How to Use Corbett Maths, Maths Genie and Dr Frost Together

By Tracy Davis · Reading time: 9 minutes

It’s a Sunday night in early November. You’re at the kitchen table with a cup of tea you’ve forgotten about, three browser tabs open (Corbett Maths, Maths Genie, Dr Frost) and a worksheet your child handed you ten minutes ago, mumbling something about a test on Tuesday. Each site looks brilliant in its own way. Each site is also vast. You’ve no idea where to start, and your child has gone to watch something on a phone in a different room because this conversation isn’t going anywhere good.

You’re not alone in this: every parent I talk to has tried to navigate the free-resources landscape and walked away feeling more overwhelmed than they started. The good news is that all three of those sites are genuinely brilliant, and there’s a sensible way to use them together. Here’s the rough order I’d suggest and what each one does best.

What this article covers

• Corbett Maths: what it’s brilliant at
• Maths Genie: what it’s brilliant at
• Dr Frost Maths: what it’s brilliant at
• What each one doesn’t do well
• How to combine them sensibly
• What free resources can’t replace
• FAQ
• Tracy’s take

Corbett Maths: what it’s brilliant at

Corbett Maths, built and maintained by John Corbett, is the easiest entry point for almost any GCSE Maths topic. It’s organised around three things, all free:

• Topic videos: short, calm, no-frills explanations. Each one runs about 5 to 10 minutes. The whole syllabus is covered, including a strong set for Higher tier.
• Practice worksheets: printable PDFs with answers, one per topic. Tightly designed so a parent can hand one over and have a useful 20 minutes of work.
• 5-a-Day: a daily five-question mixed-topic sheet at three levels (Numeracy, Foundation, Higher). The single best small-dose practice habit in UK maths education, full stop.

The right way to use Corbett Maths is as the entry video plus the worksheet. If your child is starting a new topic, or doesn’t remember a topic the school did three weeks ago, Corbett’s video is almost always the right first move. Then the worksheet to check it’s stuck.

The 5-a-Day is the most underused tool on the site. Ten minutes a day, three or four times a week, builds maths fluency in a way no exam-paper marathon can match. Pick the right level (Numeracy for Foundation candidates not yet at Grade 4, Foundation for Grade 4 to 5 candidates, Higher for Grade 6+) and treat it as a daily habit rather than a piece of homework.

Maths Genie: what it’s brilliant at

Maths Genie, built by Adam Beasley, is the resource I’d point you to once your child has learned a topic and now needs to practise it the way the exam will ask. The site is organised differently from Corbett Maths:

• Grade-banded topic pages: every GCSE topic is sorted by the grade at which it typically appears. Need Grade 4 ratio questions? They’re on a Grade 4 ratio page, separate from the Grade 6 ratio questions.
• Past-paper questions: extracted from real exam papers and grouped by topic, with worked-solution videos for each.
• Mock papers: full-length mock papers at Foundation and Higher, with mark schemes.

The right way to use Maths Genie is as the practice and exam-style step, not as the teaching step. Most of the videos on Maths Genie are short worked solutions to specific questions rather than topic explanations; they’re brilliant once you understand the topic, less useful as a first introduction. If your child has watched a Corbett Maths topic video and done the worksheet, Maths Genie is where they go next to see what the question looks like in an actual exam.

Dr Frost Maths: what it’s brilliant at

Dr Frost Maths, built by Dr Jamie Frost, is the most pedagogically sophisticated of the three. It started as a teacher resource (the slides Dr Frost used in his own classroom) and has grown into a full self-marking online platform.

• Teaching slides: comprehensive, structured, exam-board-aligned (Edexcel particularly). Each topic walks through worked examples with the pedagogical care of a classroom teacher.
• Self-marking online questions: students log in, work through questions, and the platform marks them automatically. Built-in spaced revisiting of weak topics.
• Higher-tier depth: for the harder GCSE content (advanced algebra, circle theorems, vectors, the sine and cosine rules) Dr Frost is the strongest free resource.

The right way to use Dr Frost is as the depth resource for the topics that need it. For Foundation-tier basics, the slides may be over-pitched; your child doesn’t need Dr Frost’s classroom-quality teaching of “how to add fractions” when Corbett Maths can do that in five minutes. For the harder Higher-tier topics, though, Dr Frost is often the only free site that teaches at the right level.

What each one doesn’t do well

All three sites are honest about their limits if you look. None of them is trying to be a full structured course. What that means in practice:

Site	What it doesn’t do well
Corbett Maths	No structured pathway through the syllabus; you have to know which topic to study next. No diagnostic of where the gaps are. Limited feedback loop on practice (worksheets have answers but no error analysis).
Maths Genie	Limited teaching content; it assumes the topic has already been learned somewhere else. Less useful as a first encounter with a topic. No personalised tracking unless you build it yourself.
Dr Frost Maths	Steeper learning curve for the parent; the platform is built for teacher-led use. The free tier is generous but full features sit behind a school subscription. Slides can be too detailed for quick reference.

