About StudyVault
A free, board-aware GCSE revision site built by a teacher. Honest about how it's made and what it's for.
Who runs StudyVault
StudyVault is built and run by StudyVault Education Ltd, a private limited company registered in England and Wales (company number 17490559, incorporated on 30 September 2026). Its registered office is 71–75 Shelton Street, London WC2H 9JQ.
Tom Shaun
Founder and Director
Tom is a qualified, practising History teacher and the AI Champion at Unity College in Burnley. He builds and runs the platform, plans and checks the content, and looks after the partnerships with schools.
The company has no other employees at present. Schools work with us as partners: their teachers tell us what they teach, and they review the lessons we build for them before pupils see them.
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 card, no ads, and nothing to sign up to before you start. A free account (an email address and a password) is optional; it saves your subjects and progress so they follow you from phone to laptop. Schools can subscribe for content tailored to their specific text choices, fieldwork sites, and teaching priorities, with students signing in through the school's own Google or Microsoft accounts. Either way, the goal is the same: get the right content in front of the right student at the right point in their revision.
How it started
StudyVault started as a single-subject History site for Tom's own students at Unity College. It grew into something that now covers most of the GCSE curriculum across every major exam board. There's still no team behind a curtain — one teacher, the AI tools we're open 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:
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.
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.
Hero images are photographs from Unsplash photographers (credited where required). Narration is generated by Microsoft's MAI text-to-speech voices (some older lessons still use Microsoft Azure's earlier voices). Lesson podcasts, short explainer videos and the one-minute Shorts are generated by Google's Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM). None of this is voice-cloned from real people. Interactive practice widgets on lessons where a misconception is best untangled by doing are built one at a time and checked by a teacher.
School-bespoke content is reviewed by the school's teachers before going live. Every lesson, free or bespoke, is fact-checked against its specification before it is narrated, and in September 2026 every unit on the site went through a second, independent check. Bug reports still drive fixes — the bug button on every page is read, and many lessons are better because of it.
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 nearly 5,000 lessons spanning every GCSE subject and exam board. But specific things are deliberately not AI:
- Hero images are real photographs from real photographers (Unsplash). Diagrams that exist on Unity-bespoke lessons are AI-generated and clearly marked as such.
- Mark schemes use StudyVault's own rubric (Mastering, Secure, Developing, Emerging) — not exam-board language.
- Practice question wording is original — no past-paper text, no spec codes in student-facing copy.
- Decisions about what to teach, what to emphasise, and how to structure a unit are still made by a teacher, then handed to the AI as a brief.
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.
As little data as possible
No ads, no tracking across sites. Without an account nothing about you is stored; with one, only what's needed to save your progress.
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.