What to have ready at home

Most home tuition lessons lose time to logistics before they lose it to maths. Ten minutes go on finding a past paper, five more on working out which tier that paper belongs to, and the tutor ends up teaching from memory rather than from the document your child will actually be examined against. An hour spent setting up before the first lesson is the best value hour of the whole arrangement, and it is the one part a parent can do that a tutor cannot do for them.

1. Find the specification for the exact subject and tier, print the topic list, and pin it up somewhere visible. It runs to between four and twelve pages depending on the subject, and it is the checklist every lesson is planned from.
2. Download one recent past paper and the matching mark scheme for that same specification, print both, and keep them clipped together so they never get separated in a drawer.
3. Clear a table big enough to open an A3 sheet flat, put a lamp beside it, and move anything with a screen into a different room.
4. Start one lever arch file per subject and tab it using the headings from the specification rather than the chapter headings from the textbook.
5. Put the latest school report, the most recent mock paper and any written teacher feedback into the front pocket, so the first lesson begins from evidence instead of guesswork.

Why the exam board specification comes first

Every GCSE course is a document before it is a subject. The exam board publishes a specification that lists, topic by topic, exactly what can be examined, and it sets out the paper structure, the tier, the duration of each paper and the marks attached to each assessment objective. AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Eduqas and WJEC all publish theirs as free PDFs, and each one carries a version number and an exam series on the front cover.

That version number matters more than most parents expect. A specification reissued for first teaching in a given year may have moved content between papers, changed the weighting of a spoken endorsement, or dropped a topic that an older textbook still covers across forty pages. Print the current version, not the one saved on a laptop three years ago.

Tier is the second thing to confirm, because it changes what a pupil is even able to score. Maths has Foundation and Higher entry, combined science has Foundation and Higher, and English Language runs as a single tier with no Foundation option at all. A Foundation maths paper caps the achievable grade at 5, so drilling Higher content with a Foundation entrant is time spent on marks that cannot be banked.

The same logic applies to younger pupils. If your child is 9 and working towards a senior school place at 11+, the equivalent document is the admission test format published by the school or the consortium running the test. For a Year 7 pupil catching up in maths, it is the school's own curriculum map for that year. The principle holds from age 7 to 18: teach to the published document, not to a general impression of the subject.

The paper and the mark scheme belong together

Past papers are free from every exam board website, and they are the most useful physical object in the room. Choose a series written against the current specification, ideally the most recent summer or November sitting, and print the whole paper including the front cover, because the cover tells you the tier, the time allowed and the total marks.

Print the mark scheme too, then clip it behind the paper with the printed side folded away. A pupil who can see the answers while attempting question 4 is not practising; they are copying, and the tutor learns nothing about where the marks were lost.

Four pieces of mark scheme shorthand cover most of what you will see. M is a method mark, awarded for the right process even when the arithmetic collapses. A is an accuracy mark, which usually depends on the answer being right. B is an independent mark that stands alone, often for a definition or a single correct statement. cao means the answer must be exactly correct with no leeway. Two more appear constantly: ecf, short for error carried forward, tells an examiner to follow a wrong number through the working rather than punish it twice, and oe means or equivalent.

A mark scheme is not a model answer. It is a grid written for examiners, and it often looks shorter and blunter than a full solution, which is why it confuses parents reading it cold. We walk through the mechanics of reading one alongside your child on a separate page, so there is no need to repeat that here.

What actually goes on the table

Paper is the main item. Print the past paper you are working from, then print a second copy, because a pupil who has attempted question 7 badly needs to attempt it again a fortnight later without the old scribbles in the margin. Keep a pad of squared paper for graphs and a pad of plain A3 for diagrams, since a biology six-marker on the heart or a physics question on a circuit will not fit on a narrow line.

Everything else is small and cheap: two pens, a pencil, a ruler, a protractor, a pair of compasses, a calculator with a fresh battery, a highlighter, and a clock or kitchen timer. The timer matters because exam technique is largely a timing skill, and a pupil who has never worked to a per-mark budget will run out of minutes in the real thing.

Two things should not be on the table. A phone, even face down, because the pull of a notification breaks concentration more than most people believe. And a textbook open at the same time as the past paper, since the point of a past paper is to find out what your child can do unaided.

The room, the light and the chair

Our tutors travel to homes across Bristol and the surrounding area, and the difference between a good lesson and a cramped one is often the furniture. A dining table in a Victorian terrace in Redland will do fine. A bedroom desk wedged under a shelf, with a laptop, a lamp and three school bags on it, will not, however tidy the room looks from the doorway.

What the space needs is simple enough. A flat surface wide enough for an A3 sheet and a past paper side by side. Light from the left if your child is right handed, so the writing hand does not cast a shadow across the page. A chair at a height where the forearm rests level on the table. A plug socket within reach, because a tutor may bring a tablet or a document camera. A door that closes quietly, and a household that keeps the television volume where it is rather than raising it.

One practical note for evening lessons in the winter term: a table lamp beats an overhead bulb, and it beats a dark corner with a laptop screen doing the lighting.

