About this book

What this book is

This is a complete GCSE Physics book for England. It covers Foundation and Higher tier, and it follows the specifications of AQA, Pearson Edexcel and OCR. You can read the whole book in a browser, and there is nothing to install.

Every section has three pages. Learn teaches the ideas and the method. Practise with help gives questions with hints you can reveal. Practise gives independent questions, with the answers at the end. Each chapter opens with a problem you can solve by the end, and closes with a Review.

Who made it

This book is part of Open.Textbook, an independent project by Leon Vaughan, who wrote and assembled it.

Answers are checked by a computer

The questions and answers in Practise come from one set of data. Before the book is published, a computer checks that data with SymPy, a computer algebra system. The check tests each step against the claim it makes, so a page cannot show an answer the check did not pass.

The check proves the mathematics. It cannot judge whether an explanation is clear. If a page is confusing, report it, even when the answer is correct.

Where the content comes from

The curriculum follows the subject content published by the Department for Education. That material is Crown copyright, and it is used here under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

The specification content, and any wording taken from a specification, belongs to the awarding bodies. AQA, Pearson Edexcel and OCR publish the specifications this book follows.

The formulae and tables in the Formulae booklet are the awarding bodies' own sheets. Ofqual decides which material the boards must provide.

The claims in this book rest on these documents:

These sources were last checked on 2026-10-12.

No awarding body endorses this book, and the Department for Education does not supply it.

Reporting a mistake

If you find a mistake, report it as an issue on the project's GitHub page: https://github.com/leonpjvaughan/Open.Textbook/issues/new.

That route needs a free GitHub account. The project has no email address, because it does not run a mail service.

In your report, say which page you were reading, what you expected, and what you saw. That is enough to find the mistake and fix it.

Licence

This book is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. That covers the text and figures written for this book. Material from the sources listed above keeps its own copyright and licence.