The GCSE Revision Tips You Won’t See Elsewhere (because why bother writing those?)
Everyone’s heard the usual revision advice: make flashcards, do past papers, take breaks, stay hydrated, etc. You know the drill.
But here are some less obvious — and genuinely useful — maths revision tips that’ll help you actually improve your skills and confidence before GCSEs.
1. Practise the real basics
Before you dive into tricky questions, make sure you’re fluent with the core number skills.
Fractions, negatives, decimals, percentages — they pop up everywhere and you need to be able to handle them confidently.
2. Then work on the next basics
Once your number work is solid, focus on these topics:
Factorising, using the quadratic formula, collecting like terms, and finding the mean, mode, and median.
These skills appear in questions across multiple topics, so it’s worth taking the time to get fluent.
3. Practise with the formula sheet in front of you
Don’t wait until exam day to get familiar with it, use the official formula sheet while revising, whether on paper or on a screen. Know what’s given, what isn’t, and where everything is. It saves precious seconds in the real thing and means you won’t spend time memorising formulae that you’re given.
Here are some of the main ones (message me if I’ve left yours out):
Edexcel Higher and Foundation
OCR Higher and Foundation
AQA Higher and Foundation
Eduqas Higher and Foundation
4. Circle theorems: learn with the list beside you
When you’re practising circle theorems, keep the list of theorems right next to you at first. The aim isn’t to memorise straight away — it’s to recognise patterns and see how each one is applied. Once you’ve nailed down how to use them, then you can work on memorising them and it’ll be much easier because you’ll be used to using them.
5. Ask yourself: What kind of equation is this?
Before jumping into solving any equation, pause and identify its type – linear, quadratic, simultaneous, etc. It’s a small step, but it trains you to pick the right method from the start instead of diving in blindly.
6. Don’t rush into past papers
They’re useful — but not too early.
Start with topic-by-topic practice first, then practise small numbers of questions (CorbettMaths’ 5-a-day questions are great for this) with a timer – give yourself one minute per mark. Then move to past papers. This keeps the past papers for when they’re most useful, when you’ve nailed down as much of the material as possible.
7. Understand surds through algebra
Think of it this way:
Algebra is like doing maths without specific numbers.
Surds are what happens when you put the numbers back in — but they’re not neat ones.
If you can manipulate algebra, surds become much easier to handle.
8. Stuck on “problem-solving”?
Ask yourself:
“What piece of information would I like to have that I don’t currently have?”
It focuses your thinking and often helps you spot the missing link in a multi-step problem.
9. Mix up your equation practice
Make sure you can confidently solve each kind of equation on its own — then mix them up.
10. Check your syllabus
Sounds obvious, but loads of students forget. The exam board syllabus tells you exactly what you’re expected to know (and you can find it with Google).
Don’t revise things that aren’t on it — and don’t skip the bits that are.
11. Prioritise sleep (well before The Night Before)
Focus on good sleep hygiene for several nights before the exam, not just the night before. That way, if nerves keep you awake on the last night, you’ll already have several good nights sleep under your belt and the last one won’t matter so much.
12. Study mark schemes
Mark schemes aren’t just for checking answers — they show you how marks are awarded. Learn the phrasing and steps examiners expect to see. Often it’s about clear working, not the final number.
13. Bonus resource: WJEC Question Bank
Even if you’re not sitting WJEC, their question bank is a great extra resource. It’s packed with longer, wordier questions — perfect for practising problem-solving and applying maths in context.
Our First Lesson
Before your first lesson, I’ll send you a Google Meet link by email. If we decide to continue, you’ll use the same link for all future sessions — simple and consistent.
All you need to bring is a pen and paper, though if you have a device that lets you write on my online whiteboard, that can be helpful. If you have any recent school tests, I’d love to see them — they’re not essential, but they give me a useful snapshot of your current level and how you perform under exam conditions.
I keep my camera on for lessons but I won’t require you to keep yours on, it’s up to you. In any case, when I’m looking at the online whiteboard (which I will be for most of the lesson), I can’t also see you so I’ll spend most of the lesson not looking at you.
We’ll start by discussing your goals — what you’d like to achieve, where you think you are now, and what’s motivating you to improve. Then we’ll do some maths together. It’s not a test, it won’t be done in silence and you don’t need to have prepared for it. It’s simply a way for me to see what you’re confident with and what challenges you. You should expect it to feel uncomfortable at times because I’ll be trying to find the limits of what you know. It also gives you an insight into what lessons with me would be like – lots of conversation and curiosity, focused on understanding why maths works, not just how.
If you’re working towards your GCSE, we’ll probably look at topics like fractions, negative numbers, percentages, area, and algebra. For A-level students, we’ll focus on algebraic manipulation and circles, and we might explore differentiation and integration as well.
Throughout the lesson, I’ll be asking you to explain your reasoning — how you got your answers, how confident you feel, and how you check your results. This helps me understand not only what you know, but how you think.
By the end of the session, I’ll have a clear idea of your strengths, key focus areas, and three to five topics for us to tackle next. It’s a great starting point for your learning journey; I’ll keep reassessing you informally as we go and adjusting our plans accordingly.
Exam vocab revisited.
It all begins with an idea.
In 2015, having completed action research as part of my PGDip in Maths Education at Warwick and early in my teaching career, I wrote an article for the Times Educational Supplement on the value of teaching A-level maths exam vocabulary explicitly.
Ten years later, how has my teaching and thinking about pedagogy evolved? Do I stand by what I wrote then?
100% YES.
The underlying idea was something that I was taught on my PGCE - “make the implicit, explicit” - and the specific idea of teaching maths-specific exam vocabulary is something I work on with all my students. In the article, I wrote about it being needed most for A-level students and that continues to be true but there is no reason why it can’t be taught sooner so that the leap to A-level is less shocking.
The research and the article that led from it have become a integral part of my teaching. I am constantly considering what fundamentals may not have yet been made explicit to my students and I focus on making them explicit. This can mean having conversations about simpler ideas than my students or their parents might expect but if that brick of understanding is missing from their wall of maths, it needs filling in and will give them a stronger foundation for future learning.