St Edmund's
Preparing for Success in GCSE English
GCSE English exam candidates are now immersed fully in their revision, with all Literature and Language elements having been taught last year and finished at the very start of this.
Students have returned to their Language papers and are working through tasks with an eye on the skills required for each. They have been thinking about how to implement AQA’s advice on writing about structure, as well as how to wrestle a high-quality answer out of critical statements about their unseen text. Those students also preparing for Literature are currently revising ‘An Inspector Calls’, preparing presentations, peeling back the characters’ words to get at the playwright’s ideas and to identify the values those characters embody. There has been a focus on last words and the truths they express, as well as how the arcs of characters are suggested in their early dialogue and how their words, like everybody’s, are windows on to their values and worldviews.
Our Upper Fifth students are also – of course and inevitably! – completing plenty of practice essays. It is in the writing, as we’re all very aware, where everything is decided so weekly responses to past-paper questions should be of no surprise. It’s natural, then, to find ourselves thinking very carefully about essay technique, considering essay advice from the board and stressing not only the need for the thoughtful organization of ideas, but also and especially the need for coherence across the entire answer and the need for answers that are orientated obviously towards the task. Students getting themselves along to clinics to review essays is a great use of time, not only because it allows for detailed talk about the writing – strengths, areas for improvement – but also because they illuminate the path to stronger, higher grades. Of equal importance, the department would argue, is that all talk about the texts stresses the value of literature as a mirror that reminds us of both who we are and who we might be, while all talk about essays stresses the value of extended, organized thinking … and how to do it!
Our students find themselves in an enviable position: there is plenty of time between now and the exams. Taking advantage of this, as well as what’s on offer in the way of clinics and post-school revision sessions, will stand them in excellent stead.
Details about the after-school revision programme will be sent soon to students, with parents copied in. Lunchtime clinics have been running since the start of term.
Matthew Whitman
Head of English
