Jamie is one of those extremely gifted teachers who was always destined for the classroom, even though he didn’t realise it at first. As a successful student at Oxford University, he won the Microsoft Research Prize for best undergraduate dissertation and went on to study for a PhD in Computer Science. While teaching as part of his graduate studies, the positive and enthusiastic response of his students inspired him, making him realise that he had a real passion and talent for the profession – so he arranged a week of work experience at his old school and the rest is history.
Jamie Frost, as well as teaching at Tiffin School, has also created and runs the hugely influential and ground-breaking website for maths tuition DrFrostMaths that provides an online learning platform, teaching resources, videos and a bank of exam questions to practice on, all for free. The site was developed to both support his school’s lower attaining students and galvanise those who may be disenfranchised with mathematics. However, it has now far outgrown that modest ambition.
When the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools all over the world, DrFrostMaths became a lifeline for students shut out of classrooms. Within a week, the site’s pageviews had jumped from 0.4 million to 1.3 million per day. Jamie spent every free hour he had coding to adapt the site to meet the needs of students and teachers in this new environment, developing virtual white board software and tools to help teachers monitor students’ progress in real time. He even received a donation of £10,000 to help him fund his free site and Amazon web services also donated $10,000 in server credit.
The site has now had over 7 million resource downloads and is a worldwide sensation. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the site is used in some capacity by well over half of all secondary schools in the UK. Jamie travels internationally to speak about his teaching methods and his resources have been used around the world to provide teaching for schools in Zimbabwe, for disabled students, and even for 18-21 year-olds in an Ohio prison.
