It's time to revise your study habits

The year-end parties are over, and pupils are looking ahead to the less pleasurable prospect of exams. Diana Hinds reports on revision courses that can help to boost those all-important grades

As the new term gets under way this week, many pupils will have more on their minds than what they got for Christmas. Exams – GCSEs, AS levels, A2s – are suddenly not far away. Mocks, for many, are imminent, while others will be digesting results from the end of last term. Some will even be looking ahead to Easter and wondering if they should be booking themselves in to a revision course.

Twenty years ago, revision, by and large, was something you did by yourself, shut up in your bedroom with chocolate biscuits and ever-expanding sheaves of notes. But alongside the growing pressure for results has developed an increased emphasis on "study skills": the importance not only of knowing your subject, but of knowing how to prepare and package what you know to do well in exams. Some pupils can do this unaided, but most need to learn.

Research by the University of Strathclyde has shown that structured help with GCSE revision – study skills classes, mentoring, and especially Easter revision courses – can lift pupils' results by an average of three-and-a-half grades across their subjects, or by one extra pass at A to C grades.

An increasing number of schools now run their own Easter revision courses. Anne Welsh, the head of George Stephenson High School in North Tyneside, was persuaded by the Strathclyde research to set up GCSE revision for a week in the Easter holidays, and has now extended this to revision for year nine SATs, using money from the Government's standards fund.

"It's a very lonely business revising for exams," Ms Welsh says. "A course gives them a structure, and the support of teachers and peers that is not there if they are revising on their own."

The course is strictly voluntary, although staff try to encourage students they think would benefit most. "Our internal research shows that students who come on the course invariably do slightly better than those who don't," says Ms Welsh.

Where schools do not offer such courses, help is at hand from tutorial colleges around the country – provided, of course, that parents are able or willing to pay fees of between £300 and £800 a week. Many tutorial colleges report increased take-up of their revision courses in the past few years, particularly at AS-level and GCSE, and some are recruiting as many state-school as independent-school pupils.

"More parents now recognise the importance of good GCSE results when it comes to applying to university," says Gareth Thomas, the Easter revision course director at Davies Laing and Dick tutorial college in London. "The more competitive university courses will be looking at the number of As and A*s a student has."

Revision courses have in the past tended to attract students wanting to meet the GCSE requirements to carry on with their chosen A-levels in the sixth form. But Bridget Norton, the registrar at d'Overbroeck's in Oxford, says the college is now enrolling a higher proportion of very able students on its revision courses: "Students who are trying to be sure they get their A*s". The courses are also proving useful for A2 students needing to retake AS-levels, she says.

A good revision course will cover key topics, boost confidence and help students to understand what the examiners look for – a process of "fine tuning", according to Sarah Alakija, the GCSE course director at Mander Portman Woodward in London.

Sheena Patel, 16, who is studying for A-levels at La Swap Sixth Form College in Highgate, decided last year, together with her parents, that she needed some extra help with GCSE dual award science to raise her biology grade from the C she got in mocks. She signed up for a week at Davies Laing and Dick, and went on to gain two grade As last summer. She now plans to enrol for another Easter revision course, in biology and chemistry AS-levels. "Revising at home is a lot harder because there are always things to distract you," she says. "If you're on a course, there is the teacher and the other pupils, and it's not boring. In a small group of eight, you get a lot more individual attention than you do at school in a class of 30."