Charlie Wilson-Marklew.

Where the maths came from

I read Mathematics at Oxford and left with an MMath. Then, instead of staying in academia, I spent fourteen years using the subject commercially — which turned out to teach me more about how mathematics is actually understood than the degree did.

I began in strategy consulting at OC&C, then took commercial roles at Sainsbury’s Argos, GoCompare, Marks and Spencer, Ocado and Just Eat Takeaway.com. The work was pricing hundreds of thousands of products, forecasting demand across European markets twenty years out, modelling the economics of partnerships worth hundreds of millions, and assessing risk on decisions where being wrong was expensive.

None of it arrived labelled with which method to use. That is the real lesson: outside the classroom, the hard part is never the calculation. It is recognising which piece of mathematics the situation is asking for — and that is a skill you build by understanding principles, not by memorising procedures.

I now run a commercial advisory practice alongside teaching, which keeps the applied side sharp and keeps supplying me with problems worth putting in front of students.

Why teach

Because the most common thing I hear from intelligent adults is “I was never any good at maths”, and I have almost never found that to be true. What is nearly always true is that somewhere — often around thirteen — an explanation went past them, they did not feel able to say so, and everything after that was built on a gap.

That is a fixable problem. It just needs someone patient enough to keep breaking the idea down, and interested enough to find the actual gap rather than re-teaching the topic that appears to be causing trouble.

I specialise in analytical, accelerated and gifted learners — students who are ahead and under-stretched — and, at the other end, in adults rebuilding confidence in a subject that went badly the first time round. The two turn out to need much the same thing: harder, more interesting problems and someone who will not rush.

Mathematics isn’t a list of rules to memorise — it is the ultimate strategic toolkit for decoding how the world works.

Local, properly

I live in Milton Keynes and served as an elected councillor here from 2016 to 2021, representing around ten thousand people. I sat on the Audit Committee throughout, was one of two Vice Chairs of Budget and Resources Scrutiny, and later Vice Chair of Regeneration Scrutiny, at a council spending £535m a year.

I mention it because scrutinising a council budget is a useful thing to have done before teaching anyone statistics. It is one of the few settings where you watch numbers being used to argue for things in public, and learn to ask what a figure is quietly assuming.