Hey you, how’re you doing? Only two weeks in and I already feel like I need to say that I hope you are all surviving the term so far.
I’ve been in the depths of reviewing students’ scripts, looking at our exam data to see if there are any systemic issues that we can address. Using ResultsPlus (or whatever AQA, OCR, and Eduqas have) is imperative. I don’t understand how you can look to make any improvements if you don’t know what needs to be improved, and the data behind your GCSE results is one of the best ways of getting that insight.
To top it all off, we’ve just changed the scheme of work for our Years 9, 10, and 11 in my day job. I’ll discuss the changes we made and why at some point (I have a plan to talk about how to transition between schemes, too), but the short version is that any scheme of work you have should be reviewed regularly and tweaked.
Amid all this, I’ve downloaded the examiners’ reports and I’ve been trying to read them before falling asleep … that’s not me trying to be humorous, I just find it difficult to find quiet time. Ultimately, it has taken me about three evenings to digest a single report. Across the country, there are thousands of us doing the same thing … or not even getting around to reading them. I know I’ve heard people say that these reports relate to last year’s kids and we’ve already moved on to the next Year 11.
But there is an absolute goldmine of information in these reports. They either help us tweak our teaching or simply reaffirm that it’s not just your kids who struggle with, say, surface area and volume. So, I’ve had an idea. Going forward, I’m going to read this sh1t so you don’t have to … and give you the headlines. No doubt there will also be a load of old twaddle about teaching entwined with it, for which I apologise in advance.
I’m going to start with the Summer 2026 Edexcel Foundation Paper 1, and I’ll be back soon with the rest before moving onto AQA etc. I suspect there will be some common themes running across all the boards’ reports: legibility, equipment, showing working, etc., which will be interesting to explore.
So, let’s do this…
The Good News
Students actually did brilliantly in the first half of the paper. The basic skills are in place, and the start of the paper allowed students to show what they could do.
- Converting fractions to percentages was a massive win for most, though some didn’t read the question and wrote a decimal. I know that at least one of my weaker students every year will have done this. I say weaker, but that’s not what I really mean … they just don’t have the automaticity that comes with repeated practice.
- Order of operations was generally well-handled, but the classic left-to-right error still sneaked in. Again, this is common with those who lack automaticity due to a lack of practice. Some students don’t think it applies unless it’s in a lesson called “BIDMAS” (or whatever acronym you choose but that’s a whole other argument!).
- Identifying 2D shapes was standard, and thankfully, the examiners condoned some creative spellings as long as the intent was clear. Over the years, I’ve seen some truly wild interpretations get full marks!
- Probability scales, basic scale drawings, and simple coordinates also brought home plenty of marks.
For me, the big question is: how many of these skills are actually a Year 11 issue? Most of this is first taught in KS2 or KS3, and for some, it’s just still not secure.
The Stuff That’s Hard to Take
As soon as the paper introduced multiple steps, context, or required a bit of deeper reasoning, things began to unravel. This is nothing new, but it highlights exactly where we need to place our focus during intervention. Some of these are easy wins tied to exam technique.
- Fractions and Percentages of Amounts: Students not showing their working out gets a major mention. There is one specific habit I now preach to my students: we have to show what calculations are used to find a percentage of an amount. When their arithmetic lets them down, it’s not enough to write 10% = xxx so 30% = yyy. If they do not write down the process for finding that 30%, they lose out heavily on method marks when their calculations fail. We need to keep drumming it into them: show the 10% step and do something with it!
- Conversions: I’ve been banging on about these for a while now. Lots of students on this paper found converting kg to grams simple enough, but converting millimetres to centimetres based on a given statement completely threw them off. A lot of students simply agreed with a wrong statement because it looked plausible, or failed to give a robust enough justification beyond “it is wrong”. These AO2 (Reasoning and Justifying) type questions are a personal focus area for me. I’ve started to be much more exacting with the language I accept in class, which allows for some slippage when it comes to the actual exams.
- Averages from Lists: Absolute facepalm moment here. Finding the median from an unordered list remains a classic trap. Far too many students forgot to order the list first or struggled to handle what to do when they were left with two numbers in the middle. Is it a case that they haven’t been exposed to examples with two middle numbers when it’s first taught? Who knows?
- Decimal Multiplication: The report noted that while the column method and Napier’s bones remain popular for multiplying decimals, place value errors are costing marks. Students are still forgetting to add that crucial zero in the units column when multiplying by the tens digit. This is a major issue and I’m not sure what the answer is here either. The old adage springs to mind: we don’t practice until we get it right, we practice until we can’t get it wrong!
The Crossover Killers
The back end of the paper was a real battleground, especially with topics that cross over with the Higher tier.
- Proportion: The proportion question that involved both direct and inverse proportion was tough. Students completely mixed up the two concepts.
- Algebraic Manipulation: Factorising a basic expression went well, but substitution with negative numbers caused a lot of lost signs. When it came to solving quadratics … NOW THIS MADE ME GIGGLE … the examiners’ report says, and I quote: “with the quadratic formula being seen in only a small proportion of responses.” … that’s because, the last time I looked, using the quadratic formula is a Higher-only topic! Trust me: it really is not on Foundation. It was given on the Exam Aid (Formula Sheet) for the Higher tier, and it sounds like the examiners were mistakenly expecting Foundation students to know it and use it.
- Reverse Area/Volume: The cuboid question that gave the surface area and asked for the volume was a massive hurdle. A shocking number of students just assumed all faces were equal or tried to guess the height without setting up any logical steps. This was a genuinely tough question.
Some Other Things Worth Noting…
- Greyscale Warning: Remind students not to use colour to differentiate lines on graphs. The papers are marked in greyscale, so those beautiful multi-coloured lines all look exactly the same to the examiner!
- Estimation First: Encourage classes to estimate their decimal calculations first so they know if their final answer is even remotely sensible.
- Money Notation: Watch out for the classic £0.25p error. They need to use correct money notation consistently, not mix the two symbols … I’ve been encouraging mine to use no symbols at all.
- Context Check: Teach them to read the question properly and ask themselves if their answer actually makes sense in the real world. I know we all try to do this anyway … my new phrase is: “It’s not maths … you can do the maths … it’s literacy. Now let’s decode the question.”
Right, that is it from me for today.
There… I read that sh!t so you didn’t have to!
They aren’t really sh!t and if I can get more of you reading them (even if only via me), it’ll be a good thing!
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