Most GCSE revision timetables are beautiful, colour-coded, and abandoned by the second week. They fail for the same reasons every time: too ambitious, too rigid, and built around subjects rather than around the days you actually have.
Write down the evenings that are already spoken for - training, work, music, the night you are genuinely too tired. Whatever is left is your timetable. Building a plan for a week you do not have is the most common way this goes wrong, and it is fixable in ten minutes.
Aim for four or five short sessions a week in September, not seven. A plan you keep at 70% beats a perfect plan you quit.
Plan in sessions of twenty to thirty minutes with one topic each, rather than "two hours of science". A named topic gives you a finish line, and finishing is what makes you come back tomorrow.
Write the topic, not the subject: "photosynthesis word equation", not "biology". If you cannot name the topic, that is the real problem and it takes two minutes with the specification to fix.
Before mocks, spread it roughly evenly and lean slightly towards the subjects with the most content to hold in your head. After mocks, stop being even-handed: rank subjects by how badly they went and weight the bottom third heavily. The marks are cheapest where you are weakest.
You will. The plan is not the point; the habit is. Drop the missed sessions rather than trying to catch up on them - a rolling debt is what makes people abandon the whole thing in November. Restart tonight at the topic you were on and carry on.
Exam timetables and specifications are set by the exam boards and by your school, not by us. Check the current specification and your school's own dates rather than relying on any single source, including this page.
The single best-evidenced revision method is retrieval practice: shutting the book and trying to produce the answer from memory, then checking. It feels worse than re-reading notes, which is exactly why most people avoid it, and why it works better.
Re-reading and highlighting feel productive because they are fluent. Fluency is not learning. If you can look at a page and think "yes, I know this", you have tested your recognition, not your recall, and the exam asks for recall.
Spacing it out beats cramming for the same reason. Ten minutes on a topic today, again in four days, again in a fortnight, will hold longer than an hour in one sitting, even though the hour feels like more work.
Real questions from GradeNinja's own bank, with the answer and the explanation the app gives. Tap to reveal.
360
Multiplying by 100 moves the decimal point 2 places right: 3.6 → 360. Multiplying by 10 moves it 1 place, by 1000 moves it 3 places.
From north to south outside the magnet
Outside a bar magnet, field lines run from the north pole to the south pole. Inside the magnet they run from south to north, forming closed loops.
To dedicate Antarctica to peaceful purposes and scientific research, banning military use and mining
The Antarctic Treaty (1959) commits signatories to using Antarctica only for peaceful purposes, primarily scientific research. It bans military activity, nuclear testing, and (through the 1991 protocol) mineral extraction.
William Frankenstein
William, Victor's young brother, is the Creature's first victim. The Creature strangles him after discovering he is related to Frankenstein.
55,718 questions across 28 subjects, XP, boss battles and friend challenges. No card needed.
Start revising free →In September of Year 11, four or five sessions of twenty to thirty minutes is a realistic starting point - roughly two hours a week. That rises through the year, and starting low is what stops you quitting in week three.
Early in Year 11, yes, roughly evenly, because spacing each subject out beats blocking them. After mocks, weight heavily towards your weakest subjects, since that is where the extra marks are cheapest.
Drop the missed sessions and restart where you left off. Trying to catch up on a backlog is the most common reason people abandon a revision plan entirely.
They are better at one specific thing - forcing recall and telling you honestly whether you knew it - which is the part written notes are worst at. Notes are still useful for making sense of a topic the first time.