What can I teach myself/read about prior to starting?

I can't really advise on Sociology, I have done it before but I did it under the old spec and it's changed now so .

All I can recommend, is if you know of the exam board you might wanna find their most recent version of a textbook (it will need to be 2015 as this will be the new spec!!!) and maybe consider giving it a quick read before starting.

As for Philosophy, looking into any of these beforehand will help:

- Hume's treatise of human nature - just the first 20 or so pages (as long as you cover the part where he mentions a shade of blue, you know you're reading the right part).
- Descartes, mainly his trademark argument and his method of doubt.
- Direct realism/indirect realism (bertrand russell)/idealism (berkely)
- Justified True Belief as knowledge, Gettier Cases, Reliablism, Infallibilism, Virtue Epistemology
- Innate ideas, hume's fork
- Definitions of analytic, synthetic, a priori, a posteriori, inductive, deductive, tautology, inductive leap
- ontological arguments - anselm's, descartes', malcolm's, plantinga's versions
- cosmological arguments - aquinas', descartes', kalam, william craig's versions
- god's qualities - omnipotence [paradox], omniscience, benevolence [euthypro dilemma].
- design argument

You can find Hume's book online so easily, as with all philosophy books pretty much. You don't need to be that prepared tbh, but if you want some advanced knowledge read through that PROVIDING the 2 topics your establishment are teaching are i) Philosophy of religion and ii) Epistemology, as I think(?) diff. places can pick diff topics.

And that's for AQA PURE philosophy (not philos & ethics)