Not necessarily. The internet is full of great revision notes. However, particularly if you are aiming for an A*, having your own textbook may still be worthwhile. Textbooks are more comprehensive than revision guides which often overly compact the content leaving out exam-relevant detail. Textbooks also appear to be proofread more throroughly, so are less likely to have mistakes in them. Most importantly though, they often contain examples and case studies as they could come up in exam questions too. 

If you are unsure which textbook to buy, your teacher will be happy to give advice. I am of course more than happy to give you advice in my lessons too and am also intending to publish a blog article with my own recommendations soon. So stay tuned!

If cost is an issue, check out:

• School library copies

• Older students

• Second-hand websites

Taking notes during lessons is important. It helps you to start building a first memory layer, keep track of which content you have covered in lessons and helps you decide what to look at during your independent study time. When you find yourself primarily copying things down from powerpoint slides or whiteboards instead of participating in the lesson though, pause and think how that could be improved. Ideally, use the first 1-2 months of your course to optimise your note taking.

In ideal world, your school would be providing you with either the slides or a booklet which you then can supplement with your notes from class. If that is not the case, you can annotate a good set of revision notes of which there are plenty online. For Biology, I personally recommend the ones from Physics and Maths Tutor which are free and detailed, without including to much unnecessary detail.

Important to note though is, that no matter how detailed your notes from a lesson are, they should not be your sole resource for preparing for tests. At least not if you haven’t gone over them with a textbook or trusted online resource. Also they are not a replacement for doing practice questions. Also see How do I make the most of my independent study time.

There are plents of free resources out there, so many that one can feel quite overwhelmed and there is a danger of wasting time trying to figure which ones are reliable. 

Here are the ones I recommend to my students:

• Revision notes: Physics and Maths Tutor
• Youtube Channels: Free Science lessons, Miss Estruch for exam tips (though it can be hard sometimes to navigate her video content and as some videos are overlapping in content)
• Exam questions: Phyiscs and Maths Tutor for all examboard, Access Tuition for AQA
• A word on using AI: For straightforward questions, tools like ChatGPT can sometimes help clarify steps — but do always verify explanations against your textbook or mark scheme. AI explanations are not infallible.

If you are struggling to find your way alone with just digital resources, this is where 1 to 1 tuition can really help. In my lessons, we spend a significant amount of time working through exam questions together and it's important to me to guide students using prompts rather than simply giving answers, because that active thinking process strengthens retention far more effectively.

In summary, free resources are powerful and you should make use of them as much as you can. However, resources support only learning. They don’t replace it.

Flashcards can be effective when used in the right way, but let’s get the uncomfortable truth out of the way: Creating the flash cards is doing little to nothing with regards of helping you to retain knowledge. If you know you are unlikely to actually use them, there are much more valuable thing you can do with your time. So making them only makes sense if afterwards you are using them regularly for testing yourself. There are some great techniques of how to best use them, for examples keeping separates piles depending on how well you remember their content so that you get to see the ones you are less sure about more often.

Quality matters too. Flashcards are definitely great for memorising definitions. This may be the only way you use them. If you want to go beyond that, orient yourself on exam questions that come up frequently copying the markscheme answers on to your flashcard. This can be a great way to make more of practicing exm questions.

Also consider pre-made online flashcards. My hot tip here is the website called Brainscape where you can access flashcards of former students. 

I do strongly recommend it.  From the wording of definitions, required practicals, depth of detail and style of questions, you find a lot of information in there. While there is a large overlap in content between exam boards, each specification has its own structure, emphasis and quirks.

So, the very first thing I recommend you do at the start of Year 12 is download your specification and save it somewhere easily accessible. And then use it regularly to:

• Cross-reference it with what you are covering in lessons.
• Check off topics as you complete them.
• Look ahead so you know what is coming next.

I find that my A* students are always superaware of where they are within the specification. They understand that the specification is the document the exam paper is written from — not their textbook, not their teacher’s slides.

You can download your specification directly from your exam board’s official website.