History textbooks present the past as a settled story of dates, facts, and events. But historians don't work with certainties; they navigate fragments, silences, and competing narratives. This foundational pathway investigates how sources are discovered and interrogated, how political movements shape our understanding of the past, whose voices dominate the historical record, and other questions central to historical study.

We engage with controversial questions: How did perspectives on the Soviet Union evolve when Russia started declassifying state archives in the 1990s? Why did Victorian historians write triumphalist narratives of British progress, whilst 1960s social historians recovered the experiences of workers, women, and the colonised? How can we recover information about illiterate people from the past who left no written sources behind? 

We debate these questions through close reading of primary and secondary material, critical discussions, and regular writing exercises. This pathway is recommended for students applying to Oxford or Cambridge for History or related humanities subjects. Coaches will accommodate any requests to refine syllabi according to students' particular interests or learning goals.

Secondary school Government and Politics courses teach students about political systems, ideologies, and policy debates, but rarely address how political scientists actually think and produce knowledge. This pathway offers a deeper insight into political science as a field, exploring foundational academic scholarship and contemporary case studies. 

We address questions about power, institutions, and political behaviour – do recent events in the United States suggest that democracy is inherently vulnerable to authoritarian backsliding? What can the 2025 Indian elections reveal about colonial legacies in Asian politics? Does oil wealth explain the durability of monarchy in Saudi Arabia? By exploring a range of political systems and regions, students emerge from this pathway with an informed perspective on global politics and strong critical, analytical, and comparative thinking skills. 

This pathway is recommended for any student preparing for undergraduate admissions to Oxford or Cambridge in History & Politics, PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics), International Relations, or related humanities and social science subjects. Coaches can accommodate requests to modify the syllabus according to students’ specific regional or topical interests.

Secondary school Economics courses teach theories and models, but rarely show students how economists frame problems, test theories against reality, or interpret real-world complexity when models break down. This pathway takes a different approach: we explore economics as a way of reasoning about the world.

Rather than memorising supply and demand curves or competition models, we coach our students to think like economists by engaging with contemporary crises, case studies, and policy debates: Why did Liz Truss's mini-budget crash UK markets in 48 hours? How did FTX's collapse reveal failures in crypto regulation? What makes Trumponomics different from conventional trade theory? Through these dynamic cases, students develop the analytical toolkit economists use to diagnose problems, evaluate evidence, and construct arguments.

This pathway is recommended for any student preparing for Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate admissions in Economics, PPE, or related fields. It assumes basic familiarity with economic concepts (supply/demand, market structures, GDP, inflation) but goes beyond secondary school-level content in analytical depth and real-world application.

Social scientists use systematic methods to study relationships between human behaviour, institutions, and societies. In other words, they ask how people make decisions, how power operates, and why social patterns emerge. This pathway explores the methodological choices that inform social scientists’ thinking:  How do scholars decide between methods? What can different approaches reveal? What assumptions underlie empirical claims? 

We explore these questions through a series of controversial case studies in social science research: When economist Steven Levitt claimed legalised abortion caused the 1990s crime drop, did he prove causation, or were there too many alternative explanations (economic changes, policing strategies, demographics) to isolate abortion's effect? Historian Gregory Clark used surname analysis across centuries to argue social mobility is lower than believed. But do surnames reliably track families across time and geography? Economists like Richard Easterlin and Daniel Kahneman used surveys asking people to rate life satisfaction on numerical scales. But can "happiness" be meaningfully quantified? By examining debates of this nature, students learn to evaluate research critically rather than simply memorise findings to regurgitate them in an exam. 

This pathway is recommended for students preparing for Oxford or Cambridge admissions in PPE, Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, or related social sciences.

This pathway traces core themes in Western philosophy from its Ancient foundations to the present by reading extracts from major philosophical texts. Our coaches train students in close textual analysis, logical argumentation, oral dialectic, philosophical writing, and other skills. Most importantly, this pathway teaches students to read challenging material actively and to construct rigorous philosophical arguments themselves. Students will read approximately 25 pages per week in preparation for each session. The assigned passages were chosen for their relevance and accessibility, and coaches’ presentations are intended to synthesise and clarify the more challenging dimensions of these texts. 

This pathway is recommended for any student preparing for Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate admissions in Philosophy, PPE, Classics, Physics & Philosophy, or related humanities subjects.

In school, students encounter antiquity through set texts and summaries about the Greco-Roman world. This pathway delves deeper, exploring how knowledge of the ancient world is constructed, contested, and politically deployed. We guide students through controversies at the heart of Classical study: Why did nineteenth-century scholars insist Greek statues were pure white marble when ancient sources clearly describe painted sculptures? How can we reconstruct the history of Carthage when nearly all surviving accounts come from the Romans, its conquerors and destroyers? Why were eighteenth-century Grand Tourists and Nazi propagandists drawn to the Classical world? 

