Teachers blamed the ‘dry’ English GCSE curriculum on why schools are dropping A-Level English.
Less students are enrolling to study English in college, and frankly, I don’t blame them.
The curriculum is dry. But still, there’s hope.
In this article, I cover 6 reasons why children struggle with GCSE English.
1. Poor Historical Knowledge
The U.K. history curriculum only covers a very narrow portion of history.
Children lacking historical knowledge won’t understand why an author might have written something. They’ll struggle to connect the dots, and this makes it difficult to expand on ideas.
I often recommend Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant. It provides an birds-eye view of history across multiple domains: biology, race, morals, religions, economics, and more.
There’s also Oversimplified, a YouTube channel comprising of animated videos which summarise key historical events, like WW1 and WW2 in a fun and comical way.
Horrible Histories is another popular book & video series for kids.
However, I wouldn’t recommend studying history based on one channel or one book alone, i.e. something that looks at horrible events only. It can can massively warp a child’s perception of how past civilisations operated.
2. Misunderstanding Technical Terms
In GCSE English, students will need to analyse how characters and themes are presented. They won’t get far if they don’t know their technical terms, also referred to as ‘literary devises’, or ‘literary terminologies’.
Most of the simple terms, usually things to do with grammar (like nouns, verbs and adjectives) would’ve been covered in primary school.
The difficult ones however, usually things like figurative language terms (like metaphors, similes & personification) are explored in more depth during secondary school.
However, if a child forgets the terms they studied during primary school, this can have a major impact on their performance in secondary school (something we’ll discuss in the next point).
Using flashcards is a good way to stay sharp with terminologies.
I’ll leave a few links to some good online resources.
LitCharts has an extensive library of general literary terms, although it’s not necessary to learn all of them to get a high grade in GCSE English.
As for revising figurative language terminologies (especially important when analysing poetry and Shakespearean texts) this article from LitCharts explains the common ones, with some examples too.
Sparknotes has a decent glossary of literary terms.
As for grammatical terms, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) has an extensive list with explanations.
3. Bad Habits Carried Over From Primary School
It’s pretty common for students to forget what they learnt in primary school.
Forgetting simple technical terms (like nouns, verbs and adjectives mean) is quite common, as we discussed in the last point. This impacts a student’s ability to analyse and expand their answers – plus it can hamper their confidence if they keep getting low marks.
They might not want to put their hand up and ask what a noun or a verb is in fear of looking stupid.
Many of the students I’ve worked with have written answers full of errors but their teachers have only picked up a fraction of the mistakes. Their teachers are simply too busy to correct them; it would take an astronomical amount of time to correct all the grammatical errors from a class of 30 students.
These are often the main problems that get carried forward:
- Poor handwriting – this can be fixed by practising on lined paper.
- Poor vocabulary – often fixed by reading more and doing writing exercises.
- Bad grammatical habits – now this might be a little tricky to fix, and here’s why:
Most books on grammar are either made for young children or those who’re studying English as a second language. This might be a slight kick in the ego for a teenager.
To get around this, one thing I’ve seen to work well with teenage students who’ve fallen behind on grammar is an online learning software called IXL.
On there, you’ll find a wide range of exercises that cover just about everything, and the yearly membership for 1 student ranges from £59 to £99.
Unfortunately, IXL has lots of bad reviews. But I’ve looked into these reviews, and most of them are written by students whose teachers seem to use a one-size-fits-all approach. IXL exercises need to be tailored to individual students in order to be effective.
4. Lack of Detailed Feedback
Large class sizes can have a substantial effect on English teachers. In maths, the marking is much more straightforward. The answer is either right or wrong. In English, there are millions of variables.
There are one million ways to write a top grade answer, and mark schemes are often very vague, meaning grades can vary dramatically. I’ve seen students receive a grade 5 on a creative writing piece from one teacher, to receive a grade 8 on the same piece from another teacher.
In 99% of cases whereby students have shown me their school exercise books (and I’m exaggerating, but I’m not far off) the feedback given has been insufficient for them to improve. Many problems go amiss.
But like the rest of us, English teachers only have 24 hours in a day, a sufficient amount of which is rarely spent on sleeping and eating. The other hours are generally pretty hectic. I cannot blame them if they cannot provide the feedback students need.
This is why many parents decide to hire an experienced tutor who can work with their child outside of school hours and go over their writing with a fine-toothed comb.
5. Never Seen Examples of High-Grade Work
Another problem I’ve noticed is that teachers don’t really hand out many examples of high-grade work.
Again, I can sympathise – teachers need to be a little cautious when dishing out high-grade examples.
All it takes is for a few lazy students (who think it’s okay to plagiarise) and suddenly the school is in trouble. If even a small number of students produce too many similarities in their writing from the same class, the teacher might get in trouble.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t find these high grade examples yourself. The internet is full of high-grade example answers in most topics. All it takes is a quick Google search.
Tes is a popular site full of teaching resources where samples can be downloaded (usually for a small fee, like a few pounds). Mr Bruff’s YouTube channel covers pretty much everything English GCSE related, as well as examples.
Something that students forget to do with high-grade examples is to spot the similarities amongst all of them. Usually, all high grade answers will be of a similar length, a similar writing style, similar paragraph sizes–all of which must be studied.
Having these samples is handy because if your child is asking you to review their work, then at least you will have something to compare their work to.
6. Never Completed a Full Question Or Even Seen The Exam Paper Layout
I shudder to think how many students don’t even know the layout of their English GCSE papers, or what kind of questions they’ll be facing, or what their exam board is.
It’s like going to war without having the faintest clue of what the battlefield looks like.
Again, there’s no excuse because everything is a Google search away. But to save you time – here are some important links:
Physicsandmathstutor.com (despite the name) links to a range of past papers for English Language and English Literature
RevisionWorld.com – which also has links to English Language and English Literature past papers.
