Revision on a level politics

hey there are you doing the new Edexcel specification ?

I'm not sure what exam board you're doing, but the Pearson textbook for Edexcel is by far one of the best textbooks I have used. I'd also recommend finding other resources to supplement it, such as Heywood's 'Political Ideologies' for when you revise/learn core and non-core political ideas. There's also an open-access textbook on UK democracy by LSE Press which has applicable content for UK Politics and Constitution.

In terms of revision, recall is always a great method. Print out a copy of the specification and try and recall all of the relevant information for each part. Use your notes/textbook to fill in gaps and keep going until you know everything. Once you know the basic level content, you can go onto essay plans which you can write up on flashcards and do the same recall method.

For examples, Google is your friend. You need to keep updating your examples so that they are super fresh. Keep up with the news in the UK and US (if you're doing US) and note down anything pertinent (CMR resignations, relative power of the Commons, divisions within the Tory party and US govt shutdown are quite relevant atm). Also, use Twitter to follow news outlets in UK/US, UCL Constitution Unit, Trump, Democratic Audit etc because you can always find really useful stuff for your essays.

Hope this helps!

Hello, yes im doing edexcel a level politics new specification from 2017 onwards. Thank you so much i am going to buy the edexcel book but i just wanted to ask since politics is very heavy content how did you manage to memorise it all and when did you start?

The basic content should come quite naturally because it's quite common knowledge. You'll never forget the structure of UK government, or the qualities of the UK Constitution, for example. The best way to then go about revising and remembering is to then build up example-based knowledge around interpretations and debates (it is paramount that you spend lots of time on the areas of the specification where the debates arise), and have a general 'set' of evaluation techniques to use in conclusions and throughout your essays, usually significance, ranking, impact upon wider political context etc. This will narrow the amount you need to focus upon, but also allows to draw commonalities as to the examples you are using which have multiple applications. Ofcourse there will be some examples you will need to learn as required by the specification (GE differential turnout and voting stats, work of 2 PMs, pressure groups), but for the rest try and find some good multi-functional examples.

I am really bad and haven't started revising UK yet, but the earlier you start the more information/statistics/thinkers you can bring into your long term memory and hence the better.