My students often tell me that they’ve read the textbook several times and nothing is working.

They don’t understand anything and they are terrified of failing their gcse maths exam.

So what is the secret to actually increasing your level and how long does it take?

The simple answer? Practice, practice, practice.

What does that mean in the context of maths revision?

Most sudents read through their textbook, do a few exam questions and go into their real or mock gcse maths exam completely unprepared for what they are about to face.

Then, when they get their result, wonder why it is far below the grade that they are actually capable of.

In school, most teachers barely have time to cover all of the gcse maths topics and so hardly do any exam practice questions or past papers with their students.

So what does real and effective maths practice look like?

There are 4 things you need to do, or steps you need to go through to get good at maths:

1 - Understand the topic or method.

2 - Practice simple questions for that topic - at least 20 questions.

3 - Practice harder questions for that topic - at least 30 questions.

4 - Practice doing as many exam style questions on that topic as you can find.

When you’ve done this for at least 5 different topics, try a GCSE maths past paper and see how you get on.

Here’s an example.

Let’s pick a topic: Graphs.

In GCSE AQA Maths there are specific graphs that you need to be able to recognise and sketch.

1: Learn the topic. Go through the pages in a good textbook that show you and explain each graph.

(the CGP GCSE Maths Textbook is good and is sold in our shop)

To deepen your understanding of each graph, draw them, plot them with coordinates so that you understand the shape of each graph.

Make a note of which ones go through the origin (0,0) and where they cross the y and the x axis.

You can do this with notes and sketches, you can also make posters.

And this is a very cool tool: https://www.desmos.com/calculator that lets you draw graphs by typing in the equation

2: Once you can draw the graphs without looking at any notes and understand why each graph is shaped that way, you are ready to do some easy practice questions.

Easy being things like: Draw the graph of x^2.

3: Next, find exam style questions on this topic. Before attempting to answer them, think about how they are written, what things are they trying to catch you out on?

Do as many exam style questions as possible, its ok to use the answers to help you figure them out.

Why does this work?

Learning is a process.

It usually goes something like this:

1: You come across something you don’t know or don’t understand.

2: You start to ask questions like: What does this mean? How do I figure this out?

3: Your brain has a need to answer those kinds of questions and so starts trying things inside your head.

4: Often you need to then start writing these thoughts out or do visually what your brain is doing.

For maths, this looks like doing practice questions.

For tennis it would be picking up the racket and trying to hit the ball.

For driving it would be actually driving the car.

For cooking it would be trying a recipe and putting together a dish.

Our brains are amazing, they are not designed to learn just by reading.

We have to try things out.

The more we do, the more we start to know and understand.

Really understanding something on a deep level is very different to ‘knowing’ something that we have read in a text book.

I’m going to give you the annoying answer: ‘it depends’.

All tutors and teachers have different approaches to teaching.

If all school teachers used this process, no one would be failing or struggling with maths.

A lot of maths tutors spend more time on explaining the concepts, which is fine, I don’t know if they put as much emphasis on the student putting in their own time and doing the practice questions.

The reason I use this process for my students is because it sets them up for success, not just in their gcse maths, but this process can be used for anything that you want to master, or get paid for, or anything you want to learn.

A gcse maths tutor can help with this process if they use the lessons to teach you the topics that you are stuck on - in other words they help you with step 1 - and also guide you and check your progress on doing the questions.

If you are currently looking for a gcse maths tutor (I’ve covered in detail here how to find a good one.) be sure to ask them how much their students improve and what their process is for achieving that.

With my process, students usually go up by 3 levels in about 3 months. That means they go from fail to a good pass, or move from foundation to higher tier, or go from a level 6 to a level 9.

Can you go from fail to a level 9 with this process?

Absolutely.

Here’s a brief overview:

Anything on your GCSE maths syllabus can be mastered.

If you are currently failing and want to get a level 8/9, here’s the process you will need to follow:

1: Work on your number issues.

You are failing because you are not as fast as you need to be when dealing with numbers.

Start with basic addition and subtraction. Focus on learning your number bonds off by heart.

E.g. 1 + 9 = 10 2 + 8 = 10 3 + 7 = 10

Number bonds help you add faster and make dealing with larger numbers easier too.

Learn all the ways to make 10 and all the ways to make 20.

Learn your times tables off by heart - fast. If you know them slowly or with your fingers, you will struggle with algebra.

Then, do lots and lots (about 100) questions on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Next, you need to get very good with fractions, percent and decimals - I know, they are horrible topics! - but you won’t get far without those.

I’ve got an intro on how to do percent on the maths blog, and will be adding lots more helpful stuff for this soon!