The folder that does the work between lessons

Buy one lever arch file per subject and a packet of tabs. Then use the specification's own topic headings as the tabs, in the specification's own order, rather than the order the textbook happens to follow. That way the file and the document agree, and your child can see at a glance which sections have work in them and which are empty.

Inside each tab goes the classwork, the marked assessment, the past paper attempt and any corrected version. Anything the tutor marks goes in the same section, dated. When a topic is secure, the tab gets a small tick on the inside cover; when it is shaky, it goes on a separate sheet at the front that we call the red list. The red list is what the next lesson starts with.

The file is also what makes a progress report worth reading. A report built from dated attempts says something specific about question 12 and method marks. A report built from memory says something vague about confidence. We write the second kind only when we have to.

What to dig out of the school bag

Schools hold more useful evidence than most parents realise, and it is usually already in the bag or on the portal. Worth gathering before the first lesson: the most recent mock paper with the teacher's marking on it, any end of topic test from the last two terms, the Year 9 options booklet if choices are imminent, and the predicted grade the school has recorded.

Also collect the log in for whichever online system the school uses to publish homework and reports, since seeing the set work tells a tutor more about pace than a grade on its own. If your child has approved access arrangements for exams, such as extra time or a reader, say so at the booking stage rather than in week five, because it changes how we rehearse timing.

One more item that is easy to forget: a sample of handwriting from a timed essay. English Language and the essay based subjects are marked by a human reading quickly, and legibility and paragraph structure cost marks quietly.

Tiers, target grades and grade boundaries

Parents often arrive with three different numbers and no way to tell them apart. A target grade is what the school thinks your child should reach. A predicted grade is what the school thinks they will reach on current evidence. A grade boundary is the mark needed in a particular series for a particular grade. Only the third is fixed to a paper, and boundaries move between series, so a 2019 boundary is a rough guide at best.

Keep the distinction on paper. Write the target grade on the inside of the folder, note the board's published boundaries for the most recent series beside it, and let the gap between them be the thing the lessons work on. For combined science, remember the grade is a double one, written as 5-5 or 7-6, which reflects two papers rather than one.

If your child is choosing between combined and triple science, that decision has its own page on this site and deserves its own conversation rather than a paragraph buried here.

The fifteen minutes before a tutor arrives

Small rituals make the hour go further. Clear the table and put out the folder, the current past paper and the red list. Fill a glass of water. Put the phone in another room, not in a pocket. Tell your child the lesson is happening today, ideally that morning rather than at the doorbell, because a pupil who has been surprised into a lesson spends the first ten minutes catching up with themselves.

Then leave the room. Stay nearby, and stay reachable, but let the lesson belong to your child. The pupils who make the fastest progress are rarely the ones whose parents sit in, and a tutor who is being watched teaches differently, which is not in anyone's interest.

What we bring, and what we ask you to keep

Our tutors are DBS checked and qualified, and many of them are current secondary school teachers, so they arrive knowing the specification and the mark scheme already. They bring printed copies of papers, their own annotated schemes and a tablet with a few visual models on it. They do not need you to supply anything beyond a table and a quiet hour.

What we ask you to keep going is the boring part. Keep the folder in use. Tell us the mock dates as soon as the school publishes them, because a mock in the second week of November changes what October looks like. Read the progress report when it arrives and reply with the one question it raises. A report nobody reads is just a document.

Where it usually goes wrong

The commonest mistake is printing the wrong tier. A Foundation entrant handed a Higher paper will spend an hour failing questions they were never going to be asked, and the confidence cost is real. Check the tier on the front cover against the tier on the specification before anything goes on the table.

Second is using a paper from an old specification. The topics look familiar, the structure is wrong, and the pupil rehearses a paper that no longer exists. Third is working from a mark scheme without a written attempt, which turns a technique session into a reading session. Fourth is tidying the folder away after every lesson, which undoes the one habit that makes revision compound.

Fifth, and least discussed, is buying a stack of revision guides in September. Two guides and one past paper beat six guides and none, and the specification is a better index than any of them.

If the lessons are online

Online lessons need the same table and the same paper, plus a little more preparation. Print the paper in advance, because a pupil scrolling a PDF on a phone cannot annotate it and cannot see the whole question at once. Angle the camera down at the paper rather than across at the face, so the tutor can watch the working appear line by line. Keep a spare copy of the same paper beside you to hold up to the camera when a diagram needs explaining.

The full technical checklist, from bandwidth to document cameras, sits on our online lessons page.

None of this is complicated, and none of it requires spending much. A specification printed off the board's website, two copies of a recent paper, the mark scheme kept out of sight, a clear table with decent light, and one folder per subject can carry a pupil through an entire GCSE course. Set it up once in September and the following thirty lessons start on time, at the right tier, working on the questions that actually cost marks. If you would like a second opinion on what to gather before the first session, ring us on +44 117 0451935 or email [email protected], and we will tell you what to pull out of the school bag first.