Engagement is particularly important for SEND learners and those with individual needs- but of course, for all young people. By the time they get to Year 11, students are likely in different positions, but many of the students I work with might be feeling dejected, lacking confidence, demotivated.

The good news is that because the end is in sight, and because of that extra level of maturity they often acquire over the summer holidays, students frequently rise to the challenge. That doesn’t mean it suddenly happens- but every year I see students who caused me some bother the previous year, who I’d been really worried about, start to step up their game and take accountability.

We need to remind them that we are on their side and there to support them. It’s a tricky balance, because if we pile on the pressure and make it seem like their autonomy is being restricted, we risk losing the natural motivation and desire to achieve in our most vulnerable learners. We have to take it case by case.

My blogs tend to be reflective, explorative, research-oriented. Today I want to document some top tips, ideas, and strategies through case studies of what I’ve seen as good practice.

Counterintuitively, Joy Starts with Routine

When I think about what makes Year 11 more joyful, particularly on the English language course, ironically I think it’s actually about clear routines and psychological safety. Having very clear intentions, and deliberately simplifying and reducing the amount of curriculum content, can free up space in the room, either in the curriculum or in the interpersonal relationships, for the practitioner to find and lean into joy where it feels authentic.

We need to look at our students’ starting points and consider the highest-leverage skills and knowledge that will allow them to be successful. Nearer exam time, this might mean routinising specific practice questions and short challenges, helping them get to grips with the timings of the paper. In theory this isn’t the most “joyful” activity, but the familiarity and safety that comes with knowing the paper and the requirements of the questions gives us opportunities to harness more exciting revision and discussion strategies around that framework.

I don’t recommend spending the year drilling exam questions- I don’t see a benefit in this. But whether it’s a full class, a small group, or one-to-one tuition, we’re more likely to see the specific gaps in knowledge and skills and be able to diagnostically pinpoint key areas to address. By the time families come to me, it’s often at the point where things are starting to feel hopeless, and that young person’s academic self-esteem is at an all-time low, so any approach needs to be motivational. Giving plenty of time to scaffolded or independent practice is of course necessary in supporting students to build up resiliency around exams, but we have to be really intentional about what that looks like and pitch it appropriately.

An Assets-Based Approach

For this, it’s important to take an assets-based approach. Yes, we identify the key gaps in knowledge we can help support, but reframing through an assets-based approach, we look at what these students’ strengths are and how those strengths will carry them through the rest of the year. I find this a far more productive strategy for sustaining motivation.

For example, a student who has lots of ideas verbally but struggles to get them down on paper; we start with discussion, collaborative practice, and planning activities that free up their brain space and allow them to get their ideas down on paper. Once we’ve done this together, we pause and ask: what seems to be working here? What’s most helpful? Did you like this bit? When I said this to you, what gave you that idea?

Metacognition skills are really the ticket to success. We know from the research that the more aware a learner is of their own learning and thinking process, the more successful they will be with exams. Much of the work I do (to borrow a term from psychotherapy) is about ‘professional noticing’, and helping students notice, because at Year 11 level they need to be the ones who feel ownership and accountability of their work. I find the best tools in my toolkit are those that harness the skills students already have and gently nudge them in the right direction.

Let Interesting Texts Do the Work

The key areas students seem to struggle with are reading skills and interpretation. Rather than drilling independent reading practice at home, which by Year 11 might be quite futile, we do lots of reading in sessions and let the interesting text do the work.

I often reference Mary Myatt in my blogs- I find the simplicity of her offer and her discussions around reading very compelling: if we choose interesting texts, we can trust them to do a lot of the teaching work for us.

I once worked in a school where the Year 11 curriculum was bespoke, built around the theme of identity, with short extracts deliberately chosen to be interesting and to hinge on that theme; for example, an Alice Walker short story (The Flowers), and a fiction piece about a woman’s experience in the concentration camps (Cilka’s Journey. The IGCSE curriculum with Pearson is a good example of this too, as their texts are challenging and thought-provoking, developing critical thinking skills, and students often have lots to say about them.

So: making space, particularly in the first few months, for reading real-world examples, unpacking, modelling and annotating them, and making sure students have a clear approach for annotation. Unfortunately some won’t do it in the actual exam (out of resistance and time pressure), but enough whole-class or one-to-one practice sets up the right thinking process and gives them a fighting chance.

Knowing When to Hand Over the Reins

The most challenging part, particularly under Year 11 pressure, is knowing when to move from teacher-led support and scaffolds to independent practice- when we hand over the reins. If you know you’ve got a class or a student for a year or six months, this is where long-term planning comes in: managing structure and pace across the year, and managing expectations of what content will look like, so you know the incremental build-up of skills.

