Top Tips is a new series from Mr Pearce, Deputy Head of UCAS, Politics Teacher and our Apply Plus programme lead, featuring helpful tips and hints ahead of the upcoming exam season.

With exams on the horizon, it is crucial to manage your time effectively: this is a busy, high-stakes work schedule. As an old teacher of mine, a former intelligence officer in the British army, used to say, "Knowledge is power: if you know that an ambush waits around the next corner, you can avoid disaster before you get there." More precisely, knowledge plus action is power: if you can predict a problem before it arrives, you can take action to ensure it doesn't knock you off balance. 

Here are two questions to help you take control of your time: 

1. What are your personal hurdles? 
   Every Norwich School pupil is a toughened veteran of the exam process, having successfully navigated Trinity Term examinations since your youngest years with us in the Senior School. As seasoned pupils, you know what your time-management hurdles are. You know what is most likely to trip you up, unnerve you, distract you from your goals; you know which study habits you find most difficult. Do you find it hard to make and stick to a revision plan? Do you get distracted easily by friends or phones? Do you find it hard to concentrate in the afternoon? The key thing here is to realise that you mostly know all these already. That's why we call them hurdles rather than ambushes: we can see them in advance as we stare down the track, and that empowers us to take action to avoid getting tripped up. 
   
   
2. What has been most helpful for you in the past? 
   Given that you’ve been here before, you also have experience in overcoming these hurdles – and you can build on that. What has helped you most in previous exam campaigns? Maybe your "most helpful thing" is using a revision countdown timer, putting your phone in another room when you revise, or taking regular breaks. Maybe it’s setting aside 10 minutes a day simply to review your revision plan and make tweaks to ensure you’re covering the ground. Maybe it's ensuring that after every 25 minutes of revision, you take a 5-minute break where you stand up and walk around. Perhaps it's dividing your day into three slots – morning, afternoon, and evening – ensuring that you work hard in two of these slots but take the other one completely off to rest and have fun doing something you really enjoy.

In exam term, there's a massive emphasis on structure, routine, and self-discipline, but mastering your time management is not just about working more and more hours – it’s about ensuring those hours are highly effective. Likewise, it’s important to realise this isn't just about making time for work: it's about making time for rest, play, and fun too, because the reality is that rest and work are two sides of the same coin. Hard work is required during exam term – no champion becomes a champion by working "slightly hard, when they feel like it". Getting through enough work is really important – good revision really does take a lot of time, and you’ve a beautiful summer ahead of you – but please don’t stop looking after yourself and doing other things! Rest and work: two sides, one coin. 

In short, this is what you have been training for: you are in pole position to master your time-management this exam season. All those years of end-of-year exams mean you can look back now and 1) identify your hurdles, and 2) remember what’s helped you jump them in the past. You have stacks of experience in studying, revising, and balancing hard work with great activities and good rest: now it's time for all that hard-won experience to carry you through.