What Is Root? The Free AI Tutor for GCSE, IB & A Level

It's 11pm, there's a mock on Thursday, and nobody has told you which of your nine subjects to start with.

Root is an AI tutor for GCSE, IGCSE, IB and A Level students that learns how your brain learns, inside a study system built entirely around you. Four modes work together: Planner Mode schedules your studying around your real week, Root Tutor teaches you one to one, Revision Mode brings your own past lessons back before exams, and Test Prep runs timed mocks marked the way an examiner marks. Every lesson you ever have is saved, summarised and ready to revisit, so nothing you learn disappears.

It's free to start, there's no card to enter, and the free plan doesn't expire. If you'd rather try it than read about it, start here; if you'd rather watch it teach first, see a real session.

If you've arrived from one of our revision guides, you already know the awkward truth every guide ends on: the techniques that work take real effort to organise. And if this sounds like ChatGPT in a school uniform, keep reading — the difference is the whole point, and we've written a full, honest ChatGPT vs Root comparison if that's your exact question.

Root at a glance

Why studying on your own feels so hard

When you revise alone, you're secretly doing four jobs at once:

• The teacher, working out how to explain each topic to yourself
• The examiner, judging whether your answers would actually score marks
• The planner, deciding at 10pm whether tonight is biology or the maths you've been avoiding
• The memory manager, tracking which topics are fading and need another look

The research covered across this blog, from active recall to spaced repetition, is clear about what works, and revising well is a learnable skill. But the same research is honest about the cost: the effective techniques take sustained effort and constant scheduling across every subject at once. Knowing that retrieval beats re-reading doesn't tell you which of forty topics to retrieve on a Tuesday in March.

That gap, between knowing what works and having the time and organisation to run it, is the gap Root exists to close.

The problems Root was built to fix

• "I revise but it doesn't stick." Re-reading feels productive and quietly fails, as the study techniques evidence shows. Root makes every session retrieval based, so the effort goes where memory is actually built.
• "I forget everything after two weeks." The forgetting curve is undefeated unless reviews are spaced, and spacing is a scheduling problem. Root does the scheduling.
• "I never know where to start." Deciding what to study is its own exhausting job, and vague plans feed procrastination. Root always has one specific next step waiting, so there's nothing vague to put off.
• "I'm stuck on tonight's homework." Photograph your working and drop it in. Root finds the exact step where it went wrong, then teaches you that step instead of doing the question for you.
• "I know the content but lose marks in exams." Knowing a topic and answering the way mark schemes reward are different skills. Root's examiner style marking trains the second one.
• "I panic in exams." Confidence is rehearsal, and exam stress shrinks when the paper holds no surprises. Root drills you in your exam's real format, marked the way it will really be marked, until it looks familiar.
• "I'm just bad at this subject." Usually false. Usually the explanations never matched how you think. An explanation tuned to your brain, tried a different way until one clicks, changes the story.

What Root actually is

Root is two things working together.

An adaptive tutor that teaches the way your brain thinks. Not a chatbot that answers questions, and not an app that just marks answers right or wrong. Root teaches: it breaks topics down, asks you questions instead of lecturing, and builds your understanding step by step, using the two most replicated findings in learning science, retrieval and spacing, on everything you study.

An AI manager of your academic life. You never need to work out what to study. Planner Mode schedules your sessions around your real week (keeping up with class, revision, the run-up when a test appears), messages you first instead of waiting for you to turn up, brings weak topics back at the right intervals, tests whether the knowledge actually stuck, and always has the next thing waiting.

The part most study tools get wrong is what happens after a session. On Root, nothing you learn disappears. Every lesson is saved as a unit: a quick summary of what you covered, the notes you saved, and the full conversation, ready to resume or revise any time. Finish a class in October and it's still there in March, when Revision Mode pulls it back out for exam season. The modes feed each other: a tutor lesson becomes a unit, Revision re-tests your units, Test Prep turns them into a timed mock, and the marked feedback goes straight back into a tutor session. That loop is the product.

It's built in the UK around the GCSE, IGCSE, IB and A Level curricula, and everything below is how those jobs get done.

How Root teaches: like a tutor, not a search engine

Ask Root about a topic and it won't dump an essay on you. It works the way a good private tutor works. A typical exchange looks like this:

You: I don't get how to solve x² + 5x + 6 = 0

Root: We'll get there, and you'll do most of it. Quick check first: if two things multiply together to make zero, what do you know about at least one of them?

You: it has to be zero?

Root: Exactly, that's the entire trick. So if we could rewrite x² + 5x + 6 as two brackets multiplied together, what would we know about each bracket?