How to combine them sensibly

The mistake to avoid is trying to use all three for the same topic at the same time. That’s how you end up with the three-tabs-and-a-mug-of-cold-tea problem. A sensible week, focused on one topic at a time:

• Day 1: Corbett Maths video on the topic (5 to 10 minutes) + the matching worksheet (15 to 20 minutes). This is the teach-and-check step.
• Day 2 or 3: Maths Genie topic page at the right grade band (15 to 20 minutes). This is the exam-style practice step.
• Day 4 (Higher tier only, or harder topics): Dr Frost slides or self-marking questions for depth (20 minutes). Optional for Foundation work.
• Daily, separately: Corbett Maths 5-a-Day (5 minutes). Mixed-topic spaced practice that picks up the bits the topic work doesn’t.

Total time per week per topic: about an hour. Across a 60-topic GCSE syllabus, that’s a lot of topics, which is why the work doesn’t fit between September and May without a teaching framework underneath. But for individual topic gaps, a Corbett-Maths-Genie-Dr-Frost loop is a brilliant unit of practice.

What free resources can’t replace

Here’s the bit nobody mentions when they talk about free resources: the resources are excellent at delivering content, and they’re not designed to do the three things a structured course does for you.

• Diagnose where the gaps actually are. Your child doesn’t know what they don’t know. A Corbett Maths topic video on “fractions” doesn’t tell them they’re tripping up on fraction division specifically; a structured course’s diagnostic does.
• Tell you what to learn next. A 60-topic syllabus doesn’t sequence itself. Schools sequence it for you. A structured course sequences it. Free-resource patchworks don’t, and that’s where the eight months of effort go missing.
• Feedback loop on the wrong answers. Worksheets give you answers; structured courses give you “here’s why you got this wrong, here’s what the misconception is, here’s the right way to think about it”. The error analysis is the actual teaching.

This isn’t a criticism of the free sites; none of them claims to do these three things. It’s the honest description of where free meets a limit.

FAQ

Which one should we start with if we’re starting today?

Corbett Maths. If your child has a specific topic to learn, find the topic video and the worksheet. If they don’t have a specific topic, start the 5-a-Day at the right level today and make it a daily habit.

Is Maths Genie or Dr Frost better for Higher tier preparation?

For practice and exam-style questions: Maths Genie. For depth-teaching of the harder Higher-tier content: Dr Frost. They’re complementary, not interchangeable. A typical Higher-tier topic deserves a Dr Frost slide-read followed by Maths Genie exam-style questions.

What about Sparx Maths / MathsWatch / Hegarty Maths?

These are paid platforms (Sparx is school-only; MathsWatch and Hegarty are school subscriptions, individual access via parents is rare). If your child’s school uses one of them, that platform should be the first port of call because it’ll be aligned with the school’s teaching sequence. If they don’t, the Corbett-Genie-Frost loop is the strongest free alternative.

How much time per week is enough?

For a Year 10 or Year 11 student already going to school maths lessons, two hours of focused free-resource work per week is plenty. For home-educated students or adult learners doing the full preparation independently, five hours per week is the more realistic figure (see our 6-month adult study plan for the breakdown).

My child won’t watch the videos. What now?

Common, particularly for late Year 10 / early Year 11 when video-watching feels school-adjacent and that’s the last thing they want at home. Two things help. First, do the worksheets without the video and let the gaps show themselves; the video then becomes a tool to fix a specific gap rather than a chore. Second, watch one together if you can sit through it; a parent’s attention shifts the framing from “homework” to “shared activity”.

Are the answers reliable?

Yes, all three sites have well-established reputations for accuracy. Corbett Maths and Maths Genie have been used by hundreds of thousands of UK students for years; errors are caught and corrected quickly. Dr Frost is teacher-built and pedagogically careful. If you find an error, the contact pages on all three sites are responsive.

Is “free for parents” really free?

Corbett Maths and Maths Genie: yes, completely free. No accounts needed, no premium tier. Dr Frost has a free tier with substantial content; some self-marking features sit behind a school subscription, but parents can use the visible content without a login.

Tracy’s take

Free resources are friends. I link to Corbett Maths videos inside our paid courses because John Corbett’s videos are short, calm and on the right side of “explaining without patronising”. Maths Genie sits on my desk during the lead-up to exams every year. Dr Frost’s slides are where I send Higher-tier students for the topics that need real depth.

What they can’t do for you is sequence the syllabus, diagnose the gaps and close the feedback loop on the wrong answers. That’s the work a structured course does, and it’s the bit that turns “we’ve watched a lot of Corbett Maths videos” into “we’ve actually built the maths confidence to walk into the exam”.

If you’re using free resources well, you’ll know it: the worksheets get easier, the 5-a-Day scores creep up, the topic videos start to feel familiar. If you’re getting through a lot of resources without that sense of accumulating fluency, the missing piece is usually structure rather than more content. Our GCSE Maths course is built to fit alongside the free resources, not replace them: the diagnostic-to-practice rhythm with the free sites as the deep dive on individual topics.