A revision programme is a small set of decisions, not a timetable. Decide what gets revised and in what order, how often a topic comes back, who chooses the next thing, what happens to the results, and what you are going to stop doing to make room. A department that answers those five can write its calendar in an afternoon. One that skips them ends up with a document nobody follows by November, because every week becomes a fresh negotiation about what to cover. The single most common failure is the last decision: a programme added on top of an unchanged scheme of work is a programme that quietly gets dropped.
Most revision programmes are written as calendars. Week one, respiration. Week
two, photosynthesis. They are reasonable documents and most of them are abandoned
by half term, because a calendar assumes every other decision has already been
made and none of them have.
The five decisions
1. What gets revised, and in what order. Specification coverage or last mock's
weakest topics. Both defensible, and they produce different programmes: coverage
is fair, weakness is efficient. Pick one to lead.
2. How often a topic comes back. Once is a lesson, not a programme. The gap
matters more than the total time, and a topic revisited after three weeks is doing
more work than one revisited after three days.
3. Who chooses the next thing. Teacher chosen keeps coverage honest. Student
chosen builds the independence you want by March. Most departments drift into the
first and never revisit it.
4. What happens to the results. If a recall task produces no decision, it was
an activity. Decide in advance: reteach, move on, or hand it back to the student.
5. What you are going to stop. This is the decision that gets skipped, and it
is why programmes die. A revision routine bolted onto an unchanged scheme of work
is competing for time it does not have, and it loses.
Making it small enough to survive
The programmes that last a full year tend to look modest on paper: ten to fifteen
minutes a week per subject, taken from the start of lessons rather than added to
the end of a term.
That is partly a workload calculation and partly a psychological one. A routine
that costs a teacher an hour of marking a week has a half life of about six weeks.
One that costs nothing to mark can run to June.
Where this site fits
We supply the activities and the marking. Everything is matched to a published
specification, checked as the student works, and short enough to fit the slot the
programme actually has.
We do not supply the oversight. Nothing records who worked through what, so there
is no programme dashboard and no completion report: your own assessment data
remains the measure of whether it is working. The same boundary is described on
the intervention page.
For the weekly slot itself, the
fifteen minute activities are the natural unit.
Everything is browsable by specification on the revision pages, and the
official past papers are there for the measuring half.
Earlier than most schools start one, and smaller. A weekly ten minute recall slot from the beginning of Year 10 does more than an intensive block in April, because it is spaced and because it is survivable.
Should it be the same across a department?
The shape should be, the content does not have to be. Agreeing the cadence and what happens to the results is what makes it a programme. Agreeing every activity is what makes it a document nobody follows.
How much curriculum time does this need?
Less than most departments fear, if it comes out of the start of lessons rather than being added on top. Ten to fifteen minutes a week per subject is a realistic starting point.
Who decides what gets revised next?
Answer it deliberately. Teacher chosen keeps coverage honest, student chosen builds independence, and the two produce different programmes. Most schools drift into the first without ever deciding.
Can DoRevision tell me how the programme is going?
No. Nothing records who worked through what, so there is no programme dashboard. Your own assessment data is the measure, and this site supplies the activities and the marking rather than the oversight.
Does this replace mock exams?
No. Mocks measure, revision programmes build. Using mock question level analysis to choose what the programme covers next is the useful connection between them.
Put one in front of a class
Tell us the subject and how long you have. You get a link to hand out, and it marks itself.
15-minute GCSE revision activities for teachersShort, specification-matched revision activities for those spare fifteen minutes: a starter, tutor time, the end of a lesson or a cover period. Students get their answers checked as they work, so there is nothing for you to mark afterwards.
GCSE revision intervention a department can sustainA workable shape for revision intervention: find the gap, work one narrow thing, check whether it moved, repeat. Written around what a small department can actually keep up for a term, and clear about what this site cannot tell you.