The best A-Level revision resources, honestly compared
There is no single best A-Level revision resource, because the popular ones do four different jobs. Question banks and past papers (Physics & Maths Tutor, ExamQA, the boards themselves) test you. Written notes (Save My Exams, textbooks) explain in one direction. Retrieval apps (Seneca, Anki, Quizlet) make things stick. Tutors and AI tutors (Lumi) answer back when you are stuck. Pick one of each rather than four of the same kind.
Search for revision resources and you get listicles of twenty sites with a sentence each, which is useless, because it tells you nothing about which ones overlap. Here is the more useful framing: there are four jobs, and almost every well-known resource does exactly one of them well.
Job one: testing yourself
Question banks and past papers. This is where you find out what you can actually do, as opposed to what you feel familiar with, and the gap between those two is where most dropped grades live.
- Your exam board's own past papers. AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC publish them with mark schemes and examiner reports, for free. Nothing else on this page is as close to the real thing.
- Examiner reports specifically. Almost nobody reads these and they are the closest you get to being told what the marks are for.
- Physics & Maths Tutor. Past papers and questions sorted by topic across the sciences and maths, which is what you want when you need eight questions on one specific thing.
- ExamQA. Topic-sorted questions and papers in a similar vein. Worth a look if PMT does not cover your subject well.
Job two: getting it explained
Written notes and video. One-way explanation, produced once, for everyone.
- Save My Exams. Concise spec-mapped notes plus topic questions and mark schemes. The editing is the value: someone has decided what matters.
- Your textbook. Slower and more thorough. Better than its reputation for topics where you need the derivation rather than the summary.
- YouTube. Free and often outstanding, particularly for anything visual. The problem is search: you spend real time finding the good video, and the one that matches your board is not always the one that ranks.
- Your own class notes. Underrated, if they are complete. They match what your teacher will actually assess.
The shared limit is that none of these can tell when you have quietly stopped following. They were written before you arrived and they end the same way regardless of what happens to you in the middle.
Job three: making it stick
Retrieval practice. Being asked a question and having to produce the answer from memory is one of the few study techniques with strong evidence behind it, and these tools make it cheap to do a lot of.
- Seneca. Free for a large amount of GCSE and A-Level content, mapped to boards, with spaced repetition built in. Hard to beat at the price.
- Anki. Ugly, fiddly to set up, and the most powerful thing on this list if you stick with it. Best for vocabulary, definitions and anything with a clean question-and-answer shape.
- Quizlet. Faster to set up than Anki and friendlier. Good for the same jobs, with less control.
One warning. Retrieval practice only works on things you understand. Drilling a card you do not comprehend teaches you to recognise the card, and recognition collapses the moment the exam rephrases the question.
Job four: answering back
The one most students have no resource for. When you have read the note, watched the video, and still cannot follow the third line of the method, everything above is exhausted. What you need is something that can find out what you are missing and try again differently.
- A private tutor. The gold standard, and priced accordingly at roughly £35 to £60 an hour for A-Level. One hour a week, term time only.
- Your teacher, at lunchtime. Free, excellent, and constrained by the fact that they teach several hundred people.
- The friend who gets it. Genuinely effective, and it helps them too, since explaining something is the fastest way to find the holes in your own understanding.
- Lumi. An AI tutor you talk to, which draws the explanation on a whiteboard as it goes and will start again in a different way when the first attempt does not land. Available at eleven at night, which is when most people actually get stuck.
Putting it together
| Job | Examples | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Test yourself | Board past papers, PMT, ExamQA | Always. Start here to find out what is actually wrong. |
| Get it explained | Save My Exams, textbook, YouTube | You know which topic is weak and want it laid out cleanly. |
| Make it stick | Seneca, Anki, Quizlet | You understand it and need it retrievable in June. |
| Answer back | Tutor, teacher, Lumi | You have read it twice and still cannot do the question. |
A week that uses all four
- Monday: attempt a past paper section on the topic you are least comfortable with. Mark it brutally.
- Tuesday: take the specific things you dropped marks on and get them explained properly, until you can say each one back without looking.
- Wednesday and Thursday: twenty minutes of retrieval practice on the same material, plus whatever is queued from previous weeks.
- Friday: attempt a different past paper section on the same topic. If the marks moved, it worked. If they did not, the gap is further back than you thought.
It is unglamorous and it is the whole method. The resources matter far less than the loop, and the loop only closes if you have something for all four jobs.
What to take from this
- Most students own three resources that all do the same job and none that does the others.
- Past papers from your own exam board are the highest-value thing on this list, and free.
- Written notes are for organising knowledge. They cannot diagnose why you did not follow.
- Retrieval practice apps only work on content you already understand.
- The resource you use four times a week beats the better one you use twice a term.
Questions people also ask
Your own exam board's past papers page, and it is free. Everything else is a way of getting you ready to answer those papers.
Its past papers and topic question collections have long been freely accessible, which is why it is so widely used for the sciences and maths. Check the site for current arrangements.
No. Board past papers, examiner reports, Seneca's free tier and YouTube will cover a lot of ground without spending anything. Paid tools mostly buy you time and organisation.
Three or four, one for each job. Students who collect ten spend their revision time switching between tools instead of answering questions.
Earlier than feels comfortable. Waiting until you have finished revising a topic means you find out what you misunderstood at the point where there is no time left to fix it.