Secondary English - how to support this student

[ECT22]

I'm an ECT2 Secondary English teacher. One of my lovely Y11 English Lit students is bright and extremely hard-working, but it's just not clicking for them. Their first mock grade in summer Y10 was a 4, and they are upset and demoralised because their work has not really shown much progress so far this term. I am stressing on their behalf too - in private obvs, not in front of them! Their target grade according to their KS2 data is a 7 (I still find this sort of target setting hard to grasp, as it seems such a stretch to forecast GCSE outcomes, for subjects that change beyond recognition by Y11, on Y6 data - but what do I know, I've barely started teaching...). Other students predicted 7-9 grades in the class are on track for those grades - so it doesn't seem to be an issue with the way I am teaching generally. But I'm desperately trying to think of ways to support this student. They will attend revision/guided practice sessions, I have said I will do practice answers with them during social times if they want to... I can see that they over-complicate their written responses, but I'm struggling with how to explain/model a clearer approach. Any advice from experienced English (or other!) teachers would be appreciated.

Without being able to see the work, it’s almost impossible to offer meaningful advice. I would speak to colleagues in your department. How did this pupil do on their other Y10 exams?

I'd definitely look at their performance across all subjects. Is it specific to English, or are they way below target across the board?

I had a Y11 student once with a target of an 8 because he'd been heavily coached/supported by his TA during his SATs. He had dyslexia, and did well to achieve 4s/5s at GCSE.

If it's specific to English, then hopefully targeted exam practice will help. If they are struggling across the board, then it's worth taking time to figure out why that is.

Are they bright verbally but struggling to write concepts down, especially long form?

The target grade was plucked out of someone’s arse years ago and means nothing. Flag now to your HOD that this student’s target grade is way off and keep doing it with evidence until SLT agree to change it to something more realistic, otherwise it will be used as a stick to beat you with for the rest of the academic year.

For a student who struggles with writing academically you have to give them clear modelled examples. I usually sit with them and get them to tell me what they think the answer is, and then I’ll push them to develop their ideas, but only verbally. We’ll talk about potential interpretations, discuss possible quotations to use and so on, and then plan together what a paragraph might look like. I then write the paragraph using our plan, talking through why I’m doing what I’m doing as I’m writing it. I then ask the student to write the next paragraph with me, and then the third paragraph by themselves, getting them to explain to me why they’re writing what they’re writing. I also show them examples of good paragraphs and get them to identify the features that make it good and write their own versions of the same sentence structures, etc. After several sessions of doing these sorts of activities, you should start to get somewhere. However, no matter what you do, getting a child to go from a 4 to a 7 in a few months is unlikely, so you do need to flag now that this student’s prediction is unrealistic.

Teach them how to write a thesis statement and make sure they have a good bank of discourse markers. David Didau’s blog, the Ormiston English curriculum, and The Writing Revolution are all very good on this. It doesn’t matter if the paragraphs are formulaic or repetitive at first. Over time as the student masters the structure and it becomes automatic they will be able to develop it with their own analysis.

Strongly agree with this. The examiners’ report for AQA Lit this year explicitly commented on the greater frequency of thesis statements in candidates’ responses and how effective this was in improving AO1.

You could also try what-how-why to help them simplify/clarify their written ideas - what is the writer trying to say? how are they doing this? why are they doing this?

As a primary teacher, I just don't understand this. In SATs you are on your own - all the help leading up to it won't make any difference on the day if you don't have the capability within yourself. They are hard. If you can't read at a certain level or retain quite a significant amount of information (maths, SPAG) then you just will not pass. Primaries haven't been awash with TAs for years and years, and I genuinely can't think of a scenario where a TA could be freed up for a significant amount of time to help 'just' a dyslexic pupil when every class will have far needier children (consider all the pupils who get an EHCP in Y6 so never enter a mainstream secondary).

Secondary schools put on all sorts of revision classes for their pupils before exams, so why are primaries accused of somehow fixing results when in reality they probably do a lot less? Sorry long post for a short comment in yours and I'm genuinely after discussion, not a fight, but I see it a lot on teaching forums.