How to Help Your Child Revise for GCSEs: A Practical Guide

How to Help Your Child Revise for GCSEs: A Practical Guide

Revising is tough. It may be the first time a student has ever been truly independent of a classroom. Suddenly sat there, staring at the pile of exercise books, wondering where to start.

It’s a daunting task.

How do you truly condense nearly two years of learning into effective GCSE revision notes and THEN, somehow, commit it to memory. Pupils say to me all the time “I don’t know how to revise”, so let me break down what I’ve seen work and how you can help your child through this stress.

Start Early

This is my number one. It always takes longer than you think. Just like cleaning the house before the in-laws arrive. It’ll only take an hour right? Wrong! You know it, I know it. And we spend that final 10 minutes frantically rushing around with a cloth, desperately trying to eradicate every spec of dust which dared sit on the surfaces. Well, organising notes and starting to systematically work through them takes even MORE time than kids think. So - encourage them to start as soon as possible. I’ve written a couple of articles now on how to use the summer holidays to help students get on top of things - and this is where I’d start.

Organise

The summer holidays is a moment to reflect on the academic year’s learning. Take all notes on topics covered and sort them into order. Some students like to copy, others like to condense onto flashcards. Either way, the goal is to have a set of notes that can be called upon when we enter the exam period PLUS the exercise also helps children recognise areas they find difficult. Use that! Note down which topics they find hard and take extra care with those notes.

Confidence Scores

Sometimes students find it hard to really work out which topics they find hard, so I use a method to help identify the weak spots - and I’d recommend doing this during the sorting phase. Get students to score, on a scale of 1-5, how confident they are with their understanding of that particular topic. Teenagers have a real habit of choosing the number 3 - so I ban that number entirely so that actually they are left with a binary choice: yes, I understand this topic, or no, I do not. Here’s what is great about using this as a revision method. You can revisit these confidence scores later down the line to see whether the revision is working. If someone scores their confidence a level 1, does three hours of revision and still scores it a 1, we know something isn’t working with how they are revising that topic.

Past Papers

Only if they’re ready, past papers are a phenomenally good way to test one’s self on revised material. I really recommend everyone should build up to doing a past paper after a few weeks of revising, whether that’s in the summer, Christmas or Easter. Here’s why. A past paper is exactly as it says - it is a test given to past students. Sounds obvious but, in the current GCSE climate, the papers are the same on most subjects because there hasn’t been a major curriculum update since around 2017. Some questions may have been slightly tweaked and a few extra text choices may have been given. But fundamentally, you can pick up any AQA or Edexcel exam paper from 2017 and you’ll be receiving the same style of questions when it comes their turn to sit the paper. The benefit of a past paper is not just exposure to the topics and questions but also the exam technique. Students massively underestimate how tricky it is to manage time in an exam. In fact, with GCSE English students of mine who really struggle with this, I make them do one past paper every month over Year 11. This also helps their stamina improve as they have to learn to focus through the length of that exam time - sometimes, in English, that’s 2 hours and 15 minutes (even before extra time).

Motivation and Encouragement

You’ll all know your children better than me, but here’s something I use with lots of reluctant teenagers and this works. I get them to create a reward system; to lay out all their favourite things: the chocolate, the games console, the phone and we put treats on the line. For example, complete your one hour of revision, get your one hour on the PlayStation. This triggers the dopamine reward hit in them that makes the reward feel even more meaningful - and it came from that discipline to do something they may not want to do for a short while. Another way I motivate is to lay the numbers out for them in relation to time. Even one year from exams, if you say to someone finishing Year 10 “in one year it’ll all be over - only 360 more days” that normally jolts them to life. It really does go so quickly, quicker than they’ll expect, and as they get older they often start to feel the speed of that time pass. Say to that same Year 10 “do you remember what the end of Year 9 felt like?” And they’ll generally agree it only felt like yesterday.

None of this is rocket science, but the students who do these things consistently are the ones who walk out of that exam hall feeling like they gave themselves a real shot. That’s all any of us can ask for.

And that includes you. Because this period is tough on parents too. Mentally draining in a way that is hard to explain unless you’ve lived it. The worry, the nagging, the wondering whether you’re doing enough. But here’s the thing - you have an enormous advantage over your child in all of this. You’ve been through it. You know it ends. You know that in a year’s time, life looks completely different and this mountain they’re staring up at right now becomes something they’re proud they climbed. They can’t see that yet. You can. So use it. Be the person in the room who genuinely believes it’s going to be ok, because the chances are, it is. That calm, that perspective, that quiet confidence you show them - it matters more than any revision schedule.

If you’d like some help putting a GCSE revision plan together for your child, feel free to get in touch here.

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