The Night Before: Last Minute Tips for AQA Paper 1H (23 May 2025)

The night before the exam... A room full of nervous students. What advice to you give?

It’s tempting to “throw the kitchen sink” and bombard students with everything they could possibly need to know. But at this late stage, I don’t think there’s much to be gained from this – what knowledge they have now is basically what they’ll have tomorrow morning, and anything else they might want to recap and revise they’ll be much better doing at home by themselves (or, preferably, they’ll get an early night and good sleep).

I’m also not a fan of predictions. It’s a serious risk that trying to second-guess the exam writers will send students off on the wrong scent.

Instead, I’ll suggest here a more targeted, concepts- and skills-focused approach. The brief resource to accompany this can be found here.

 

“Just Write More Essays”? Rethinking Strategies for Deliberate KS5 Writing and Exam Practice

With so little time to play around with in lessons, what can we do to help prepare students with their essay practice and exam preparation?

This year, rather than the blanket instruction to “just write more essays”, I’ve begun to hone in on particular elements of essay planning, writing, and the deconstruction of questions in order to make the best use of our remaining classroom time.

From Big Picture to Fragments and Back Again: Building Sequencing into KS5 Revision

If students don’t know the story of their course, do they really understand what they’ve studied at all?

This deceptively complex question has occupied much of my thinking as we approach A-Level revision season.

It’s tempting to view “knowing the story” as a question of “knowing stuff”. So long as students have revised the details, they know what happened overall. And if they know that, they therefore know the story.

But having lots of detailed knowledge does not necessarily mean students can zoom out and see how it all fits together. Plenty of diligent students end up mastering the finer points of their courses only to find themselves lost in a sea of information (or, to mix metaphors, unable to see the wood for the trees).

This was the situation one of our A-grade students found herself in last year. In a fit of anxiety, she asked me how on earth she could pull all the information together so she knew the sequence, chronology, and meaning of the many events she had studied. Thankfully, this student was self-aware enough to raise her concerns two months before the exam (rather than two days before). We had time to develop an approach. And, broadly speaking, it worked. She mastered the story of the course, was able to recognise and remember how everything fitted together, and got her grade A.

This post explores a series of solutions we developed ahead of last year’s A-Level exams and have continued to work on ahead of this year’s exams as I’ve gone back to refine revision strategies. In what follows, I’ll present this as an integrated approach that might also help your students as they approach final A-Level history exams. This fits into a series of posts (see here, here, and here) since last year on this blog which have explored revision strategies and techniques.

The Power of the Thesis, Part 2: Unlocking Historical Interpretations

In a post last week, I made that case that developing a thesis – one central line of argument – is crucial for students’ own writing at KS5.

Here, I’d like to pick up the idea of a thesis as a central line of argument to suggest how it can help students understand other people’s writing, in particular historians’ interpretations. I’ll make the case that, when faced with a historian’s interpretation of the past, students should focus on finding a central argument, and that, further, doing so is actually vital to them understanding that historian’s interpretation.

This post relates particularly to the treatment of interpretations in the AQA A-Level History Paper 1; but I hope the ideas it raises might be of some use to teachers teaching other exam board specifications and even at different key stages.

The Power of the Thesis, Part 1: Constructing Arguments in A-Level Essays

What is the point of an essay?

Over the past few years, I’ve asked A-Level students this question repeatedly before beginning to tackle exam skills, and received a variety of answers. They range from the plausible but vague (“to make a point”), to the bland or directionless (“to answer a question”, “to show what I know about…”) to the outright mercenary (“to pass exams”).

In fact, there is only one point to an essay. To make and test an argument.

The clue is in the name, even if we don’t know it. Etymologically, the noun “essay”, originating from the French essai, means “trial, attempt, endeavour”, as well as “short, discursive literary composition”. “Essay” also exists as a verb, meaning “to put to proof, test the mettle of”.

Given that this is the case, the most important part of any essay must be the thesis.

The Night Before: Last Minute Tips for AQA Paper 1H

The night before the exam... A room full of nervous students. What advice to you give?

It’s tempting to “throw the kitchen sink” and bombard students with everything they could possibly need to know. But at this late stage, there’s not much to be gained from this – what knowledge they have now is basically what they’ll have tomorrow morning, and anything else they might want to recap and revise they’ll be much better doing at home by themselves (or, preferably, they’ll get an early night and good sleep).

I’m also not a fan of predictions. It’s a serious risk that trying to second-guess the exam writers will send students off on the wrong scent.

Instead, I’ll suggest here a more targeted, concepts- and skills-focused approach. The brief resource to accompany this can be found here.

Giving KS5 History Students Ownership over their Revision: Some Thoughts and Strategies

Last week, I put forward some thoughts on approaching revision at KS5 (that post can be found here). This week, I’d like to share some DIY revision techniques that students can use to develop their own meaningful History revision materials in the run-up to their own exams.

A-Level Revision 2023-24: Thoughts and Responses

Revision is often the last thing we think about when planning a teaching unit. I remember vividly years where just getting to the end of a course felt like an achievement. But if students are to succeed in exams, a solid revision scheme is clearly important.

In his recent feedback webinar for the AQA A-Level History exam’s component 1, Keith Milne raised a number of useful and provocative points. Several things, in particular, struck me in relation to revision.

1. Students should revise with a purpose – it’s not enough just to memorise information, they need to know why they need that information.
2. Students must be able to use knowledge to reach a judgement, not just to demonstrate their memory of facts.
3. Students need to have clear strategies to answer the question asked in exams, something requiring broad evaluative and analytical skills.

Here, I’ll give a few thoughts on how we might approach these points, with some examples to illustrate, and draw out two key principles from each. These are drawn from my experience of teaching the AQA course 1H: Tsarist and Communist Russia and my revision resources, which are linked in full here.

Telling the Soviet Story Through Posters

Google Images is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s now almost embarrassingly easy to find a vast array of visual sources from a historical period. On the other, typing key words into a search engine and clicking on an eye-catching picture requires so little thought that it can lead us to overlook the true significance of a source.

Posters provide some of the richest visual material on the Soviet era, giving fascinating insights into the preoccupations and mindsets of Soviet political elites. We might be tempted to use visual sources as a way of easily conveying messages to students who are reluctant, or lack the skills or confidence, to read extended historical texts. But these sources can also give what has been called a “sense of period” by highlighting the nature of how messages were conveyed at the time.

This post provides an explanation and outline of one approach to using posters from the Soviet period, c. 1917-1964, as a tool to (re-)tell the story of the period.