A 6-week AQA GCSE Physics revision plan that actually works

Six weeks before a GCSE Physics exam is the sweet spot. There's enough time to genuinely move a grade, and not so much that the plan loses momentum. The students who go up a full grade in the final stretch aren't doing more hours — they're doing the right things, in the right order, with three parallel tracks running each week.

This is the plan we'd actually run with our own children. It assumes AQA Triple Physics or Combined Science Trilogy (the structure is the same; the volume differs). The big difference from a Maths revision plan is that Physics has three things to learn — topic content, equations, and required practicals — and they each need their own track in the week. Treat them as one undifferentiated blob and the equations slide quietly out of memory by the time the exam arrives.

The single biggest mistake in the final 6 weeks

Doing past paper after past paper without reviewing them properly is the trap. A student who does 8 papers and never closes the gap on the same wrong topics will sit the exam and make the same mistakes for the 9th time. Volume alone doesn't move grades. What moves grades is the loop of paper → mark → identify weak topics → drill those topics → re-attempt similar questions. We have a separate post on how to use Physics past papers properly; the short version is that the mark scheme is the most important document in this whole process.

The three tracks: content, equations, practicals

Before the week-by-week plan, the structural point. Each week of the plan runs three parallel tracks:

• Content — the physics itself. Forces, electricity, waves, energy, atomic structure, magnetism, space.
• Equations — there are around 23 equations on the AQA Physics specification. About 12 are given on the equation sheet in the exam; the other 11 you must memorise. Knowing which is which matters.
• Required practicals — 10 named experiments across Papers 1 and 2. Each one has a near-guaranteed exam question worth 5–6 marks.

If you only revise content, you'll lose 10–15 marks per paper on the practicals and easy-to-claim equation marks. The plan below builds all three into a normal week.

The equation sheet — what's given, what isn't

The AQA equation sheet hands you the awkward ones — v² − u² = 2as, F = mΔv/Δt, (final velocity)² − (initial velocity)² = 2 × acceleration × distance — and expects you to have memorised the everyday ones. The ones you must memorise include:

• F = ma (force = mass × acceleration)
• V = IR (voltage = current × resistance)
• P = VI (power = voltage × current)
• E = mc∆θ (specific heat capacity)
• KE = ½mv² and GPE = mgh
• v = fλ (wave equation)
• W = Fs (work done = force × distance)
• ρ = m/V (density)
• p = mv (momentum)

If your child can't recite these without thinking, no revision plan will compensate. The first thing to do — week 1, day 1 — is to print the AQA equation sheet, highlight the given ones, and make a flashcard set of the rest.

The plan at a glance

• Week 1: diagnostic. Find out exactly where the gaps are. Equation audit.
• Weeks 2–4: targeted topic work. Roughly 2 content topics per week, plus 2 required practicals per week, plus daily equation drill.
• Week 5: a full timed mock paper (or both papers), marked properly.
• Week 6: light maintenance only. Equations, practicals, sleep.

Total focused work: about 40–50 minutes per weekday, 90 minutes on Sundays. The students who try to do four hours a day in week 6 perform worse, not better.

Week 1 — diagnose, don't drill

Do not start by doing a topic. The whole plan hangs on knowing which topics matter most for your child. Forces and electricity together carry roughly half the marks across both papers, but a child weak on waves might lose 20+ marks before they even reach the forces questions.

The diagnostic is one of:

• A full past paper under timed conditions, marked honestly with the mark scheme. Note which question types lost the most marks — not just whether they were wrong, but what kind of wrong. Misread? Equation not memorised? Required-practical methodology?
• A topic-by-topic skill probe. We publish a free 10-question quiz on every GCSE Physics topic page — deterministic 3 easy / 4 medium / 3 hard, so you get a mastery score per topic.

While you're at it, run an equation audit: hand your child a blank list of the 23 AQA equations and ask them to fill it in from memory. Whichever ones they can't, those are the equations that get a daily 5-minute flashcard slot for the next 5 weeks.

By the end of week 1, you should have a written list — yes, on actual paper — of the 6 topics (Triple Physics) or 4 topics (Combined) that are costing your child the most marks, plus a list of unmemorised equations. Rank by available marks lost, not by hardness.

Time investment in week 1: 3–4 hours total, spread across the week.

Weeks 2 to 4 — the three-track engine

This is the body of the plan. Each week:

• Track 1 — Two content topics. Monday–Tuesday on topic A (30 min/day). Wednesday–Thursday on topic B. Friday off-track. Saturday: mixed practice on both. Sunday: full review.
• Track 2 — Two required practicals. Friday and Saturday, 20 minutes each. Read the AQA method sheet, write down the IV/DV/control variables in your own words, do the typical exam question for that practical.
• Track 3 — Daily equation drill. Five minutes every day. Flashcards for the unmemorised ones; quick mental application for the ones you know.

