Building a GCSE revision plan with your tutee

Your job in revision season

You are not going to deliver the revision. There are far more hours in the run-up than you will ever teach, and the pupil does almost all of them alone. What you can do is decide what those hours are spent on, check whether they worked, and adjust.

That reframing matters because it changes what a session is for. A revision-season lesson that consists of you explaining topics is a lesson that reaches whatever you happened to cover. A revision-season lesson that diagnoses, prioritises and sets is a lesson that reaches the other six days.

Start from the gap list, not the syllabus

Working through a specification from the beginning feels responsible and wastes most of the time available. The pupil is already secure on some of it, and the parts they are secure on are the parts that are pleasant to revise, which is exactly why they get revised.

Build a list of what is actually weak instead. Your lesson notes across the year are the honest source for this — the topics that came back twice, the question types that keep costing marks. Then rank them by two things together: how much of the paper they are worth, and how far off the pupil currently is.

That ranking does the hard work. A topic worth a lot of marks where the pupil is nearly there is the best hour you will spend all term. A topic worth few marks where they are a long way off is, honestly, one to leave until everything else is done, and saying that plainly to a pupil is more useful than pretending everything is equally urgent.

• Weak-topic summary template

Work backwards from the exam dates

Take the first paper's date and count the sessions you have before it. Not the weeks — the sessions, minus the ones that will be lost to holidays, illness and school trips. That number is usually smaller than either of you assumed, and it is the number that makes prioritising feel obvious rather than arbitrary.

Then split the list into blocks rather than hours. "Two sessions on the graph questions, then two on the wordy multi-step ones" is a plan a pupil can hold in their head. A grid of coloured hours is a plan that gets abandoned in the first bad week, and rebuilt in the second, and then quietly ignored.

Be explicit about which work belongs where. The tutoring hour is for the things that need somebody watching: the method they get wrong in a way they cannot see, the question type they avoid, the exam technique that only shows up under time pressure. Everything that is repetition belongs outside the session.

• Tutoring homework template & ideas

The weekly session in revision season

A shape that holds up: ten minutes of retrieval on something covered two or three weeks ago, then the main topic for this week, then the last few minutes agreeing what gets done before you meet again. The retrieval slot is the one people cut when time is short, and it is the one that tells you whether last month's work actually stuck.

Mark something in front of them at least occasionally. A pupil who watches you take marks off for missing working learns more about the mark scheme in five minutes than an explanation of it achieves in twenty.

Keep the plan visible in the session. Two lines at the top of the page listing what is done and what is next means the pupil can see the list shrinking, which is the closest thing to motivation available in March.

• Tutoring lesson plan template

Keeping parents in the loop

One line a week is enough: what was revised, what was set, and where it sits against the plan. Parents in exam season are anxious to be useful and often have no idea what is going on, and a short factual note stops that turning into pressure applied at home in the wrong direction.

If you want to give them something to do, make it logistical rather than academic. Protecting a quiet hour, or making sure past papers are printed, is a job a parent can actually do.

• Parent update templates for tutors
• How often should tutors update parents?

When the plan slips

It will slip. Two weeks will vanish to mocks, a bad cold and a school production, and the pupil will arrive knowing they have not done what was agreed. What happens next determines whether the plan survives.

Replan out loud, without ceremony. Cross off what is no longer realistic, move the highest-value item to the front, and say the new version in one sentence. A pupil who has been told off for missing a plan will start hiding what they have not done, and then you are planning on bad information.

It is also worth saying that a plan which never slips was probably too easy. The point of writing it down is not compliance; it is having something concrete to revise when reality arrives.

On revision timetables

Every year somebody spends a session building a beautiful colour-coded timetable that is never used again. Plenty of free revision timetables already exist, and if a pupil wants one, use one of those rather than making your own from scratch.

The timetable is not the valuable part. What you are adding is the judgement about what goes in it and the weekly check on whether it is working, and no template does either of those.

Where the weekly note comes from

Revision season doubles the admin at exactly the moment you have least time for it. Each session produces a decision about what to revise next, a task to set, and something a parent should probably hear about, and doing that across a full timetable of exam-year pupils is where evenings go.

LessonBrief takes the rough notes from the session and drafts the weekly parent line, the task and the next-session plan from them. It is privacy-first (initials, never full names, and never a label about a child), it produces documents assembled on our own server from your notes with nothing sent to any outside AI service, and each draft is yours to review and change before anybody sees it.

The plan itself still has to be your judgement. What a tool can remove is the twenty minutes of writing it up afterwards, twelve times a week.