• It builds understanding before answers. Root asks you to try, watches where your reasoning goes, and guides you to the answer rather than stating it. Getting there yourself is what makes it stick.
• It learns how you learn, and uses it. Say the textbook definition of photosynthesis has bounced off you twice. Root notices, parks the definition and tries it as a factory instead: light as the power supply, chlorophyll as the machinery. If the analogy is what clicks, Root remembers, and your next topic starts from how you think, not how the textbook does. Two students asking the same question get different lessons.
• It draws. Graphs, triangles, force diagrams, molecule structures, flowcharts: Root produces real diagrams inside the lesson, because some things should be seen rather than described.
• It marks like an examiner marks. Answer a practice question, or photograph your handwritten working, and Root marks it in the style your mark schemes reward, part by part, essays included. The feedback sounds like this: "In part (c) you found the gradient and then never used it, which is where both accuracy marks went. 7 out of 9. Want to try the missing line before I show you?"

The lesson happens in a real workspace, too: proper maths notation, a scratchpad, a built in scientific calculator, and a focus mode for when you need the world to go away. And this is why using Root isn't cheating: it won't write your homework for you. It makes you do the reasoning, the way a tutor would, because you'll be alone with the paper on exam day.

Don't take this page's word for any of it: watch a real session, or start your own. Free, no card, about two minutes.

Root vs ChatGPT: what's the difference?

The honest answer first: ChatGPT is free, genuinely useful, and plenty of students use both. But handing you an answer feels helpful and teaches you very little, and sixty messages of being taught beat unlimited answers you'll forget by Friday. Root is deliberately built to do what a chatbot doesn't:

• It teaches before it tells, guiding you to answers so the understanding is yours.
• It keeps a map of you. Root tracks which topics you've mastered, which keep slipping, and which explanations work on your brain, all organised around the exam you're sitting. No chat window does that job.
• It keeps your history. A ChatGPT conversation scrolls away; a Root lesson becomes a unit with a summary, your notes and the full chat, waiting for exam season. Ask ChatGPT to revise what it taught you in October and see how that goes.
• It knows your exam, so practice and marking match what your curriculum actually rewards.
• It runs the whole system around the conversation: the plan, the spacing, the testing, the tracking. A chatbot is a tool you have to wield well. Root wields the tools for you.

For how Root stacks up against everything else students use, see our honest rundowns of AI tutors for GCSE and study apps for A Level.

The four modes, and how they feed each other

• Planner Mode is where your term lives: it schedules your sessions around your real week and messages you first. It gets its own section below, because it's the newest and the biggest.
• Root Tutor is the classic lesson above: one to one teaching on whatever you're studying, in the way that works on your brain. Every lesson is saved as a unit you can reopen, resume or revise later.
• Revision mode works from your units, not generic content. Pick the past lessons you want back, or let it diagnose your weak topics across everything you've covered, and it builds a tickable plan and re-tests those topics until they hold. Revising for end-of-year exams means revising what you actually did in class, months later, without digging through a single old notebook.
• Test Prep mode generates a real timed mock in your exam's format, including interactive questions where you plot the graph or fill in the table yourself, the way the real paper asks. Feed it a past paper, PDF or photo, and it works from the real thing, marking question by question with what scored, what didn't, and why. Then take that feedback straight into a tutor session and fix the gaps while they're fresh.

Two more ways in, when you need them: Get Ahead mode teaches you the next thing in your curriculum before your class gets there, and School Project mode coaches you through projects and coursework against the actual rubric you're graded on, the way a teacher is allowed to: guidance on your own work, never writing it for you.

Planner Mode: the part that runs your week

Every study method on this blog works. The reason they fail is never the method, it's that each one hands you a second job. Spaced repetition asks you to track what's due across five subjects for months. A revision timetable asks you to re-rank every topic each week. Doing the studying is the easy half. Running the system is what people quit, usually around week two.

Planner Mode is Root doing that half.

You tell it which classes to manage and when you're actually free. From then on it schedules your sessions around your real week, keeps each managed class in rotation instead of letting the quiet ones rot, and when a test appears it builds the run-up backwards from the gaps it has already watched you make.

It also starts the conversation. A normal week looks like this:

Monday, 8:02 — Chemistry keep-up today, 20 minutes on bonding. It's due a visit.

Wednesday, 16:40 — You're drifting in maths. I've proposed an extra session Thursday, confirm?

Friday, 8:00 — Test in 9 days. Four sessions are ready for the gaps we found. First: the foundations that unlock the most marks.

Two things matter about those messages. Root sent them before you asked, which is the entire difference between a tutor you have to remember to use and one that runs alongside your term. And the middle one asks. Root proposes changes to your schedule and waits for you to press confirm. It never quietly rearranges your week behind your back, because a plan you didn't agree to is one you won't follow.

Every new account gets Planner Mode fully unlocked for five days with no card, so the first thing you can do is hand it a real week of yours and watch what it does with it.

After that it's part of Root's paid plans. Pro runs it across a few subjects you pick, which is enough when two or three are causing the trouble; on Scholar and above it holds your entire timetable at once, every subject, which is where it does its best work. The tutor, examiner-marked practice tests and revision mode stay free every week regardless.

