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Planning your English revision

Two GCSEs and four exams, and most of the marks depend on what you can remember and write against the clock. Plan for that with short sessions, plenty of self-testing and one timed answer a week.

Quick guide for students · 3 minute read

You sit four English exams with AQA. In AQA’s timetable for summer 2027, all four are morning exams:

  • English Literature Paper 1: Wednesday 12 May 2027.
  • English Literature Paper 2: Wednesday 19 May 2027.
  • English Language Paper 1: Monday 24 May 2027.
  • English Language Paper 2: Tuesday 8 June 2027.

The Literature papers come first, so plan to finish your main work on the set texts and the poems by the start of May. If national or serious local disruption stops exams going ahead, JCQ (the Joint Council for Qualifications, which sets the rules for exams) has set a contingency day: Wednesday 23 June 2027. GCSE results come out on Thursday 19 August 2027.

Short sessions, often

Revision works better in short sessions spread over weeks than in long ones crammed together. The psychologist John Dunlosky and his colleagues reviewed ten ways of studying. They rated two as the most useful: spreading your practice out over time, and testing yourself.

Half an hour a day, five days a week, is a plan you can keep. The free Year 11 countdown is a twelve-week plan built that way. It starts twelve weeks before your first English exam, which in 2027 means the middle of February.

Test yourself

Re-reading your notes feels useful, because the words look familiar. Dunlosky’s review rated re-reading, and marking up notes with a highlighter pen, as low in usefulness. Testing yourself was rated high. Ways to do it:

  • Close your notes and write down everything you remember about a character, a poem or a theme. Then check, and fill the gaps in a different colour.
  • Make flashcards for quotations, with the quotation on one side and who says it and what it shows on the other.
  • Ask someone to give you a theme, and name quotations for it from memory.
  • Plan an answer to an exam question in ten minutes, with no notes.

How to learn quotations has more on making quotations stick.

Mix your texts

In each week, work on more than one text or paper, and go back to texts you revised earlier. Dunlosky’s review rated this kind of mixing, called interleaving, as promising, though it has had less research than testing and spacing.

One timed answer a week

The exams test what you can write against the clock, so practise that. Once a week, answer one exam question in the real time, with no notes. Here are the times to use:

  • An extract question on Macbeth or A Christmas Carol: 50 minutes.
  • An essay on An Inspector Calls, or the poetry comparison: 45 minutes.
  • The two unseen poetry questions together: 45 minutes.
  • Section A of a Language paper, with reading time: one hour.
  • A Question 5 writing task: 45 minutes.

Then compare your answer with a model answer, or mark it against the level descriptions, and write down one thing to fix next time.

A week that works

The countdown uses the same shape every week. On the first two days you retrieve: write what you remember, check it and test yourself on quotations. On the next two you practise: plan an exam-style question in ten minutes and write two What–How–Why paragraphs from the plan. On the fifth day you write one full answer in exam time.

The last week

Leave new material alone. Read through your notes and quotation lists, do short timed tasks, and get plenty of sleep. Check the date, time and room of each exam. The day of an English exam covers the rest.

Sources

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