As students and teachers celebrate their GCSE results across the country, some teenagers have praised the help they received from an unconventional source.
Andrew Bruff, an English teacher-turned-YouTuber, has received hundreds of messages from GCSE students, all thanking him for his work in helping them get the grades they wanted with his free YouTube video guides.
“I wanted to personally say thank you,” wrote one student on Twitter, “as your videos have helped me so much in getting a grade 9 in English lit. Keep up the hard work.”
Hundreds of others have heaped similar praise on the 35-year-old from Devon, across YouTube, Twitter and e-mail.
“I am overwhelmed by today’s messages of thanks,” he told the Press Association.
“I’ve been running my YouTube channel for five years now, and every GCSE results day is similar, but this is the first year where students have been studying for the new GCSE English exams, and it’s wonderful to see that my resources have been so useful to so many students.”
Schools have been faced with a new marking system for English, English literature and maths this year, with the traditional A* to G marking scheme replaced with numbers 9 to 1.
Many students who had previously been dismayed at the low grade they were predicted have gone out of their way to thank Mr Bruff on social media for boosting their results with his original and innovative teaching style.
His most popular video of the 2016-17 school year addressed one of the English language GCSE papers.
But instead of standing in front of the camera, drily reciting instructions to learn by rote, he gave his advice by rapping the guidelines over Stormzy’s grime hit Big For Your Boots.
“I got a 7 in lit thanks to ur mad rap,” one student wrote on Twitter.
“I’ve always loved hip hop, and am intrigued by how we can memorise song lyrics so easily,” said Mr Bruff of the video.
“So it seemed a simple idea to put information students needed to memorise to music - the Stormzy rap is one example of that.”
His years in the classroom as an English teacher inspired him to start making YouTube videos to help students, he said, because he didn’t think the current education system was “fair”.“It’s not fair that the quality of your education depends on your teacher, the area you live in, or whether you have rich parents who can afford expensive revision guides and tutors,” he said.
By making thousands of videos and a podcast available for free, he hopes to level the playing field.
“Just because you have double English at 9am on a Monday morning, it doesn’t mean you’re in the right frame of mind to spend two hours learning about Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
More than 30,000 students achieved the top grade in the two English GCSEs combined this year, in which a new grading scheme marking papers by 9 to 1 replaced the traditional A* to G scheme.
Mr Bruff, who lives in Tavistock, near Plymouth, spent 10 years working as an English teacher and head of English, and now considers himself a full-time YouTuber, author and educational consultant.
He said his approach to teaching has always been based around helping students to understand what they need to demonstrate in an exam.
“With that as my primary objective, the rest fits into place easily,” he said.
For all the latest news and views on GCSE results day, please visit our specialist GCSE results hub.
