A Hatfield associate teacher and qualified pharmacist who has faced his own challenges with dyslexia has set up his own tutoring agency to support students struggling with the sciences.

Adam Ali offers revision techniques for dyslexic students who are experiencing anxiety surrounding exams and find scientific concepts difficult.

He explained: "Believe me I have been there and totally understand what it feels like, you revise hard, you go through the topic list, you try to remember the core principals and then you're not happy with the result.

"I have been through every process with studying and at points I have felt like giving up, but having dyslexia has not stopped me from achieving my aspirations."

Here he presents some practical tips to help dyslexic students with their revision for biology GCSE and A-level.

1. Understanding the content - It is essential you are able to identify what you need to know. Check what the exact points are you need to understand and in this see how much depth you need to go into. What are the keywords in each section and how is the content broken down?

2. Tier 3 language - These are the complex words you need to understand in order to answer the extensive questions in your examinations. Break the words down and use a glossary to help you formulate the meanings.

See in the specification what context you need to understand them. Do the words link with any other topics that you have done? This is especially important with practicals. Rewrite the keywords in your own words to help formulate your understanding.

3. Your note taking - Keep things simple. What is the definition, what is being asked and what are the links with other topics in that module? Do any other topics link together, are there any particular examples that you need to highlight? Look at past exam questions as a starting point to see what is being asked.

4. Practicals - This is key and what you need to understand is how to interpret results, the trends you need, what happens if you change the conditions in the investigation and how you link your knowledge to problem solve the changes in data. With the required practicals make sure to watch the relevant YouTube videos as these will give you an overview of how to conduct them. Understand the difference between the dependent and independent variables.

5. Exam questions - Although understanding of the content is obviously required, you are also being tested on your application of the content.

Be aware of the differences between different elements, describe, explain, suggest, identify. Go through exam questions to ensure you know what are the questions being asked and even with a specific topic, what are the changes in the exam questions?

Under exam conditions write practice answers as this will help you see where you are going wrong especially with some of the long answer questions.

Go though the mark schemes and work out what is specifically mentioned. With long answer exam questions it is very easy to write everything you know about the topic and this is where you tend to lose marks. Once you have established this then you then target the areas you find most difficult.

Examiners reports are really an integral part to this process and with these you can identify where other students went wrong and some of key mistakes that were made. These are worth going through as they are a good source of information in addressing students' misconceptions.

You can find out more about Adam's company CBH Education, and its work specialising in pharmacy and biology, by visiting the website at cbheducation.co.uk