell you honestly when you need fewer sessions.
Dynamics, waves, electricity — with open-ended question drills.
Our Universe, particles and waves, with Assignment support.
Rotational motion, quanta and electromagnetism with Investigation prep.
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