A mock is a rehearsal. It is sat deliberately early, before the course is finished and before anyone has revised properly, and its real job is to show which parts of a subject have not landed yet. That is information rather than a verdict, and there is time to act on it.
That first evening: what to say and what to leave until tomorrow
Results tend to come home at the worst possible moment. Everyone is tired, it is the end of a long day, and very little useful thinking happens in that first hour. A conversation started there usually turns into a conversation about how the conversation is going.
Say less than you want to. “Thanks for telling me” and “we can look at it properly tomorrow” will do. A teenager who has had a bad morning already knows it went badly, and being told so adds nothing they did not have.
Leave until tomorrow: the paper itself, any comparison with friends, and every question beginning “why didn’t you”. Those are reasonable questions. None of them is answerable at nine o’clock at night.
Worth saying out loud, once: a mock is sat deliberately early, before the course is finished and before anyone has revised properly. Sitting one badly is close to the normal experience of sitting one.
Find out where the marks went
A total is a summary, and summaries hide the part you can act on. What matters is which questions lost marks, because a question is specific enough to do something about.
Sit down with the paper when you both have the patience for it, and go through question by question. For each one that dropped marks, write down the topic rather than the question number. “Q7” means nothing in a fortnight; “simultaneous equations” means something.
Then sort what you have written into three groups, because the fix is different for each:
- Did not know it. Content that has not been learnt, or was learnt and has faded.
- Knew it, lost it anyway. Misread the question, missed a mark for working, ran a calculation wrong under pressure.
- Never got there. Blank or rushed questions at the end of the paper, which is a timing problem, not a knowledge one.
Most papers produce three or four clusters rather than twenty separate problems, and that is the useful discovery. A paper that felt like a disaster usually turns out to be two topics and a timing issue.
Pick one topic to fix first
Resist the urge to fix everything. A plan that covers every weak area at once tends to be abandoned by the second week, and nothing gets properly learnt.
Pick the single topic that cost the most marks and that comes up most often. Something that appears on every paper is worth more of the next fortnight than something that appeared once.
Our free topic review planner is built for exactly this: list the topics, and it spaces out when to come back to each one, so a topic gets revisited rather than crossed off and forgotten. If you would rather see the marks laid out first, the free marks tracker records what each paper scored and where the marks went, which makes a pattern across several papers much easier to see than a pile of them on the table.
A small plan for the next two weeks
Two weeks is long enough to shift one or two topics and short enough to actually finish. Aim for something that fits around school and still leaves evenings that are not revision.
A shape that tends to hold: three or four short sessions a week, each on one topic, each ending with a few questions done under something like exam conditions. Short and finished beats long and abandoned.
Our free timetable builder will lay that out across the fortnight. When it comes to practice, the free past-paper finder points to the real papers on each exam board’s own site, so you are working from the genuine thing rather than something approximate.
One habit is worth more than any plan: mark the work, and write down what was lost. A practice paper that is sat and not marked tells you nothing you did not already know.
When a gap will not shift
Sometimes a topic keeps costing marks however often it is revisited, and that is usually a sign that something earlier in the chain never quite landed. A second explanation from a different direction can be what moves it, and that is a reasonable moment to think about a tutor.
If you want to look, you can tell us what your child needs and see tutors who cover it. DBS status is shown on every profile, alongside the tutor’s rate. You pay that rate plus one transparent 20% Sessioned service fee, shown before you book, and many tutors offer a free intro call so you can see whether they get on before committing to anything.
Questions parents ask
Do mock results count for anything?
Mocks are internal school assessments, so they are not the qualification. Schools do use them for their own purposes, which can include setting, predicted grades and entry decisions, and that varies between schools. Ask yours how they use them rather than assuming.
Should we change the whole revision plan?
Usually not. A mock is one data point from one morning, and rebuilding everything around it tends to replace a plan that was broadly working with one that is simply newer. Change the parts the paper actually pointed at.
How long should a revision session be?
Short enough to finish. Many people find somewhere between twenty and forty minutes works before attention drops, followed by a real break away from the desk. What matters more than the number is that the session has a specific topic and a definite end.
My child does not want to talk about it at all. What then?
Give it a few days and come back to the paper rather than the grade. “Shall we work out which bits cost the marks?” is a much easier question to answer than “what happened?”, because it is about a piece of paper rather than about them.
Where should we start if we only do one thing?
Go through the paper and write down the topics that lost marks. Everything else on this page follows from that list, and without it any plan is guesswork.
More on the months ahead is in our guide for parents, and every free tool mentioned here sits on the revision hub alongside the GCSE revision hub.