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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

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

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

Mock exams are a key moment for Year 11 students, giving us a clear picture of how they are doing and where they need to improve . For...

Preparing for exams that involve reading comprehension requires more than simply answering questions at face value. To truly excel , our...

Using the spreadsheet shared by Ben Merritt on Secondary MFL Matters, I've completed a comparison for Edexcel. Tab 1 (Picture 1):  This...