A typical Monday looks like this: 5 minutes equation flashcards, 25 minutes on topic A (concept review plus 6–8 questions). That's 30 minutes total. On the topic-practical days (Fri/Sat), bump up to 45 minutes — 20 minutes on the practical, 20 minutes on the topic, 5 minutes equations.

Why three parallel tracks rather than three sequential phases? Because if you defer the equations to "later", later never arrives — the exam does. Each track is small enough that running all three at once is sustainable. Each track is important enough that dropping one costs you 10+ marks in the exam.

A common mistake here: students drift into "do another paper" mode by week 3 because it feels productive. Resist that. Past papers are a week 5 tool, not a week 3 tool. In weeks 2–4 you're doing topic drills + practical review + equation flashcards, not whole papers.

Week 5 — the mock paper week

By the start of week 5, your child has spent three weeks closing the gaps from week 1, plus 15 sessions of equation drill, plus a structured review of 6 of the 10 required practicals. Now you find out what got through.

For Triple Physics:

• Monday–Tuesday — Paper 1 (energy, electricity, particle model, atomic structure) under timed conditions. 1h 45m, no breaks, no phone. Mark on Tuesday evening with the mark scheme.
• Wednesday — review. Categorise every lost mark: was it an equation you didn't remember? A practical methodology you didn't know? A topic gap?
• Thursday–Friday — Paper 2 (forces, waves, magnetism, space). Same review on Friday.
• Saturday–Sunday — drill the gaps the mocks exposed. The remaining 4 required practicals from your list.

For Combined Science Trilogy, the same pattern with the two shorter Physics papers (1h 15m each, 70 marks each instead of 100).

If your child has already done all the official AQA papers, our Practice Pack ships ten ExamVault-authored papers with built-in mark schemes — but if cost is a factor, the official free papers from the past papers hub are absolutely adequate.

Week 6 — the quiet week

This is the week most plans get wrong. The exam is in six or seven days. The temptation is to learn new content. Don't. Week 6 is maintenance:

• Daily 20-minute equation drill. By the morning of the exam, every equation on the AQA list should be available without thought.
• One practical per day. Read the method, recap the IV/DV/control variables, work through one typical question. By exam day all 10 should feel familiar.
• One light past-paper question per day — not a whole paper. Pick a question type your child finds tricky, do it slowly, talk through the method.
• No new content. If a topic hasn't been covered by the end of week 5, leave it.
• Sleep, food, exercise. Exam-day performance correlates more strongly with rest than with the marginal hour of revision in the final week.

Why daily beats weekend cramming

A common alternative is to do nothing in the week and 4 hours on Saturday. This produces measurably worse outcomes.

The forgetting curve is steep. An equation revised once on Saturday and not touched again is roughly 50% forgotten by the following Saturday. An equation drilled for 5 minutes daily is reinforced six times in the same week, with sleep consolidation between each pass. Same total time; dramatically different retention.

This is why our £1-a-day Adaptive GCSE Maths subscription is structured the way it is — a daily pack of 10 weakness-weighted questions in 15–20 minutes. The Physics-equivalent rhythm — small daily session, three tracks, calm review — is the rhythm that produces the most improvement per hour.

A common parent question: what if we've only got 3 weeks left?

Compress, don't panic. Run the diagnostic in two evenings. Skip to the three-track structure immediately — one content topic per week, one practical per week, daily equation drill. Do a mock paper in week 2 instead of week 5. Treat the final few days as week 6.

What you can't do in 3 weeks is learn a whole topic from scratch. Focus on topics where your child is close to getting marks but losing them on detail — those are the recoverable marks. Trying to learn the whole of space physics from zero in three weeks is not.

What to expect

A student who runs this plan honestly — not perfectly, just honestly — typically goes up half a grade to a full grade in six weeks. More if the starting point was disorganised cramming. Less if they were already doing structured daily work.

The grades that move most are 3 → 4, 4 → 5, and 5 → 6. The 8 → 9 jump is harder in six weeks; that's depth that takes months. But standard-pass-to-strong-pass is genuinely achievable, and it's the move that matters for sixth-form Sciences.

If you're starting this plan today, the most important thing is the week 1 diagnostic plus the equation audit. Don't skip either. The plan only works if it's pointed at the right topics and the equation track is running.