The GCSE Physics required practicals, and how to revise them
Ask a Year 11 what they've revised and you'll hear about forces, electricity, maybe waves. You will almost never hear "the required practicals", even though they're some of the most predictable marks on the paper and the board publishes a list of exactly which ones will be tested. It's the closest thing GCSE Physics has to a set of questions handed out in advance, and it's routinely the last thing anyone looks at.
In this guide
What "required practical" means
Each exam board names a specific set of experiments that every student must carry out during the course. Measuring the specific heat capacity of a material, investigating resistance in a circuit, finding density, looking at how a spring extends under load: that sort of thing. The list is public, it's short, and it doesn't change year to year.
Your child has done them. They happened in a lab, probably in a rush, quite possibly with equipment that didn't behave. And then the class moved on to the next topic, the practical went in the book, and it was never mentioned again.
That's the problem in one sentence. The practicals feel like something that happened rather than something to learn, so they sit outside the revision plan entirely.
They turn up on both papers
A common assumption is that practical questions live in one place, so if your child has skimmed them once they're covered.
They aren't gathered into a section. Practical skills can be assessed anywhere across either paper, bolted onto whatever topic the question happens to be about. A question on energy can turn into a question about how you'd measure something and what would make your measurement unreliable, with no warning that this is now a practical question.
Which means the marks are spread thinly across the whole paper, and thin spreading is exactly how students end up losing a chunk of marks without ever feeling like they had a bad question.
What examiners actually ask
Here's the part worth understanding, because it changes how the revision should work.
Examiners don't ask about the interesting bit. They rarely ask what the result was, and they never ask whether it was fun. What they ask about is the reasoning around the experiment: which variable you changed, which you measured, which you kept the same and why. How you'd know if a reading was unreliable. What could have gone wrong, and whether the error would push the result up or down. How you'd improve the method if you did it again.
That's a narrow, repetitive set of question types. Once your child has seen half a dozen of them, the shape becomes obvious, and it stays obvious whichever experiment the question is dressed up as.
The corollary is a relief for most families. Your child doesn't need the equipment, the lab, or a repeat of the experiment. Everything the exam wants can be revised at a kitchen table with an exercise book and a pen.
What I look for first: can your child say, in one sentence each, what the independent variable was, what the dependent variable was, and what the control variables were? If those three don't come quickly, no amount of remembering the equipment list will save the question, because every follow-up depends on them.
Revising one your child did a year ago
Most required practicals happen in Year 10. By the time revision starts in earnest, some of them are fourteen months old and the memory is a vague impression of a Bunsen burner.
Start with the book. The write-up is in there somewhere, and even a scrappy one carries the method and the results table, which is most of what's needed. If the book has gone missing, and books do go missing, the board's specification lists every required practical by name and the school's revision material will usually have a summary sheet.
Then work one at a time rather than skimming all of them. A single practical done properly, where your child can produce the method and explain the errors, is worth more than a nodding acquaintance with the whole list. Ten minutes each, spread across a fortnight, covers the lot.
Why writing beats rereading
Rereading a method feels like revision. It's warm, it's quick, and it produces a strong sense of "yes, I remember this."
That feeling is unreliable, and it's especially unreliable here, because a written method is easy to follow and hard to reproduce. The exam doesn't ask your child to recognise a method. It asks them to write one.
So the drill is simple. Close the book. Write the method out from memory, including the variables and one thing that could go wrong. Then open the book and mark the gaps. The gaps are the revision; everything else was already known.
You can run this without understanding a word of the physics, incidentally. You're checking whether what your child wrote matches what's in the book, which is a comparison task, not a science one. It's the same approach that makes past papers work, applied to a smaller and much more predictable target.
Common questions
Which required practicals come up most often in GCSE Physics?
The list is fixed and published by each exam board, so there's no guessing involved. Across a run of past papers, the ones involving measurement and calculation tend to recur most, because they let the examiner test method and maths in one question. Rather than gambling on which appears, it's faster to work through the board's own list, since it's short and finite.
Are required practicals examined in both physics papers?
Yes. Practical skills can be assessed anywhere on either paper rather than being gathered into one section, which is part of why students underestimate how many marks they account for. A practical question can appear attached to any topic, so treating them as a Paper 1 concern is a mistake.
How can a student revise a practical they did over a year ago?
By writing the method out from memory rather than rereading it. The exam asks students to produce a method, identify variables and explain errors, so revision should ask the same. Once it's on paper, they check it against their book and mark what they missed. Repeating the equipment list from memory is worth far less than reconstructing the reasoning.