• Spaced repetition without the admin. Root tracks every topic you've covered, notices what you keep getting wrong, and resurfaces the right material at the right time, mixing topics as it goes so you're always working on what needs work. The schedule most students can't sustain by hand simply happens.
• Everything you learn, kept. Every session becomes a unit with its summary, your saved notes and the full conversation. Your whole history of being taught is one tap away, which is exactly what you want it to be in exam season.
• Notes and flashcards from your own work. A notes hub for every unit: save explanations mid lesson or write your own, then turn any of it into flashcard decks you can drill.
• Built for week four, not just day one. Most study apps die in your downloads folder because every session starts with you deciding what to do. "I always give up after a week" is a design problem, so Root removes the decision (one next step, always waiting) and makes showing up worth protecting: weekly streaks with a streak shop, quests, XP, levels and badges, a mastery garden that grows as you learn, and friends you can add with a code so you're not doing it alone.

Is Root free? What the free plan includes

Root's free plan is a working study system, not a locked demo. Without paying anything, and without entering card details, you get every week:

• Real one to one tutoring: 60 messages from you a week, spread over as many sessions as you like, in 3 active units (a unit is one topic block, like Quadratics or Forces; finish one and start another whenever you like, so maths, science and a language on the go works fine)
• Exam style practice: 2 practice tests a week, generated for your curriculum and marked question by question
• Revision mode: 25 messages a week of sessions that diagnose weak topics and bring them back until they hold
• Your own materials: attach two documents per unit, like specs, class notes or past papers
• Notes and flashcards: save what you learn, drill it later
• A learning profile that never stops updating: Root keeps learning which explanations work on you the entire time

One thing worth saying plainly: every plan runs the same tutor model on the same settings, free included. There is no faster lane and no smarter lane. Pro raises how much you get and opens Test Prep, Revision Mode, Get Ahead and Progress — the answers themselves are the same ones the free plan gets.

New accounts also unlock a five day trial of the Pro plan as they get started, with no card required. When the trial ends you drop back to the free plan automatically and nothing is charged. Pro is $18.99 (about £15) a month when you want it: limits high enough to stop mattering, unlimited units, Test Prep and Revision Mode in full, and the progress dashboard with your hours, questions answered and mastery tracked skill by skill. But free is not a countdown: it stays free, every week, for as long as you want it.

Create your free account and Root starts learning how you learn from the first question.

Who Root is for: GCSE, IGCSE, IB and A Level

Root is built for secondary school students aged 13 and up: GCSE, IGCSE, IB and A Level. It covers the core academic subjects with teaching styles tuned to each, because how you learn quadratics and how you analyse an unseen poem are not the same skill. Tell Root your course and exam board, AQA, Edexcel, OCR, Cambridge, WJEC or your IB programme, and it teaches to that actual syllabus.

It fits whether you're rescuing a grade, sitting comfortably and pushing for the top, or already ahead and wanting to stay there. Root meets you at your level, because its whole job is knowing your level.

Is Root safe? A word for parents

The comparison you're probably making is with a human tutor, so here is the honest version. A good private tutor at £35 an hour, once a week, is over £140 a month, for one hour of help. A great one is worth it: they know your child's school, they can read a mood across a kitchen table, and no AI replaces that. Root's job is the other six days, at £0 on the free plan, any hour your child needs it.

The three questions parents actually ask. First, Root will not do your child's homework for them: it teaches with questions and makes them do the reasoning, because they'll be alone with the paper on exam day. Second, data: conversations are processed by Root's AI provider, OpenAI, to generate replies; they're not used to train AI models, by Root or by OpenAI, and Root never sells data. The full detail is in the privacy policy, and Root is for ages 13 and up. Third, screen time: the streaks reward showing up, not staying on. The weekly streak asks for 45 focused minutes across a week, not hours of scrolling. And because Root decides what to study next, "have you actually revised?" stops being your conversation to have.

If you're weighing up the options, our comparison of AI and human tutoring is written to be straight with you about both.

What Root is not

Root is not a human, and doesn't pretend to be: it can't know your school's inside jokes or sit beside you in the exam hall. Like any tutor, human or AI, it can occasionally get something wrong. It's built so mistakes get caught rather than believed: it works step by step, so a wrong turn is visible in the working rather than hidden in a final answer, its teaching is anchored to your actual curriculum, and practice is marked in the style real mark schemes reward. And it will never simply do the work for you, because handing you answers would be the one way to guarantee the grade doesn't change. For a balanced look at what AI tutors do well and where they fall short, our guide to AI tutoring doesn't pull punches.

Everything else on this blog still applies. You can run every technique here by hand, and every guide shows you how. Root simply removes the reason most students who know the techniques never benefit from them: the daily effort of being your own teacher, examiner, planner and memory manager, all before the actual studying starts.

Studying was never meant to be a solo job. Two minutes, no card: start free and let Root take its half of the job. Still unsure? Watch a real session first.