About StudyVault

A free, board-aware GCSE revision site built by a teacher. Honest about how it's made and what it's for.

What StudyVault is

StudyVault is a revision site for GCSE students. It covers most subjects across AQA, Edexcel, OCR, and Eduqas/WJEC, with content shaped to each board's specification. Lessons combine readable explanations, retrieval practice, knowledge checks, flashcards, and audio narration. Practice subjects (Maths, English Language, Languages, parts of Geography and Science) replace passive reading with question-by-question drills graded Bronze, Silver, Gold.

The free tier is genuinely free — no sign-up, no card, no email. Schools can subscribe for content tailored to their specific text choices, fieldwork sites, and teaching priorities. Either way, the goal is the same: get the right content in front of the right student at the right point in their revision.

Who built it

StudyVault is built and run by Tom Shaun, a teacher at Unity College in Burnley. It started as a single-subject site for his own students and grew into something that now covers most of the GCSE curriculum across every major exam board. There's no team behind a curtain — just one teacher, the AI tools we'll be transparent about below, and the bug-report button at the bottom-right of every page.

How content is made

Every subject is built from the official specification published by the relevant exam board. The spec defines what students must learn; everything else is designed around it. Here's the actual pipeline:

1
Plan from the spec

An AI agent reads the exam-board specification and produces a unit-by-unit, lesson-by-lesson plan. Whitelisted external sources (exam board teacher support, examiner reports, EEF research) inform style and emphasis — never the content itself.

2
Draft each lesson

Per-lesson AI agents write the article, knowledge checks, flashcards, practice questions, and a glossary. Every claim is grounded in the spec or the agent's training; no past-paper text and no exam-board language is reproduced.

3
Add the trimmings

Hero images come from Unsplash photographers (credited where required). Narration is generated by Microsoft Azure's text-to-speech voices. Lesson podcasts are generated by Google's NotebookLM. None of this is voice-cloned from real people.

4
Review

School-bespoke content is reviewed by the school's teachers before going live. Free-tier content ships marked pending review — it's available for students immediately, but iteratively polished as bug reports come in. The bug button on every page is the main way we improve.

What's AI, what's not

We won't dance around this. AI does the heavy lifting on text generation — that's the only way one teacher can build coverage across roughly 1,990 lessons spanning every GCSE subject and exam board. But specific things are deliberately not AI:

What we believe

Free is free

Revision shouldn't be a luxury. The core content is free for everyone, no account required.

Spec-led, not opinion-led

Every lesson maps to the actual exam specification. We're not guessing at what's important.

Honest about AI

AI helps us cover ground. We're explicit about where it's used and where it isn't.

Teachers still matter

StudyVault doesn't grade you, know you, or care about your progress like your teacher does. Use it alongside, not instead.

Mistakes get fixed

If you spot something wrong, the bug button takes a screenshot and sends it to us. Reports are read.

No tracking

We don't collect personal data. Your progress lives in your browser, not on our servers.

Want to dig deeper?

The FAQ covers the questions students and parents most often ask, including the ones about AI we've heard pushback on. The privacy policy spells out exactly what is and isn't collected. And anything else — a subject we haven't built, a bug, a question — there's a "Request a subject" panel on the homepage and a bug button on every other page.