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From a GCSE examiner’s point of view, I believe most students do not underperform in writing because they lack ideas, motivation or effort. Much more often, they underperform because they have been taught a version of GCSE writing that does not reflect how writing is actually assessed. Year after year, the same issues surface in exam papers. Students rely heavily on scaffolds , they misunderstand what “complex language” really means and accuracy at sentence level is sacr

One of the most powerful ways to build confidence, fluency and motivation in the MFL classroom is through purposful games. I believe that well-chosen, low-prep activities can transform the energy of a lesson while driving serious progress in retrieval, phonics, grammar and spontaneous use of the target language. Below is a bumper list of 30+ tried-and-tested MFL games  you can use across key stages. They work brilliantly in German, French, Spanish and beyond. ⭐ Retrieval & M

There’s a lot of talk everywhere about the new 2026 GCSE MFL exams and for good reason! The updates are designed to make language learning more meaningful, focusing on real communication rather than memorised scripts and let's hope they will! The part, I would like to focus on in this post is the Role-Play  section in the speaking exam. If you’ve ever taught GCSE languages, you’ll know role-plays have always been around in some form but the new version asks students to use th

In the world of MFL, book looks can sometimes feel like a tick-box exercise or a stressful scrutiny. Too often - and this can be the case...

When we talk about language learning, “speaking” often feels like the ultimate goal. It’s what learners and parents usually see as...

Back in January, I shared a blog on Improving GCSE Performance Post-Mocks  (link here ). Yesterday, I came across a LinkedIn post from...