Muhammad’s story
He failed nearly all his GCSEs at a Manchester school with some of the worst results in the country. Ten years later he had a Physics PhD from Cambridge. Muhammad has tutored privately for 30 years, starting while he was at Cambridge, alongside every job that followed. This is the whole story, as he told it to the Manchester Evening News.
1976
Moss Side, Manchester
Muhammad Ali came to Manchester from Bangladesh with his family aged three, not speaking a word of English. He grew up off Platt Lane in Moss Side, a stone’s throw from the old Maine Road stadium; his father worked as a chef in Hazel Grove, Stockport.
1981
The Moss Side riots
Moss Side was rough. Muhammad was racially abused on the street routinely — by children, not adults — and it became ordinary to him.
1984
Ducie Central High School for Boys
A school on Moss Lane East that, by the time it closed in 2002, reportedly had some of the worst GCSE results in the country. Truancy was rife; Muhammad was cricket mad and assumed that was his future.
1989
Results day
He hadn’t revised. His mother drove him to school from their new home in Fallowfield expecting five good passes — the norm at the time.
1989 GCSE results
Two passes. Five fails. Not the end of the story.
1989
Shena Simon Sixth Form
A single question turned it. He resat his GCSEs and passed, then took two years of A levels — BCC, enough to scrape into his first-choice university.
1992
Manchester University
Reading Physics, things slowly started clicking. By his second year he was top of the class — ahead of a mature-student classmate who would go on to be a famous physicist.
1995
Cambridge, Cavendish Laboratory
Muhammad wanted a PhD. He applied to Cambridge “as a joke” and got in — the first in his family ever to go to university. Started tutoring privately.
After Cambridge
Job hunting and call centres
A Cambridge PhD did not make the road straightforward. Muhammad applied for 125 jobs and faced repeated rejection. He worked in call centres.
2000
Manchester
In September 2000 he started a Computer Science MSc conversion course at Manchester. He lost his motivation and left at Christmas.
2001
A trading firm
In February 2001 he got a break with a trading firm. It folded in 2004 and Muhammad was made redundant.
2006–07
Mortgage broking
He started a PGCE and left it, then returned to call-centre work. Around 2006–07 he qualified as a mortgage broker, only for the credit crisis to derail that route too.
Late 2000s
Greater Manchester
Muhammad taught GCSE pupils through Food4Thought, a social enterprise working across all ten Greater Manchester boroughs. He was also its Finance Director, handling wages and scheduling lessons. He loved the work, but the funding ended after the 2010 GCSEs and he was laid off again.
2010
Islington, London
That is when Muhammad started delivering tuition flyers door to door in Islington. MST began as a stopgap and became his lasting career. Now a father of three, Dr Ali runs Mathematics and Science Tuition from Islington — teaching Maths, Physics and Chemistry personally, enhanced DBS-checked, in person and online worldwide. He has taught in Islington ever since.
Today
Why this matters for your child
He credits his parents’ moral support, not raw ability, for what came next — and wants every family he teaches to know the story didn’t end on a results-day slip in 1989. Through repeated setbacks, both before and after Cambridge, he never gave up on himself. That is why he understands how failure can knock a pupil’s confidence, and why he believes it needn’t define their future.
As told to the Manchester Evening News, August 2025.
Before you go
“I take the first call myself, and it costs nothing.
Tell me what is going wrong, and I will tell you honestly whether I can help — and what the first few lessons would look like.”
Muhammad AliFounder and tutor — PhD physics, Cambridge
