Hannah Whitfield
FCCAHead of Faculty · SBL, SBR
Fifteen years in audit and reporting, five of them on ACCA marking teams. Writes most of our examiner commentary.
About usWe are a tuition provider
We are a tuition provider
that started as a question bank.
The Ilum was built by tutors who kept watching technically strong students fail on technique. Everything here follows from that one observation.
- 2,400+
- ACCA exam-style questionsAcross all 13 papers
- 13
- Papers covered end to endNotes, questions and mocks
- 92%
- First-time pass rateApplied Skills, Mar 2026 sitting
- 4.9/5
- Student ratingFrom 6,210 reviews
What we hold toFour principles,
Four principles,
including the expensive one.
The last one costs us money regularly. It is the reason students send us their colleagues.
- 01
Tell students the truth about readiness
A readiness score that flatters you is worse than no score at all. If our heat map says do not book the sitting yet, that is the honest reading of your last four attempts — not a nudge toward another month of subscription.
- 02
Practice before content
Most students fail on technique, not knowledge. We build the question bank first and write the study text around what the questions expose, which is the reverse of how tuition material is usually made.
- 03
Marked by people who have marked
Written scripts go to qualified accountants who have served on ACCA marking teams. Automated scoring is for objective tests, where it belongs, and nowhere else.
- 04
The right route may be the cheaper one
If your transcript earns you exemptions, we tell you — even when it means selling you four papers instead of nine. If we think an exemption is deferring work rather than removing it, we tell you that too.
“Nobody fails ACCA because they had not read the chapter. They fail because nobody ever showed them what a marker does with the answer they just wrote.”
Hannah Whitfield · Head of Faculty
Faculty
Every tutor teaches one thing, and has examined or marked it.
Nine paper specialists, no generalists. Each of them still practises, which is why the worked examples come from real files rather than textbooks.
Ravi Menon
FCCA, MBALead Tutor · FR, FM, AFM
Former group financial controller. Built the MTQ workspace after watching students lose marks to the interface rather than the maths.
Sara Mahmood
ACCA, CTALead Tutor · TX, ATX
Tax specialist who rewrites both tax papers for every Finance Act. Runs the Karachi and Dubai evening cohorts.
Daniel Okonjo
ACCAStudent Success · Foundations
Career changer himself. Designed the zero-assumption foundation module for students arriving without a finance background.
How we got here
Seven years, in four steps.
- 2019
A question bank, nothing else
Started as a shared bank of past-paper-style questions written for one evening class in Lahore.
- 2021
Marking at scale
Recruited the first marking team so written scripts could be returned inside 48 hours rather than a fortnight.
- 2023
The MTQ workspace
Built a working spreadsheet environment after a cohort reported the interface, not the content, cost them time in the CBE.
- 2026
38,000 students
Live cohorts in four time zones, thirteen papers covered end to end, and a syllabus heat map behind every one.
Student storiesThe people who found the
The people who found the
gap between knowing and passing.
4.9 / 5 from 6,210 reviews
The mock marking is the whole product. I had passed FR twice on paper in my own head and failed both times — the marked script showed me I was answering a question nobody asked.
I came from six years in retail management with no finance background. The foundation module assumed I knew nothing, which was correct, and eleven months later I had passed all three Applied Knowledge papers.
The MTQ workspace is the only practice environment I found that behaves like the real CBE. On exam day the interface was the one thing I did not have to think about.
Come and look
The best way to judge us is to sit one of our mocks.
Take a full timed mock for any paper, free, and get it marked the way we mark for paying students. If the feedback is not better than what you are getting now, you have lost three hours.
- No card required
- Cancel any time
- Full library on day one