Who teaches
Our tutors
Skybound is small and deliberately narrow. Everyone who teaches here is a medical or dental student who sat these papers recently and went through the application themselves.
Dhruv Upadhyay
Skybound's founder, and one of the tutors. Dhruv is in the third year of a medicine degree and teaches Maths and the sciences at GCSE and A-Level. He has been tutoring GCSE students for several years, including through an established tutoring company before starting this one.
If you book a diagnostic, there is a good chance he is the person who marks it.
The wider team
Our tutors are medical and dental students at UK Russell Group universities and European medical schools. They sat the same GCSE and A-Level specifications your child is sitting, within the last few years, and they went through the applications and the interviews that follow.
That recency is the point. A tutor who sat the current specification remembers which topics the examiners actually press on, and a tutor who sat an MMI two years ago remembers what the stations felt like. Neither is something you can get from a textbook.
One member of the team went through the dentistry application specifically, which is why we are willing to support dental applicants rather than treating dentistry as a footnote to medicine.
What we check before anyone teaches
- Grade 8 or 9, or A or A*, in the subject they teach. We ask to see the certificate, every time.
- Enhanced DBS with a children's barred list check. No tutor takes a session until theirs is in place, and we will show you the certificate on request.
- Safeguarding training, completed before teaching, and our safeguarding policy sets out how to raise a concern.
- An observed session before they teach a student of ours unsupervised.
Parents are welcome to sit in on any lesson, and all contact happens on our platform rather than through private messages.
What we will not tell you
We do not publish success rates, average grade improvements or testimonials, because we are new and any number we gave you would be made up or drawn from a sample too small to mean anything. When we have results worth quoting, we will quote them and say how many students they came from.
We also will not promise a particular tutor before we have talked to you. Matching depends on the subject, the exam board, the year group and, honestly, on who has the right hours free.
Start with the free diagnostic
Every student begins the same way: one full hour under exam conditions, marked against the real mark scheme, followed by a written summary of where the marks are going and what we would do about it. It costs nothing, and the assessment is yours to keep whether or not you carry on.