Hi, I’m Jono. I run Cognito, a UK GCSE and A-Level revision platform used by about 1.5 million students. Emma very kindly let me put together a guest post for Emma and 3, because she gets a lot of GCSE-related questions from her audience, and we talk to a lot of parents at exam season too. A few patterns keep coming up.
Across the GCSE families we hear from, the ones who handle exam season well aren’t the ones with the most expensive tutors or the shiniest revision apps. They’re the ones who get the basics right and stay consistent with them. Here’s the playbook the teachers and tutors we work with tend to agree on.
1. Find the topics your teen actually doesn’t know, not the ones they say they don’t
The single biggest revision time-waster is teenagers revising topics they already understand, because those are the comfortable ones. Five past-paper questions across a unit, marked honestly, will tell you the real weak topics in about twenty minutes.
2. Short, focused sessions beat long ones
Twenty-five minutes is plenty. Forty-five at a push. Beyond an hour, attention shrinks and they’re learning less per minute. Most secondary teachers will tell you they wouldn’t run a 90-minute lesson without a break in it, so it’s a bit odd we expect teens to revise that long at home. The Pomodoro technique exists for a reason.
3. Active recall, every session
This is the technique with the most rigorous evidence behind it. Read a topic, close the book, write what you can remember on a blank sheet, then check what you missed. Repeat until the gaps get smaller. It’s harder than re-reading, and that’s exactly why it works.
4. Practise under exam conditions, more than you’d think
Most teens lose marks on how they handle the paper rather than on the content itself. They run out of time, misread the question, write three paragraphs when one was needed, or panic on a long-answer question. Timed past papers under proper conditions are the only real fix for any of that.
5. Pick one good tool, then leave them with it
There’s an enormous amount of GCSE Science and Maths content online, and the trick is finding short, exam-board-aligned material that doesn’t sprawl. This is the gap we built Cognito to close. Free to use (with some limits on the free tier), short videos, clean topic structure, practice questions that surface what they actually don’t know. We hear from a lot of teachers who recommend it to tutoring families for the same reasons. Try it free first, and if your teen finds it useful, Emma’s readers get 20% off Pro with the code EMMAAND320.
6. The teaching-it-back test
This one is gold. Get your teen to explain a topic out loud to you, a sibling, the dog, whoever happens to be in the room. If they can explain it clearly, they know it. If they can’t, they don’t quite have it yet. It’s the best diagnostic for whether revision has actually landed.
7. Sleep is part of the revision
The cramming-until-midnight thing is the most counter-productive habit a Year 11 can fall into. Memory consolidates during sleep, so a teen who revises for 90 minutes and sleeps for eight hours will outperform a teen who revises for three hours and sleeps for six. It’s not even close.
If I could give one piece of advice to parents heading into a GCSE term, it would be this. Be the structure your teen doesn’t quite have yet. They don’t need you to teach them the content. They need you to hold the routine: the bedtime, the snack station, the printed timetable, the Sunday catch-up. The teaching itself is the easy bit now, because the tools exist for it. The structure is the hard bit, and it’s the bit only a parent can really do.
Stick to the basics, hold the routine, and most teens end up surprising themselves.
Guest sponsored post by Jono Ellis, CPO at Cognito. Partnered with Emma and 3. Cognito is free to use. Readers get 20% off Cognito Pro with the code EMMAAND320.