We approach these questions and others by engaging with foundational scholarship, fragmentary inscriptions, competing translations, and other primary and secondary sources. By engaging with these materials, students develop critical reading and analytical skills and understand how classicists construct arguments. 

This pathway is recommended for any student preparing for undergraduate admissions to Oxford or Cambridge in Classics, Ancient History, or related humanities subjects. The pathway assumes familiarity with Ancient Greek or Latin, but can be adapted for students without prior language training.

This pathway examines how theologians interpret sacred texts, construct arguments about religion, respond to challenges from modern society, navigate historical and archaeological evidence in their research, and other questions central to the discipline. 

We coach our students through important theological questions and controversies: Should sacred texs be read as divine revelation, human literature, or both? How should religious communities respond to critique from LGBT+ rights groups, climate activists, and other progressive communities? Can theology be politically neutral? We approach these questions and others through close engagement with primary theological texts, hermeneutical debates, and contemporary challenges. Students will develop skills in textual analysis, doctrinal synthesis, contextual awareness, ethical application, and other practices central to the discipline of Theology. Crucially, they will learn to construct rigorous theological arguments of their own.

This pathway is recommended for students preparing for Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate admissions in Theology, Philosophy and Theology, or related humanities subjects. Coaches will adapt the syllabus to match students' specific interests in tradition, period, or methodological approach.

This pathway explores law not merely as a set of rules, but as a form of reasoning, argument, and moral inquiry. Students learn how legal thinkers interpret statutes, construct arguments from precedent, balance competing rights, and debate what the law is and ought to be. We introduce key schools of legal thought— natural law, positivism, legal realism, feminist jurisprudence, critical legal studies, and others — and examine how each informs the law in theory and in practice. 

We apply these ideas to fundamental questions at the intersection of law, morality, philosophy, and society: What is the difference between law and justice? Can an unjust law be legally sound? Do judges merely apply the law, or do they make it? What are the moral foundations of legal reasoning? How should the law respond when different rights – privacy, free speech, equality, or others – collide? Is artificial intelligence capable of legal judgment, or is reasoning about justice distinctively human? 

The pathway approaches these questions through close reading of landmark judgments, philosophical texts, and case studies. Students will learn to analyse arguments, test definitions, and construct their own positions with clarity and precision – these skills are honed through regular writing assignments. 

This pathway is recommended for students preparing for undergraduate admissions to Oxford (Law with Legal Studies/Jurisprudence), Cambridge (Law), or related degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Coaches will adapt the syllabus to match students’ specific interests.

This pathway goes beyond analysing paintings, sculptures, buildings, or specific works of art, instead exploring how art historical knowledge is produced and challenged. We discuss the work of art historians –  considering value and attribution, decoding iconography, debating the social function of images, and other facets of the discipline. We also address important art historical controversies: What does Michael Baxandall mean by "the period eye” – can we ever truly see as Renaissance viewers did? How do art historians trace Nazi-looted artworks and support restitution claims? Why did Leonardo's Salvator Mundi sell for $450 million despite attribution doubts? 

We explore these questions and major themes in art history through engagement with foundational scholarship, contested artworks, exhibition catalogues, and other materials. Students develop skills in visual analysis, provenance evaluation, technical interpretation, and exhibition critique. Fundamentally, this course equips students to construct rigorous art historical arguments of their own. 

This pathway is recommended for any student preparing for undergraduate admissions to Oxford or Cambridge in History of Art, Archaeology and Anthropology, or related humanities subjects. Coaches will adapt the syllabus to match students' specific interests in period, region, or theoretical approach.

Secondary school English literature courses focus on the themes, characters, and historical contexts underpinning major literary works. This pathway delves deeper, addressing how critics engage with major questions, construct interpretive frameworks, question textual authority, and trace the politics of language through texts. 

We explore how movements from formalism and structuralism to deconstruction, feminism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism have transformed the practice of literary interpretation. We address major critical questions: What makes a text “literary”? Does meaning lie in the author’s intention, the text’s language, or the reader’s response? How did Barthes’ “death of the author” reshape literary studies? How do Marxist and psychoanalytic readings diverge? Through close reading of theoretical essays and literary works, as well as exercises applying different critical lenses, students learn to construct nuanced arguments about form, meaning, and interpretation. They develop skills in textual analysis, theoretical synthesis, and critical writing.

This pathway is recommended for any student preparing for undergraduate admissions to Oxford or Cambridge in English Literature and Language, Modern Languages, or related courses.