What's new in FRCR Vault, September 2026: flashcards, quick-reference tables and a referral month

Bookings for the February 2027 sitting open on 22/09/2026 for resident doctors and members, and on 29/09/2026 for everyone else. If you are sitting in February, this is the week your revision plan becomes real. Here is what has changed in the vault since the August sitting. Everything below is in every pass. Nothing costs extra, and nothing renews.

Flashcards: write it, flip it, grade it

Every one of the 2,500+ questions in the bank can now be run as a flashcard.

The front of the card is the stem on its own, with ruled lines underneath. You write the answer you would give in the exam, then flip. The back shows the correct option, the explanation and the source quote with its citation, alongside what you wrote, so you mark yourself honestly rather than nodding along. Grade the card as got or missed and the next one comes up.

Grading feeds the same spaced-repetition queue as practice sessions. A card you get right moves up a box; a card you miss goes back to box one. There are five boxes, reviewed after 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days, and nothing is ever scheduled past your exam date.

To start, open Flashcards from the rail (or the Flashcards tab on your phone). The setup page lets you pick a site and a question type, then a deck of 10, 20 or 40. Cards due for review come first, then ones you have not seen. Reckon on about half a minute a card, so a deck of 20 fits into a coffee break. Space reveals the answer when your cursor is out of the writing box, and the keys 1 and 2 grade the card, which makes a desktop session very quick.

Flashcards suit the recall half of revision: dose-fractionation schedules, staging thresholds, trial names and their headline results, the facts the SBA papers assume you know cold. Practice sessions and mocks remain the place for the synthesis the exam actually tests, and both feed the same queue.

Quick-reference tables: breast, lung and prostate

Pass holders now have a Quick reference section with one page per tumour site. Three sites are live: breast, lung and prostate. Each page has:

• Radiotherapy selection and dose: the indication, the selection rule, the target and technique, the dose and fractionation, and what accompanies it, with the preferred regimen marked where a decision group has more than one option.
• Organ-at-risk constraints: the organ and contour, the constraint, the regimen it applies to and its priority.
• Staging and risk groups: shown in both TNM editions, with the edition the RCR lists for your sitting shown first.

Every clinical field on every row is tied to a passage in its source, and the source is named beside the row, so a table is never the end of the trail. The sources are the ones the bank already uses: NICE, the RCR dose-fractionation guidance and consensus statements, the AJCC and UICC staging publications and the primary trials.

The tables are deliberately partial. They cover what the exam blueprint asks for at the level of a reference sheet, not everything a site protocol contains, and systemic treatment appears only where it determines the radiotherapy regimen. Where a table is still partial, the page lists what is missing rather than filling the gap from memory. More sites are in progress.

Refer a colleague, get a month

Your account page now carries a personal referral link. Every colleague who buys a pass through it adds one month to your access, applied automatically at the moment they pay. No codes, no cash, no limit on how many.

Copy the link from the Refer a colleague section on your account page and share it wherever your cohort talks. If your pass has lapsed when a referral comes through, the month starts from that day, so the link keeps working after your exam.

Also new since August

• Passes instead of subscriptions. Access is one payment for three months (£39) or six (£69). Nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel. If you subscribed before 11/09/2026 the founding prices (£29 and £55) are applied automatically at checkout.
• Question types. Every question is now tagged as management, radiotherapy, diagnosis, staging, toxicity, evidence or science, and the practice and flashcard setup pages filter by type.
• A hard mock. Alongside the full and half papers there is a hard set built from the questions the cohort most often gets wrong at first attempt.
• A new app shell. A collapsible rail on desktop and a tab bar on phones, a practice setup page, and a dashboard rebuilt around what to do today.
• The February 2027 plan. A week-by-week revision schedule from now to the sitting, weighted to the blueprint, at frcrvault.com/revise/february-2027.
• Add to home screen. The site can now be added to your phone's home screen as an app icon from the browser's share or menu button, which is the quickest way into a flashcard deck on the ward.

What is next

The next quick-reference pages are in progress, and the bank continues to be revised as guidance moves. If you spot something wrong in a question or a table, the report button on the question or the contact page reaches the person who wrote it, and every report is checked against the cited source.

If you are sitting in February and do not yet have a pass, passes start at £39 and the sample question shows you exactly what pass holders see before you pay anything.