Virginia Betts is a Tutor, Writer and Actor living in Ipswich, Suffolk. She worked as a secondary schoolteacher for over 15 years, three of those at the old Deben High School in Felixstowe, before forming her tuition business, Results Tutoring. She takes students from all over the world and during lockdown in 2020 she wrote and two books which were published in June this year. She is also a professional actor.
Virginia Betts is no stranger to Suffolk and has strong connections to Felixstowe. She was born in Ipswich, studied Literature at Essex University and then went on to teach at secondary school. Her early career brought her to the old Deben High School. She already had some close links to the town, paying regular visits to family, and has fond memories of braving the waves and eating ice-cream on the beach. She also discovered that she is related to Charlie Brinkley, the old ferry master, and was delighted to see his photograph, complete with hook hand, on the wall of the ferry café. Perhaps this explains her love of sea shanties and tales of pirates?
In 2013, Virginia left her post at Ipswich School to start her own tuition company, Results Tutoring where she indulges her love of literary analysis whilst helping students to achieve their potential in exams ranging from 11 plus to A level. She noticed she had a particular affinity with students with conditions such as autism, adhd or dyslexia. Many of these students have a ‘spiky’ profile, excelling beyond the scale at some subjects and finding others very challenging. Virginia struggled with Mathematics and numbers at school just as much as some of her students struggled with words. She discovered she had Irlen’s Syndrome, which is a form of visual distortion caused by the brain. She had not heard of it, and indeed her amazing memory had compensated and hidden the condition, but soon coloured lenses for reading made her life headache free. But more than that, she realised she had always felt ‘different’, a bit like she had landed on this planet with no instructions. She wondered if she might be autistic but dismissed it at first due to her lack of understanding of the condition. After all, she was sociable, academically advanced, and married with a son, even running her own business.
However, the more she learned to look past the stereotypes, the more she realised that she did find some fairly ordinary things challenging, like remembering faces or names, (even those of friends) or what to buy when shopping. She likes to socialise but is quickly exhausted or overwhelmed and needs a lot of ‘downtime’. She also has some ‘savant skills’, like a near eidetic (photographic type) visual memory for words, facts and events. These and some other factors led her to seek a diagnosis and at the age of 45 she received that confirmation. This changed her life in a positive way. It explained some of her difficult times in the past, but it also shaped her future in a new and exciting way, and she never stops advocating for those who also have the condition. She sees it simply as a different neurotype, and just part of the person-as-a-whole. Students really benefit from her one-to-one tuition, and they also like it that she can genuinely understand and relate to them.
Virginia’s tutoring work is always very busy, and even during lockdown she tutored online full time. However, lockdown offered a chance for reflection, and in this introspective time, Virginia wrote two books. The first, The Camera Obscure, is a collection of dark, dystopian and supernatural stories inspired by the Victorian Gothic style. Virginia has been reading Stephen King from a young age, so be prepared to be scared! However, she does not like ‘blood and gore’, and prefers psychological tension. She believes that Stephen King is a most intelligent ‘horror’ writer, and books like The Shining have underlying themes like addiction and family dysfunction.
The other book, Tourist to the Sun is a full collection of poetry. Many of the poems have been previously published in various literary journals, like Acumen, and Virginia has now produced a collection with a strong connecting theme: the relentless ticking of time. She uses a variety of traditional forms to express some thoroughly modern issues, and reflects on subjects like death, dysmorphia, friendship, motherhood or marriage. She has a highly visual style, with an acute attention to detail.
Finally, Virginia has been a performer from a young age and was trained by LAMDA. She has recently returned to the stage. She played the lead in the Suffolk Poetry Society’s first ever play in verse, has acted as Anne Boleyn and Helen of Troy from Mai Black’s Thirty Angry Ghosts poetry collection and will also be performing this at Cuppa in Felixstowe on October 8th.
Further afield Virginia will also perform in Ipswich and Cambridge.
It has been an eventful 2022 and it looks sure to continue in an upward trajectory, all the way to the sun and beyond!
If you want to know more about Virginia, you can find her on her website, virginiabetts.com, and she is easy to follow on Twitter (@ResultsGin); TikTok (virginiacbetts); Facebook (Virginia Betts author, virginia c betts or Results Tutoring); Instagram (ginnb900) or Linked in (Virginia Betts) Results Tutoring can also be contacted via Yell.com
Praise for tutoring on Yell: ‘Virginia is an exceptional tutor’; ‘A life changer’; ‘Amazing result, A* grades’ ‘My daughter came to her with a low C and finished with an A*’
Praise for Tourist to the Sun: ‘It’s really blown me away, uniting the honest directness of modern poetry with the musicality of more traditional verse.’ (Mai Black, poet and author)
Praise for The Camera Obscure: ‘Fitzgerald; Thomas Hardy; Laurie Lee. I think these stories reach their heights.’ Reader, 2022.
