A structured plan from today to your A-level exams
Dr Lavan Ganeshkumar, PhD · updated 10 September 2026
A revision plan is not a timetable. A timetable says what you do on Tuesday. A plan says what has to be true by March, and works backwards from there.
Almost every plan a student writes fails, and it fails for the same two reasons: it counts weeks that do not exist, and it has no room to catch up. Both are fixable before you write a single entry.
Start from the exam date and count backwards
Write down your first exam date. A-levels usually begin in mid-May. Then count the weeks between now and then, and take out the ones you will not work: half terms you will actually take off, Christmas, the week you have mocks in a different subject.
The number that is left is smaller than you think, and it is the only number that matters. Planning against an imaginary thirty weeks is why plans collapse.
Divide the course, not the calendar
List every topic on your specification. Not chapters of a textbook, the actual specification points, which is what the exam is written from and what your board publishes.
Now divide those topics across the weeks you counted. If it does not fit, that is the plan telling you something true, and it is much better to learn it in September than in April.
The two-year shape, if you are in Year 12
Year 12 is not a warm-up. Roughly half of what you sit in the final papers is Year 12 material, and it is examined two years after you learn it, which is exactly the interval at which unrevisited material disappears.
So the Year 12 plan has two jobs running at once: keep up with what is being taught, and revisit what was taught a month ago. The second is the one everybody drops, and it is the reason Year 13 feels like starting again.
The one-year shape, if you are in Year 13
You are consolidating two years of content while still being taught new material. The plan has to carry both, and the Year 12 half is the part that has decayed.
A useful order: revisit a Year 12 topic, then the Year 13 topic that builds on it, then exam questions spanning both. Papers routinely combine them, so revising them separately trains a skill the exam does not test.
Build in the catch-up week
Every fourth week should have nothing new in it. Not as a rest, as a buffer.
You will get ill, or have a fortnight of coursework, or simply lose a week. A plan with no slack turns one bad week into permanent failure, and that is the moment most students abandon the plan entirely rather than adjust it.
Then let it change
A plan written in September and followed rigidly until May is a plan that ignored eight months of evidence about what you actually find hard.
Review it monthly. Topics you keep getting right need less time than you allocated; the two or three that keep failing need more. The plan should end up looking quite different from how it started, and if it does not, it was not being used.
Common questions
What plan do I need to make for my A-levels?
Start from your first exam date and count backwards, removing weeks you will genuinely not work. Divide your specification points across the weeks that remain, leave every fourth week empty as catch-up, and review the plan monthly so time moves toward the topics that keep failing.
What should I be doing between now and my A-level exams?
Three things at once: keep up with what is being taught, revisit earlier topics on a spaced schedule before they fade, and work exam-style questions on material you covered weeks ago. The third is the one that reveals what has actually stuck.
When should I start revising for A-levels?
Revisiting should start within weeks of first being taught a topic, not in the spring. Spaced repetition needs gaps between repeats, so a plan that begins in April has no room left for the spacing that makes it work.
How do I plan Year 12 revision when the exams are two years away?
Roughly half of your final papers is Year 12 material examined two years later, which is exactly the interval at which unrevisited content disappears. So Year 12 needs two things running together: keeping up with teaching, and revisiting what was taught a month ago.
Trayna does this automatically. You enter your subjects, your exam dates and how long you have each day, and it builds the route from today to those exams, then adapts it as you go. Maths follows Edexcel; Chemistry, Physics and Biology follow AQA.
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