Two kinds of practice
Topic questions are every past-paper question on one topic, pulled out and put together, say, from the easy ones at the front of a Foundation paper to the nasty ones near the end of a Higher. They are for learning. You do them straight after you’ve been taught something, while it’s still fresh, and you find out quickly whether you can do it the way the exam asks. You can easily find them on websites like Physics And Maths Tutor and School.Ninja.
Full papers are the real thing. For AQA GCSE Maths that means three papers, each 1 hour 30 minutes and 80 marks, each worth a third of the grade. Paper 1 is non-calculator; Papers 2 and 3 allow one. Foundation covers grades 1 to 5 and Higher covers 4 to 9. Full papers are for testing: mixed topics, no warning of what’s next, and a clock. They build the stamina and the judgement (which question to skip, when to move on) that topic practice can’t.
You need both, at different times.
A term-by-term plan
Year 10, all year. After each topic in class, do a handful of past-paper questions on it within the week. Ten minutes, three to six questions, marked with the mark scheme. This is the habit that pays off most, and almost nobody does it.
Year 11, autumn. Go back over Year 10 topics the same way, by topic, starting with the ones that felt shaky. Then, a couple of weeks before mocks, sit one full paper at home under timed conditions. Mocks usually fall in late November or early December, with a second round for many schools in February or March.
After the mocks. Don’t just look at the grade. Go through the paper and write down the topic of every question where marks went missing. That list is your revision plan, and topic questions are how you work through it.
Spring term. Move to roughly one full paper a week, rotating calculator and non-calculator. Mark it properly, then go back to topic questions for anything that cost you more than a mark or two.
The last six weeks. Full papers in exam conditions, the whole 90 minutes, no phone. Keep a few of the most recent papers back for this stretch.
One warning about recent papers. AQA lets teachers see a paper soon after the exam, but it only goes on the public website about a year later. That is why schools like to use the newest papers for mocks. If you’ve already done every recent paper at home in October, your mock tells your teacher very little.
What one topic looks like, bottom to top
Here are three real AQA questions on percentages. Each is worth 3 marks.
- June 2024, Paper 1 Foundation (non-calculator): “Work out 35% of 1200”
- November 2024, Paper 3 Foundation: “The original value of a car is £8600. The value of the car decreases by 15% in the first year then 10% in the second year. Work out the value of the car after these two years.”
- June 2024, Paper 2 Higher: “The mass of an iceberg is 2 200 000 kg. This value is a 12% reduction from the original mass of the iceberg. Work out the original mass of the iceberg. Give your answer in standard form.”
Same topic, same marks, very different questions. The first is 420. The second wants two multipliers in a row: 8600 × 0.85 × 0.9 = £6579. A student who takes 25% off in one go gets £6450 and drops marks. The third is a reverse percentage: 2 200 000 ÷ 0.88 = 2 500 000 kg, which is 2.5 × 106.
The examiner’s report on that iceberg question is worth reading: “Many used 1.12 and some who identified 0.88 used it incorrectly, with a common error being 0.88 × 2200000.” Many also forgot, or didn’t know how, to give the answer in standard form. Working through questions like these in order, one topic at a time, is how a student moves from the first kind to the third.
Mark it like an examiner
A mark scheme is not an answer key. AQA’s schemes give method marks (M1) for a correct approach and accuracy marks (A1) for the right answer, so a student who sets up 2 200 000 ÷ 0.88 correctly and then slips on the button-pressing still picks up marks. Seeing that changes how students write. They start showing working because they can see it is worth something.
Then read the examiner’s report for the paper. They’re short and come out for every series. On a June 2024 question about bus passengers rising by 3% and then 8%, AQA wrote: “This was very well answered with most students using multipliers 1.03 and 1.08 and making a decision at the end. A few increased 90000 by 11%.” Multipliers, in other words, and a clear decision at the end.
Free places to find questions
- Maths Genie: videos and worksheets for every topic, organised by grade, plus past papers. The core is free.
- Corbettmaths: famous for 5-a-day, a short daily sheet at five levels from Numeracy to Higher Plus.
- Physics & Maths Tutor: questions by topic for AQA, Edexcel and OCR.
- Dr Frost Maths: a bank of more than 48,000 exam questions with auto-marking; individual students can use the core features free.
- Save My Exams: polished topic questions and model answers, mostly behind a subscription.
- School.Ninja: like SaveMyExams, but free!
- AQA itself, where most papers stay up for three years.
One last thing
If your child has sessions with one of our tutors, ask them to bring a marked paper, not a blank one. A paper with the lost marks circled shows a tutor in five minutes what would otherwise take three sessions to find. The hour then goes on the questions that matter.
