The physics teacher who built a 1.4 million-student classroom, one exam question at a time

Maya Okafor taught physics for eleven years in a comprehensive school in Leicester. In the spring of 2021, with exams cancelled and her students revising from bedrooms, she filmed a nine-minute explanation of momentum on her phone, propped against a cereal box, and posted it so her class could rewind her. By the autumn, a hundred thousand students she had never met were rewinding her too.

Five years on, Okafor’s channel is among the largest education channels in the United Kingdom, her revision platform employs eight former teachers, and she has not, by her own description, stopped being a teacher for a single day.

Before the camera

Okafor grew up in Coventry, the daughter of a nurse and a bus mechanic, and was, she says, “the child who asked why the bus stopped when you pressed the pedal, and did not accept ‘because it does’.” Physics was less a subject than a way of being allowed to keep asking. She studied it at Warwick, taught for a year in Birmingham, and settled in Leicester, where she ran a department of four.

The classroom was where she learned the thing that later made the channel work: an explanation is only finished when the slowest student in the room nods. “You learn to watch faces,” she says. “On YouTube you can’t see the faces, so you have to imagine the most confused person watching, and talk to them.”

The turning point

The momentum video was not meant for the public. It was unlisted, shared to a class WhatsApp group, and reposted by a student’s older sister to a revision forum. Within a week it had been watched more than her school had pupils. Okafor made a second video because the comments asked for one, and a third because the second had comments too.

I didn’t leave teaching. I changed the size of the room.

She kept her job for two more years, filming on Sunday afternoons in a spare bedroom, until the channel’s income passed her salary for the fourth month in a row. Handing in her notice, she says, was harder than any video. “A school is a place. A channel is not a place. I was afraid of the not-a-place.”

Building the audience

Okafor’s growth has come almost entirely from a single format: one exam question, fully worked, filmed in one take, no music, no cuts. She resisted advice to shorten, to add a hook, to “do a face.” The one concession she made was to the title, which now names the exam board and the year so students searching for a specific paper can find her.

“Everyone told me the algorithm wanted personality,” she says. “Students wanted the answer. I decided to trust the students.”

The bet held. Her audience is unusual for its retention: the average viewer watches most of a video, and exam-season traffic returns every year like a tide.

What didn’t work

An attempt at short-form content in 2023 was, she says, “a year of being someone else.” The clips performed, the channel grew, and she disliked every one of them. She stopped and lost a quarter of her short-form followers within months. “They came for a person who wasn’t me. I’d rather have fewer people who came for the physics.”

A paid course launched too early, before she had a team, produced a summer of refunds and apology emails. She rebuilt it with two former colleagues and relaunched a year later.

The business

Okafor now runs Revision Club, a subscription revision platform with eight teaching staff, structured around the same principle as the channel: worked questions, one at a time, in the order the exam boards set them. The channel remains free and is, she says, the marketing department. Sponsorships are limited to two a year, both from education companies she has used herself.

The first video that worked was the one I was embarrassed to post.

What she has learned

She talks about the channel the way she talks about a class: as a room of people who are trusting her with their time. “The mistake is to think about growth. Think about the one student who is going to fail if you explain this badly. Growth is what happens when you don’t fail her.”

What’s next

A course for adults who were told at school that physics was not for them. “Most of them were just taught badly,” she says. “I’d like to be the second chance.”