About Simon Poliakoff
Physics Teacher, YouTuber
and Creator of Creative Commons Physics Resources
Physics Teacher, YouTuber
and Creator of Creative Commons Physics Resources
I have worked as a physics teaching for over 20 years mostly in England but completed my training in North Wales and taught in Ethiopia as a VSO volunteer. I currently work in a comprehensive school in Hertfordshire. Over the years I have been involved in delivering various programmes to support non-specialists to teach physics. In my experience, teachers will often see new ideas on courses, websites or at conferences but when they get back to their own school due to time pressure the new ideas don't get implemented. As well as teaching physics I also give regular workshops and talks to provide CPD for other physics and science teachers.
On this website I am aiming to provide ready to go teaching resources and support videos. I hope that this will be useful for non-specialists or trainees teaching the topics for the first time and that I provide sufficiently detailed guidance to make the implementation straightforward. Hopefully it will also be useful to established physics teachers who are on the hunt for new ideas, links to good simulations and other resources to adapt and put into their lessons and schemes of work. I highlight hazards that are clear to me but teachers should complete their own risk assessment before using anything with students. In 2024 I shared complete schemes of work for light topics for KS3 and GCSE along with a comprehensive set of ideas for teaching magnetism and electromagnetism which I compiled together with Dan Jones. In January 2025 I added a new set of teaching ideas for the Forces and Motion topic and in June 2025 a set of teaching ideas for the Waves topic. And in January 2026 I added the set of teaching ideas for electricity, electric fields and capacitors. The support of the Ogden Trust in paying for my time was essential in making this happen. I am just finished ideas for electricity and electric fields which was shared in January 2026. I am now working on remaining topics and hope to release the next set of ideas in Summer 2026.
I am providing everything on a creative commons non commercial license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) as I am not aiming to make any money but rather to help improve the quality of physics teaching and hopefully make some other teachers lives easier. (For transparency my Simon Poliakoff YouTube Channel is monetised since otherwise all the ad revenue just goes to google. Any videos featuring other creative commons non commercial content are not monetised).
I am lucky to have worked with a variety of fantastic teachers over the years and many of the teaching ideas are borrowed and adapted from others. I hope that they will appreciate their ideas being shared to a wider audience. I would also like to thank author of Physics for You - Keith Johnson for permission to use some of the diagrams and worksheets from the support resources which I have used since the start of my career. I would also like to highlight the excellent BEST resources which I have integrated into the lessons and ideas packs which are also available under a creative commons license.