A-level Sociology Revision Timetable

The revision planner below allows you revise each of the major topics across the entire A-level sociology syllabus three times before the first sociology exam.

In a recent blog article ex Harrow headmaster Barnaby Lenon advised that GCSE students should revise each topic ‘at least three times’:

“You need to revise all your work at least three times before the exam… it is the coming back to the notes three or more times that drives the information into the long-term memory”

This is something I agree with… and if mere GCSE students are being advised to revise everything thrice, it figures that if you’re revising for A-levels, you should up your game from this, so the timetable below schedules ‘3 rounds’ of revision which finish on the Saturday before the first A-level sociology exam (2018 dates), allowing you to get in a final ‘fourth round’ immediately before each exam:

General advice about using the above A-level sociology revision timetable

Remember (as if you’re going to forget!) to add in your other A levels to your own personalised revision timetable! This is just sociology
Before you begin revising, make sure that you ‘know what you need to know’: the above sub-topics are derived from the AQA’s specification (click here for the AQA’s specification and here for my much prettier summary of it).
Obviously if you’re not doing ‘global development’ as the option on paper 2, then swap the global development topics above for whatever topic you’re doing.

Each sub-topic is not the same length, and they will take you different amounts of time to revise effectively. Education policies is much bigger than say ‘the Marxist perspective on crime’ for example.
The amount of time you will need to spend on each sub-topic depends on how well you personally know each sub-topic.
There is considerable overlap between some of the sub-topics, so you may find some of these quite quick to revise.

NB – It’s not the point of this post to offer advice on how to revise, I’ll cover that in a future post, but you should be aiming to some ‘testing yourself’ and exam practice in most of your revision sessions.
Of course ideally, you would have already revisited most of the first year A-level content (usually education, research methods and families) at some point in the second year, and so if you follow this revision schedule, then you will actually have revised some of the sub-topics more than four times.
‘R and R’ stands for ‘rest and relaxation’, or ‘rock and roll’ (2) – take your pick, but I recommend you have at least one day off a week! I thought ‘Friday’ was more student centered than Sundays. If you don’t like either version of R and R, you can always go Nandos instead.