Reducing stress and preparing for success in GCSE

The GCSE exam results are out and now it is time for a fresh batch of Year 11s to get ready to write the exam next year. Year 11 is the most crucial year in your entire GCSE journey. You have spent 5 years in secondary school preparing for this exam and you want to come out tops and for all that effort to count. It´s a natural time for many students to be nervous as dealing with multiple subjects and multiple papers in each subject, and preparing for them all at the same time can appear quite overwhelming.  Students need to have a structured plan to deal with that. It may have been mentioned by your teachers, parents and everyone else, but I’m reiterating it here once again to not underestimate the power of a study time table and sticking to it. This way, you are methodically covering the entire syllabus multiple times over before you appear for the exams. 

What I advise my students is a two-week rolling schedule covering each subject. Let´s assume you are taking the standard E-Bacc qualification. That means you have all 9 subjects to deal with.  Now this varies from student to student, but you need to spend some time thinking about subjects that you feel more confident about and the ones where you think more preparation is needed. This will determine the subjects where more time will be required and others where you feel quite comfortable to just give it an hour or two every couple of weeks. Do not make the mistake of giving equal time to everything as with that approach you will end up wasting a lot of time revising things you already know or feel quite confident about.  I’ll take an example of a student who feels quite comfortable with subjects that require narrative writing like English and History, or even Geography paper-2. However, this student find science and maths more challenging. For such a student, it is fine to allocate an hour every two weeks for English Language and practice writing actual GCSE questions in that time. For English Literature and History, it would be best to allocate at least two hours so that one hour can be spent revising the texts and the other hour for practicing exam questions. However, when it comes to sciences, you might actually plan to spend a couple of hours every week on each subject to prepare and practice.  

So overall, across your two weeks you can still cover every subject, but you might be spending twice or thrice the time on subjects where you need more time to prepare than where you feel better prepared. This schedule might also need further changes as you approach closer to the exam date. But the most important thing to take away is to cover every subject over a two week cycle and never to leave a subject without practice for multiple weeks as you would very quickly find that you have fallen behind there. 

I hope this gives you an idea of how to approach a study time table. Please message me if you require private tuition or need more guidance to tailor something specifically for you and I’ll be more than glad to assist. Good luck and success for your 2024 exams.