Think back to your revision classes last spring. How many students came? How many sat passively while you went through exam questions and techniques? Were the participants the students who really needed to revise or just the conscientious ones who attend everything? And what good did it do them?

That last question is the most important and I would contend that it probably didn’t do them much good at all; it didn’t make the difference that such an intervention is supposed to make.

Teachers are caught in a bind. They run revision classes and students do well, so they repeat the process the following year. And if students don’t do well, teachers will tend to put on even more classes for the next cohort.

As a head of department, I tried hard to move away from this pattern, despite feeling guilt that we weren’t working as hard for the children as other teams. But I trusted my staff to complete the curriculum within the school day. Why would an extra 30 minutes after school make a difference between grades anyway? It’s an insult to the professionalism of teachers to suggest that it would.

The few catch-up sessions we did run were for genuine cases of need, not for lazy students who had done nothing for two years.

What I did do was to introduce subject “surgeries”. These involved students coming along to an after-school session with a question about a particular part of the course, which they could then discuss with their teacher. I believe 20 minutes of individual support about something a student actually needs help with is more valuable than 90 minutes of listening to a lecture on something they already understand.

Rewarding hard work

When I had wider responsibility for teaching and learning, I rolled this idea out across other subjects. Many teachers found it genuinely useful and it also took the pressure off them. But we had to look more broadly at the problem, too. This was not a case of rolling back from helping with revision; it was about doing it in a smarter way, and helping the students to be smarter about it as well.

One such example involves exercise books. Students should be revisiting their notes during the course of the year and making additional notes. These notes should then be used for revision. After all, it doesn’t make sense for them to buy a revision guide when they could be looking back over their own notes. Not only is there a financial cost but this also establishes a pattern of learning that fails to encourage students to be reflective about their work.

By the end of Year 11, I would like to see exercise books with key information highlighted and which have extra notes written in the margin - on pages that are dog-eared and obviously well used.

This may require a culture shift. Have a think about your school: is hard work explicitly rewarded? How much attention does sporting success get compared with the praise given to children who always do their homework. Of course, praise should be given for lots of aspects of school life, but working hard and getting good marks should definitely have a higher profile. Only then can you begin to change the ethos of the school so that more children will want to work hard and become responsible for their own learning. Then, when students get to Year 11, they will be in a better position to revise effectively - they will know what they don’t know and be able to take steps to remedy this.

Also, we need to explicitly teach children how to revise. That should happen in key stage 3. Again, it goes back to independent learning. More students than ever are going on to post-16 education; those passive revision puddings are going to find the jump much harder than the children who have learned to work under their own steam.

But my problem with revision sessions is not just about students and their learning. It’s about us as teachers, too. Many schools will hold Inset training on work-life balance and mindfulness. Good. But then those same schools will assert the importance of revision sessions and untargeted intervention. Increasing the workload of staff and lengthening the school day for students is not a route to reducing stress - quite the opposite.

In the end, it boils down to the student sitting in the exam hall with a pen and paper: it’s the teacher’s job to train them for this situation. The ability to cope with exams comes from having developed resilience and independence, not from being a passive sponge in endless revision sessions.

Fiona Folan is a former head of department and school leader

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