Lydia Ridding, English Subject Advisor

As many experienced colleagues will know, students who find themselves in a GCSE ‘resit’ class very often have a tricky relationship with English already. Not achieving a Grade 4 in school can make students feel like they have failed; they may not be on their chosen programme of study because they don’t meet the entry requirements, which can be dispiriting. 

Motivating students not just to want to pass the course but to enjoy English (perhaps for the first time in their lives) is your biggest challenge, but often the most rewarding aspect of the job.

The start of term

You may be under pressure to assess students in time to decide whether to enter them for the November exams, but insisting that students complete written assessments during your first lessons is unlikely to get the best out of them. In fact, this approach may make students fear your classroom more and have a negative effect on attendance from the start. 

A more productive induction period could be spent listening to your students and getting to know more about their experience of English. Gentle enquiries about their likes and dislikes based on English at school can prove cathartic for them and instructive for you. What other courses are they completing? Do they have a part-time job? Do they have any hobbies or interests?

Building confidence, one day at a time

Be prepared to start slowly and build up to GCSE level work. It’s important not to overwhelm students with full exam papers from the start of the year. A skills-based approach is best and can help students to tackle assessment objectives without even realising they are doing so. 

Rather than confronting them with extracts of unseen texts and asking them to identify the language and structure choices made by the writers, start by asking them to think about the overall purpose of the text and who the target audience might be. We have plenty of example exam-style non-fiction and fiction extracts for you to use on Teach Cambridge. 

Don’t feel that you need to treat every extract as a full exam paper. Be flexible in your approach and focus on making students familiar and comfortable with facing unseen texts. Read the extracts aloud for students to follow along or go round the room and each read a sentence. If reading aloud feels like too much pressure at the start, reading in pairs or groups of three works well too. Initially, ask students to identify one thing they have learned from the text and one thing they don’t understand. This paves the way for honest conversations about how to deal with complex material in exam conditions.

Differentiation is more important than ever

Despite the aim of getting all students to pass with a Grade 4, the ability range in GCSE English classes can be wide. In my last year of teaching, it was not unusual to be supporting students who have achieved a Grade 1 at school, alongside others with Grade 7 targets. 

You may have students who experienced extenuating circumstances during the summer exam period at school and were unable to complete their exams, in which case, a November resit may be appropriate for them. Anyone in this or a similar situation might prefer to work on some past papers and have 1:1 sessions with you to discuss how they got on with them. A useful strategy can be to get them to have a go at using the mark schemes to mark their own work before you see it. This exercise can really help to demystify the exam for students and build confidence as they approach the resit.

The power of reading

Both GCSE English Language papers require students to explore unseen reading material. This can be a challenge to those who are not fans of reading, or who struggle to read independently for various reasons. 

The Reading Agency’s Quick Reads are great, accessible options for use in the classroom. A relatively cheap way to have class sets of books that will appeal to a post-16 audience, the Quick Reads are exactly as described – shorter than a traditional set text, more easily accomplished by resit cohorts and therefore confidence-boosting. 

You might like to read together as a group to build confidence, before progressing to independent reading. You will undoubtedly be mindful of the limited time you have with your students each week, but a rich and stimulating course, where you carve out space for enjoying reading (perhaps for the first time), will have a positive impact on results too. Why not explore the Reading Ahead programme, specifically designed for post-16 settings?

Using oracy skills to improve writing

If students lack confidence in speaking in front of the whole group, don’t despair. Establish a seating plan that enables everyone to work with a partner they feel comfortable speaking with. Every time you read a new text with the class, first ask students to discuss their opinions of it with their partner. 

The trick is to start with very easy questions like, ‘Did you enjoy reading it?’ or ‘Would you like to find out what happens next?’. The content of the response is not important. Don’t be offended if students say they didn’t like the story, just focus on getting them to explain why. These opinion-based questions are really helpful preparatory foundations for the skill of evaluation. 

Oracy skills can also be used effectively for creative writing. To begin with, ask students to retell a story they have read or the basic plot of a favourite film. Formulating the order of events and being judicious about which details to include in the retelling are all important building blocks of storytelling on paper.

Explore support materials

On Teach Cambridge we have a bank of teaching and learning resources specifically designed to work in post-16 settings, including curriculum and lesson plans for delivering the qualification in one year, using a skills-based approach.

Establishing ways of working

Liaise with your learning support and exams teams to ensure that any access arrangements are in place in plenty of time for the November or summer series. This is particularly relevant for those FE colleagues teaching the course in a year where students are new to your centre, but applicable to all. 

Hopefully, you will already know from enrolment forms what kind of support measures should be in place for each of your students but it’s really worth double checking the information with everyone in your classes to avoid any last-minute panic in the run up to exams. An important principle is that if candidates need to use laptops in exams, it needs to replicate their normal way of working. Make this clear at the start and encourage students to practise their word-processing skills. There is some useful guidance on typed scripts in our examiner reports on Teach Cambridge.

Stay connected

If you have any questions, you can email us at English@ocr.org.uk or call us on 01223 553998. You can also sign up for email updates for information about resources and support or follow us on X @OCR_English.

If you are considering teaching any of our qualifications, use our online form to let us know, so that we can help you with more information.

About the author

Prior to joining OCR in June 2023, Lydia spent 20 years working in a range of sixth form colleges across the country, teaching A Level and GCSE qualifications in English. She was a coursework moderator with OCR for a number of years and has an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck University.