Aryan Sankaye

I still remember the first time I showed a group of students how the Coriolis force actually falls out of the maths behind rotating reference frames, rather than just handing them a formula to memorise for the exam. That moment, watching something ‘click’ because they understood why and not just what, led me to found Mayfair Scholars.

I achieved 11 grade 9s at GCSE, four A*s at A-Level (Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Economics) and an A* in my EPQ on computer vision and deep learning. I’m now reading Physics at Imperial College London. However, the grades were never the point for me. They were simply a by-product of learning to ask better questions and having real intellectual conversations about what I was learning.

I founded Mayfair Scholars on a simple idea: students learn best from people who’ve just been through the same exams, the same pressure and the same confusion. That’s the idea behind our motto, ‘by students, for students’. My own teaching grew out of years of coaching Olympiad-style Physics and problem-solving to students at my school, where I found that deep intuition beats rote technique every time.

That shapes how I teach. Rather than rushing through a syllabus, I’ll spend a full lesson building real intuition for something like wave mechanics using Desmos or GeoGebra, or run an actual experiment to show a student rotational dynamics, rather than just deriving it on a whiteboard. The tool changes with the concept: sometimes a simulation, sometimes an experimental demonstration, sometimes just relentless first-principles questioning. The goal is always the same: understanding that sticks, rather than formulae that are forgotten the week after the exam.

I believe a lot of students end up disliking subjects like Maths and Physics not because the subjects are hard, but because they’re taught as things to memorise rather than things to understand. My aim with every student I tutor is to change that.

Subjects and levels

• A-Level and GCSE: Maths, Physics, Further Maths, Economics
• 11+ entrance: Maths, English, Verbal and Non-Verbal Reasoning
• Admissions tests: ESAT