This isn’t necessarily where the excitement of a “joyful curriculum” shows itself- but once we’ve accounted for the key access points, we can judiciously choose where to inject joyful moments, and how to deliberately remove scaffolds.

I currently use frameworks for conversation practice- I.E teaching them about “sounding clever” in academic writing- using sentence starters and a text to revise, going back and forth practising sounding clever and using those starters. Some lessons are for conversation, some for independent writing and ownership, where I function more as an accountability partner while the scaffold we’ve already practised does the supportive work.

Particularly for learners who struggle with self-doubt: either they plan independently and we write the first paragraph together, or if ideas are the struggle, we plan together, I write the first paragraph, and they take the reins from there.

I’m experimenting more with AI to support some of this thinking and vocabulary work- not as a tool for students to opt out of learning, but if they have an interesting idea and get stuck in the process, asking AI to generate a vocabulary bank that supports and allows them to express those ideas. Using it a little as a “cheat” in the planning and early process, then removing that scaffold later on.

Vocabulary: The Tricky Part

The better a child’s vocabulary, the more confident they’ll be expressing ideas across the English language exam. With the best will in the world, we can’t inject a dictionary into their brains- particularly for students not currently meeting the pass mark who we know are capable with the right support.

This is where reading comes in again: making sure there’s interesting vocabulary and technique in the texts they can learn and be inspired from, and unpacking specifically what those are- a bit of pre-teaching.

I’ve seen excellent work in a school I trained in, supporting EAL learners by using the literature course to inform language skills- building a bank of vocabulary and phrases from poems, and using this as a prompt for creative writing, so students build language skills and figurative language and are directly encouraged to apply it in their own writing. This is where I’ve seen strong wins- thinking of the courses as less binary, and thinking about where the skills are and the best way to integrate them. Lots of visuals and drawing can also bring language to life, particularly through a lens of inclusion.

Revision, Evaluation, and Making Knowledge ‘Sticky’

The key area students struggle with is knowing how to revise for English language. I’d advocate for revision activities that help students remember skills and knowledge- Year 11 we can support them with more subject-specific terminology and opportunities to embed it. Kids seem to love remembering and learning technical vocabulary- there’s a safety in that, which is part of why students tend to do well on the language analysis question on both papers (worth eight marks).

The more challenging questions are evaluative, comparative, and ask students to synthesise information. These questions are genuinely hard, and students struggle with how to approach them. But evaluation is psychologically privileged in our brain, just like storytelling- it’s a way our brains remember things more easily.

So rather than just recap quizzes of key quotes, asking students to evaluate how far does this show something about the character makes that knowledge stickier. Going through key texts and consistently asking students to express: do you agree this is true about the character? Where’s your evidence? Can you link that to a language feature? Routinising and modelling the actual thinking means that by the time the question comes up, there’s less pressure on structure, and students intuitively understand what’s being asked.

A mistake I see a lot: teachers pushing the false idea that Question 4 needs four paragraphs, and students buckling under the pressure of that expectation. Let’s show them examples of how to respond concisely, so they don’t feel overwhelmed.

Bringing It Together

On reflection, I use a structure where we front-load thinking and skills in the first few months, so that by the time we integrate towards more academic, independent practice, students have already been exposed to key vocabulary- I.E- what it means to evaluate, what it means to summarise- with access to model examples, whether from me, real-life examples, or student work.

If I could give one quick, actionable tip for engagement- Knowledge organisers can be great tools to help reduce overwhelm; making sure every student has a copy of that key information takes the fear away. If they know they can fit everything they need to know about a particular question onto half a page, it reduces cognitive load and leaves space for thinking, and in many instances, creativity. Hopefully, by that point, they’ll feel like they’re in much safer hands with us too.

REFERENCES

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Morris, H. (2019). Cilka’s journey. Zaffre.

Myatt, M. (2018). The curriculum: Gallimaufry to coherence. John Catt Educational.

Pearson, P. D., & Gallagher, M. C. (1983). The instruction of reading comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 8(3), 317–344. https://doi.org/10.1016/0361-476X(83)90019-X

Quigley, A. (2018). Closing the vocabulary gap. Routledge.

Quigley, A., Muijs, D., & Stringer, E. (2018). Metacognition and self-regulated learning: Guidance report. Education Endowment Foundation.

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1016/0364-0213(88)90023-7

Walker, A. (1973). The flowers. In In love & trouble: Stories of Black women. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. Jossey-Bass.