Start with the exam board’s own website
Before anything else, know which board your child sits: AQA, Edexcel (also called Pearson), OCR, WJEC, or SQA in Scotland. Every one of them publishes, free, on their own site:
- Past papers, going back several years
- Mark schemes, showing exactly how marks were allocated
- Specimen papers, for the current specification, useful when a specification has recently changed and there aren’t many real past papers yet
- Examiner reports, published after each series
That last one is worth pausing on. Examiner reports are written by the people who actually marked the exam, and they say plainly where students lost marks, what common misconceptions showed up, and what a good answer looked like. Almost nobody reads them, which is exactly why they’re valuable, they’re free insight most students never use.
One practical note: boards don’t keep every paper up forever. Some subjects’ papers get withdrawn from public view after a few years, often for copyright or security reasons. Maths and science papers tend to stay available longer than other subjects, but it’s still sensible to download and keep what you need rather than assuming it’ll still be there next term.
Where third-party sites fit in
Once the official papers are covered, third-party sites are useful for topic practice rather than full papers.
Free and worth using:
- Physics & Maths Tutor (PMT), a long-running, ad-supported library of past papers and topic questions across maths and sciences
- Corbettmaths, videos and worksheets for individual maths topics, useful for drilling one weak area rather than sitting a whole paper
- Maths Genie, similar to Corbettmaths, free and maths-specific, with topic questions and worked examples
Paid, and worth knowing about:
- Save My Exams, a subscription platform with revision notes and exam questions written by teachers and examiners, organised by exam board and specification. It adds structure on top of past papers rather than replacing them, useful for a student who wants notes written to the exact spec rather than generic ones.
None of these replace actual past papers under timed conditions. They’re best used to fix a specific weak topic before going back to a full paper.
The mistake that wastes the most time
Revising from the wrong board, or an outdated specification, is far more common than it should be. A generic “GCSE Maths revision” search returns content mixed across AQA, Edexcel, OCR and older specifications, and the topics, the exact wording of a mark scheme, and even how a question is phrased can differ enough to matter. Before using anything, check it’s labelled for the right board and the current specification, not just “GCSE Maths.”