For parents & carers
Which GCSE revision website should I get for my child?
There is no single best GCSE revision website for your child. The useful question is which job you need doing. BBC Bitesize and Seneca cover content for free. Exam-board past papers, or a practice tool that marks as you go, turn that reading into exam performance. Start with whatever the school already uses, add one source of questions, and leave the rest until those two are a habit.
Last updated 19 August 2026 · Written and fact-checked by the GCSEwiz team
Start with what school already gave them
Most Year 10 and 11 students already have a login. Seneca is set as homework in a huge number of English secondaries; some departments use Tassomai, Educake, Kerboodle, MathsWatch or GCSEPod. If the school has already chosen a content platform, paying for a second one that does the same job is how families end up with three unused subscriptions and a teenager who still has not done a past paper.
Ask one question: “what does school actually want you to open?” Then make that the default, at least until it is a habit. Adding tools is easy. Dropping tools they have not used is how revision gets started.
Two jobs, not one mega-app
Revision websites fail parents when they are sold as a complete solution. They do two different jobs, and almost none of them do both well.
| Job | What “good” looks like | Usually free |
|---|---|---|
| Learn the content | Clear explanations matched to the exam board, short enough that a tired Year 11 will actually finish a topic. | BBC Bitesize; Seneca’s free tier; the department’s own platform |
| Practise answering | Questions in the shape of the real papers, with a mark and an explanation on the same day - not a pile of PDFs waiting for you to mark. | Exam-board past papers; Physics & Maths Tutor; Corbettmaths / Maths Genie for maths |
The paid question, asked honestly
Paid platforms earn their fee when they do something the free stack does not: questions that meet the student at the level they are actually at (so they are neither bored nor drowning), marking that does not wait for a teacher, and a next-topic decision so the evening does not start with a blank stare at a revision list. Those are real conveniences. They are not a secret syllabus.
A tutor at typical advertised rates of £30–£60 an hour is a different purchase again: worth it for one stuck subject, expensive as a replacement for daily practice. If the problem is “they will not open anything”, a website will not magically create the hour. Structure at home still does more than a new login.
Where parents actually hear about these tools
If you are choosing from a WhatsApp group, a Mumsnet thread or a “best GCSE revision websites 2026” article, you are seeing the same five names on rotation: Bitesize, Seneca, Save My Exams, Physics & Maths Tutor, and whichever app paid for the listicle. The Student Room and Reddit’s r/GCSE are where students compare the same tools, usually more bluntly. None of those threads can know your child’s board, their mock result, or whether school already set Seneca.
Treat every list as a menu, not a shopping list. Pick the content source school already uses, pick one way to practise questions, and give that pair a half-term before you add anything else. The students who do well are almost never the ones with the most logins.