Quick Tips

Very little revision happens in August, and that's fine. It's a holiday. The last two weeks are different, and they are worth using lightly rather than either ignoring or panicking about. There is a genuine effect at work here. Memory decays over a long gap without retrieval, and a student who has not thought about the subject since July will start September several steps behind where they finished. Not because they have lost the ability, but because retrieval takes practice

GCSE results land on Thursday, and for anyone going on to A Levels, the grade matters less than what sits underneath it. A grade 6 in Chemistry earned through strong recall and shaky application is a different starting position from a grade 6 earned the other way round, even though the certificate looks identical. A-Level Chemistry rewards the second student and quietly punishes the first, because the content stops being something you can hold in memory and starts being somet

Results arrive on Thursday, and they say less than they appear to. A grade is a snapshot of one performance, across two or three papers, on particular days. It reflects what was known, what was recalled under pressure, and a genuine element of chance about which topics came up in which combination. That last part isn't just a comforting turn of phrase. Ofqual, the exams regulator, says 98% of A-Level grades and 96% of GCSE grades are accurate to within one grade either way. A

There is a decent rule of thumb for revision: if it feels comfortable, it isn't working. I've watched it happen more times than I can count. A student confidently closes their revision guide, sits down, and produces almost nothing on paper - not because they hadn't worked, but because reading it back had quietly convinced them they already knew it. The material was familiar, it went in smoothly, and they finished each session with a real sense of having covered a lot. The pro