In Class …

Everybody is revising, though review of work is a regular activity for all my students all year round. I have been using a wide variety of resources detailed in the posts Revision Time 2017 and Mathematics Revision Resources.

Some recent favourites with the students:

My Year 9 and my Year 11 students all like the exam collections on Diagnostic Questions. Looking at the Insights for my classes I can see they have answered thousands of questions between them. I find it very quick and easy to create a quiz which can provide a great starter. For Year 11 I have used questions where I can see students have had the most misconceptions.


The Maths Teacher

Many of my Year 9 students as I do really like David Smith’s ‘The Maths Teacher’, which includes GCSE exam questions by topic at both Foundation and higher tier. What I particularly like about David’s site is the choice between video, the video transcript or straight to questions and worked solutions. One of my year 9 students told me she had been using the various formats. She has been trying the exercises and really appreciating the very clear written solutions which she can then check with her own. She has also used the video lesson where she has been unsure of any exercise questions.

Another site which Year 9 have found helpful for revision is Transum Mathematics. A student asked for some practice questions for factorisation and I remembered the excellent Algebra activities on Transum; lot’s of factorisation practice, note the various levels.

Transum Mathematics


Questions which are working really well for Year 11 include AQA’s AO2 and AO3 questions which I have included on the AQA GCSE page and Edexcel’s Problem Solving questions – included on the Edexcel GCSE page. Edexcel have added another set of problem solving questions – 24th April. Note too Edexcel’s very useful Maths Emporium Guides to Life: to  guide for GCSE Mathematics Examinations. This applies whichever board you are using. My Year 11s will enjoy that this week!

GCSE Advice

Funny – but such wise exam advice from Edexcel

More resources which work very well are our sets of questions we have created using the enhanced results analysis. To help your thinking have a look at the AQA’s Guide to AQA Enhanced Results Analysis  

AQA (use the login button at the top of the screen and then choose e-AQA box).
Edexcel Online

My Year 13 students have done many different past papers between them; I find delving into the archives to find old papers with some of the same content very useful, also using papers from other exam boards has been helpful.

 I do like the fact that for GCSE the subject content is common for all boards; from September 2017 this will also be true for A Level. We can use resources from all the exam boards!

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