Teaching and Learning

Boosting the Grade at GCSE English: It’s Never Too Late 

Help GCSE English students who believe it's too late find the marks they're missing, with exam skills that can be taught in weeks.

  • 1 hour 4 minutes
  • 6 modules
  • 1 CPD hour
  • Certificate

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14 days free, then £70 a year or £7 a month.

What you'll learn

  • Diagnose where individual students are losing marks on each paper
  • Translate the assessment objectives into language students can act on
  • Teach students to choose short quotations and analyse single words
  • Plan intervention sessions around one specific gap at a time
  • Give families simple ways to help, like testing quotations at home

About this course

Some students reach the final months of GCSE English sure they're "just not good at English". Years of feedback have told them what they can't do, and another general revision session won't change their mind.

You can give them a sharper way in. You'll see where marks are won and lost across the language and literature papers, and how to turn the assessment objectives into plain words students can aim at. From there you can teach them to pick short quotations and say something about them rather than retell the text. Students who spend too long on a four-mark question and never reach the big one are giving marks away, and you'll know how to stop that.

There's also advice on adapting all of this for students with SEND, and on simple ways families can help at home, like asking their child to explain a quotation over tea.

  • For early career teachers, middle leaders and 3 other roles. Post-16 and secondary. England only.

6 modules

Open in order

  1. The Assessment Landscape

    12 min
  2. Mindset and Motivation

    8 min
  3. What Examiners Actually Want

    11 min
  4. Exam Technique: Language and Literature

    18 min
  5. Intervention, Revision and SEND

    13 min
  6. The Bigger Picture

    5 min