Core Revision
Revising around clinic and a toddler: the parent’s AKT playbook
Dr Victoria HammondCo-Founder & Lead for Educational Design · 4 min read
Published 31 May 2026 · Reviewed 31 May 2026
Here is the plan most revision guides quietly assume: clear your evenings, find a quiet desk, settle in for a focused two-hour block. If you have a young child and a full clinical week, you already know that block does not exist — and waiting for it just means the revision never starts.
So the first move isn’t a better timetable. It’s accepting that your revision will be built from the gaps you actually have: the fifteen minutes before the household wakes, the nap that may or may not happen, the train in, the ten minutes while the pasta boils. Those gaps feel too small to matter. They aren’t — if you set things up so they’re usable.
Five moves that make small gaps work
1. Default to questions, not reading
Reading needs a run-up; questions don’t. A single AKT question with its explanation is a complete, self-contained unit of revision you can finish in two minutes and walk away from. Make question practice your default activity, so any gap — however short — is immediately usable without “getting back into it” first.
2. Keep it on your phone, queued and waiting
The barrier to using a ten-minute gap is friction: finding the laptop, opening the book, remembering where you were. Remove it. Have your question bank open on your phone so the next question is one tap away. The plan that survives contact with a toddler is the one that needs no set-up.
Sitting the AKT? Try twenty questions free.
Twenty original AKT questions in the exam's 80/10/10 split: sixteen clinical, two on evidence-based practice and two on organisation and management, with the reasoning after every one and a marked report. Free, no card and the first five are open to all.
3. Let clinic be revision
You’re already doing the highest-yield thing there is — seeing real patients. After a consultation that touched something you’re shaky on, take sixty seconds to look it up properly and lock in the guideline point. A handful of these a day turns your working week into spaced, contextual revision you didn’t have to schedule.
4. Plan in topics, not hours
“Revise for two hours tonight” is a promise to a version of your evening that won’t happen, and breaking it just adds guilt. “Get through atrial fibrillation this week” is a target you can chip at in any gap, in any order. Measure progress in topics covered, never in hours sat down.
5. Protect one slightly-bigger block a week — and guard it
Micro-sessions keep you moving, but you do need the occasional longer run for mocks and weak spots. One protected block a week is realistic; daily ones usually aren’t. Negotiate it explicitly with whoever you share the load with, put it in the diary, and treat it as the fixed point everything else flexes around.
- 2 minutes: one question + explanation.
- 10 minutes: a short block of questions on one topic, on your phone.
- 60 seconds, post-consultation: look up the thing that caught you out today.
- Once a week: one protected, guarded block for a timed mock.
Drop the idea that “proper” revision only counts if it’s an hour at a desk. I passed exams in the cracks of days that had no spare hour in them, and so have most of the parent-trainees I’ve worked with. The guilt — that you’re shortchanging the revision when you’re with your child, and shortchanging your child when you’re revising — is the real tax. Naming it helps. You are not doing it wrong; you are doing it in the only way it can actually be done.
Dr Victoria Hammond · MBBS, BSc (Hons) · parent and GP Partner
And if it doesn’t go to plan this sitting
Life with a small child is unpredictable, and sometimes the exam lands in a bad month. That’s part of why we built our “no failure tax” promise: if you don’t pass, email us within 30 days of your result and we’ll extend your access free of charge until your next sitting. For the MSRA, that means no interview or offer in your first-choice specialty (terms 4.4). Revising as a parent is hard enough without a penalty for circumstances you couldn’t control.
One last thing. Sustainable beats heroic. A plan you can keep up for months in fifteen-minute pieces will get you further than a punishing schedule you abandon in a fortnight — and it leaves something in the tank for the people you’re doing all this for. A revision approach, not a substitute for personalised educational advice.
