Year 10 is the year to build habits, not to revise like it’s Year 11

Hey, this is an advertorial guest post from Jonathan Ellis, Chief Product Officer at Cognito. Natalie was kind enough to let me write something for Plutonium Sox with a few tips for parents of Year 10 students. If Cognito ends up being useful for you, you can check it out here. We’ve got a pretty generous free tier, but if any of the paid stuff looks worthwhile, Plutonium Sox readers can get 20% off with the code PLUTO20.

Year 10 is a really good year to get to grips with. GCSE content properly starts, but the pressure hasn’t landed yet. That’s exactly what makes it valuable. It isn’t the year to treat like the exam year. It’s the year to build the habits that make Year 11 much easier when the pressure does arrive.

If your teenager gets three things in place during Year 10, Year 11 becomes a much calmer, less panicked year for everyone.

1. Little and often

Twenty minutes a night of light review across subjects, done consistently from Year 10, is worth more than a three-hour block once a fortnight. The brain retains information you revisit at spaced intervals; it forgets information you cram once and never see again.

Even ten minutes each evening puts your teenager ahead of most of the class. The goal isn’t intensity, it’s regularity. If they build the habit in Year 10 of looking at their book most evenings, they walk into Year 11 already fit for what’s coming.

2. Use resources aligned to the specification

Not all revision resources are equal. A lot of what’s out there is generic, technically about “GCSE Biology” but not written for the specific exam board and specification your teenager is sitting. That means their revision covers content they don’t need and misses content they do.

One of the biggest wastes of Year 10 revision time is drilling material that isn’t on your teenager’s paper. Before they start using any book, app, or website, check that it’s mapped to their specific spec (AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, CIE, and so on). Cognito is built this way, with notes, video lessons, quizzes and past papers all sorted by board and spec, but the same rule applies to whatever tool they end up using. Past papers from your teenager’s specific board are the most spec-aligned resource of all, so use those regularly.

3. Effective techniques (active recall over rereading)

If you look at what your teenager calls “revising”, it often follows a familiar pattern. Highlighting a page, reading it over, highlighting more, closing the book. It feels productive because they’ve been at their desk for an hour. But research on how memory works keeps landing in the same place: Rereading is one of the least effective things you can do.

What works instead is active recall. Close the book, try to remember what was in it. Write down what you can, test yourself with flashcards, do a past paper and mark it, explain a concept out loud from memory. It feels harder because it is harder, and that’s the point.

Flashcards are one of the easiest ways in. Your teenager can make their own on paper, use a free app like Anki or Quizlet, or use pre-built decks like the ones on Cognito that map to their exam board. The tool matters less than the habit of testing rather than reviewing.

The point of Year 10

If your teenager builds those three habits in Year 10, a bit of review most nights, using spec-aligned resources, and testing themselves rather than rereading, Year 11 will feel much less overwhelming when it lands. They’ll walk into revision season already knowing what works for them, already fit for it, without needing to invent a system from scratch under time pressure.

You don’t need to treat Year 10 like an exam year. Just help them build the habits now so Year 11 doesn’t have to be one big panic.