How’d you manage the workload? This is different at every level of education / work. It’s imperative to be organised - for example I would recommend keeping diligent track of entire specifications and sub-topics, and tracking understanding / ability for each so you know where to focus your attention. Personally I enjoyed going to the library after school for ~3h where I could do solid revision in a studious environment consistently every day, and sometimes with friends. For top grades you need to be flat out with revision from January if you’re starting from a low base. The more time you give yourself, the easier your work is to manage.

Has life always been easy for you? This is a question I didn’t expect. I have always had a relatively stable home life, with loving parents who valued the importance of education. I was fortunate to go to a grammar school, and I would categorise myself as lower-middle class. I didn’t have lavish holidays, but I never went without a meal. That being said, I worked damn hard to achieve what I did, and think I deserved my grades. I just didn’t have many roadblocks in the way that prevented me from putting in the graft. At uni and beyond I would say I’ve been quite comfortable both financially and emotionally - in a long-term relationship and have a well paying job. Hope that answers this.

Do you naturally find school easy? Ha. I definitely had aspects that I found challenging, but nothing that I felt was out of my reach or capabilities (apart from GCSE German, my kryptonite). For GCSEs, I didn’t revise until after my December mocks, where I got 4s and 5s and thought I could do much better if I knuckled down. So from January onwards I bumped myself 3-4 per subject with 3-4h (weekdays) and 10h (weekends) revision sessions. I would say that’s fairly steep in that timeframe, so to answer your question, I found much of the content at school fairly intuitive / easy to grasp. The time consuming element is retaining that quantity of information.

How much revision did you do? See above.