The piece below was written many years ago by a Year 9 pupil, Kanika, for a colleague of mine (@craigbmorrison) at Parkside Community College, Cambridge. It illustrates, I think, some features of what might be termed ‘exploratory’ writing – developing response, understanding and expression without recourse to P.E.E or P.E.T.A.L. or other formulae, and without... Continue Reading →
Thoughts on how schools are assessing progress and attainment in English at Key Stage 3 This post is based very closely on an original article for NATE‘s Teaching English (Issue 8, Summer 2015) Post-levels, it has been left to schools to decide on how to track progress at Key Stage 3. A number of teaching schools […]
Thoughts on how students are taught to write critically about texts in exams This post was originally an article for NATE‘s Teaching English (Issue 12, Autumn 2016) Preparing for the new English GCSEs has compelled English departments to put their Key Stage 4 curriculum through yet another revision. For many, this has been taken as an opportunity […]
James Durran 