Building better revision for every student
UpGrades exists because every student deserves revision tools that actually work. We combine learning science with adaptive technology to help students study smarter, close knowledge gaps faster, and walk into their exams with genuine confidence.
Our mission
UK students deserve revision tools that adapt to them, not the other way around. Too many students revise the wrong things in the wrong order because no one has shown them where their actual gaps are. The students who can afford tutors get personalised guidance. Everyone else gets textbooks and hope.
We're building UpGrades to close that gap. Our platform gives every student — whether they're self-studying at home or part of a school-wide deployment — the same quality of adaptive, personalised revision. For schools, that means Pupil Premium students get full Pro access with no visible distinction, and teachers get the data they need to intervene early rather than after the damage is done.
This isn't about replacing teachers. It's about giving students a system that knows what they don't know, and making sure that no student's exam results are limited by their access to resources.
Our approach
UpGrades is not a content library. It's a learning system built on decades of cognitive science research. Every feature we build is grounded in evidence about how students actually learn and retain information.
Three principles drive everything we do:
Retrieval practice
Actively recalling information produces significantly stronger long-term retention than passive review. Roediger & Karpicke (2006) demonstrated that students who practised retrieval outperformed those who re-studied, even when the re-study group spent more total time with the material. Every UpGrades session is built around active recall, not rereading.
Spaced repetition
Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve research showed that without spaced review, students forget up to 80% of new material within a week. UpGrades schedules revision at increasing intervals — topics you've mastered come back less frequently, while topics you're struggling with return sooner. This moves knowledge from short-term to long-term memory.
Adaptive gap detection
Dunlosky et al. (2013) found that practice testing and spaced practice are the highest-utility study strategies — but only if students are practising the right things. UpGrades diagnoses each student's specific knowledge gaps and adapts difficulty in real time, so every question is targeted at the boundary between what they know and what they don't.
What we cover
85+ subjects across 6 exam boards and 4 qualification types. Every question maps to a specific specification point — students practise exactly what they'll be tested on.
Exam boards
AQA
Assessment and Qualifications Alliance
Edexcel
Pearson Edexcel
OCR
Oxford, Cambridge and RSA
WJEC
Welsh Joint Education Committee
Cambridge International
Cambridge Assessment International Education
Edexcel International
Pearson Edexcel International
Qualification types
GCSE
The foundation qualification for Year 10–11 students across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
A-Level
Advanced-level qualifications for Year 12–13 students preparing for university entry.
iGCSE
International GCSE specifications for students in international schools and British schools overseas.
International A-Level
Internationally recognised A-Level qualifications from Cambridge and Pearson Edexcel.
For schools
UpGrades isn't just for individual students. Schools deploy the platform across year groups to gain real-time visibility into independent revision — something that's traditionally been invisible to teachers.
CSV upload for accounts, classes, subjects, and Pupil Premium status. Set up an entire year group in minutes.
Real-time visibility into what students are revising, how often, and how well they're performing.
Silent Pro access for PP students with no student-facing distinction. Exportable Ofsted-ready reports.
High-level views of school-wide progress for governors, trustees, and multi-academy trust leadership.
Data & privacy
We take student data seriously. UpGrades is built with privacy by design — not as an afterthought.
Full compliance with UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.
Student data is processed and stored on UK infrastructure.
Student data is never sold, shared with advertisers, or used for marketing.
Get in touch
Whether you're a student, parent, teacher, or school leader — we'd love to hear from you.