Recurring themes in the 2019 AQA GCSE English Language and Literature examiner reports

What do Heads of English do after GCSE results day? Breathe Shakespearean sighs of relief? Celebrate or commiserate over pints and prosecco? Finally enjoy uninterrupted nights of sleep for the last week of the summer? Yes to all of the above with one predictable, painstaking addition: we analyse our results. Never content with simple pass rates and progress figures, we want to break down our performance into every stratification imaginable. Once we’ve done that, we naturally start comparing against national average data and the performance of other similar centres. This leaves just one final stage of post-results reflection: unpicking the examiner reports. Over the past three years of the new GCSEs, the AQA examiner reports have proven themselves to be invaluable sources of ‘dos’, ‘don’ts’, trends and tips. My blow-by-blow summary of examiner feedback on every AQA English Language and English Literature exam question is far too long to post here. However, in the spirit of synthesis I have complied a thematic overview of the recurring ideas discussed in the 2019 AQA GCSE examiner reports. For me, three things stand out:

1.    The writer’s craft is anything they have chosen for effect - it is not a checklist of techniques. Language and Literature examiner feedback is very critical of students who technique spot, describing these students as ‘weighed down by technical terms’. Arguably we are limiting our students’ potential if we tell them to ‘look for a simile’ in a source or poem. Perhaps this is because of the danger that, once they have identified the technique, they do not look beyond it to where they can actually achieve their marks: effects and meanings. Examiners are far more likely to reward words analysed in the correct context of a passage or phrases explored as images which elicit several layers of meaning. In the still slightly intimidating structure question, this means students can be freed from complex terminology in favour of considering what the writer has placed where and why. This year, we will be focusing on the ‘why’ of aims and effects much more than the ‘what’ of techniques. The examiner reports urge us to foreground the writers: why did they craft the extract / character in this way, what was their purpose or intention and how can we interpret the meanings their writing creates?

2.    References need to be made in context. The phrase ‘the quote’ has to be the most over-used in Language and Literature analysis. Wonderfully, the examiner reports emphasise once again that a strict teaching focus on quotes is not needed: ‘more teachers are increasingly familiar with the idea that references can be in a variety of forms and are merely a way for students to demonstrate their knowledge of the text’. This year’s examiner reports have prompted our department to reflect on the way in which our students introduce their quotations and references. ‘The quote…’ is arguably far too detached from the context of the text and the writer’s purpose. The Language exam reports actually suggest that individual word-level quotation analysis can lead to ‘misinterpretation’ because students do not show their understanding of what the word is describing in the wider sense of the extract. AQA state that ‘contextualising the individual words as part of a longer passage’ is more likely to reap the rewards of marks. This year, we are going to focus on contextualising Language quotes within patterns of references such as when there are groups of words evoking a similar theme or contrasting ideas in a source. In Literature, this can be developed through useful revision strategies such as asking students how a character would deliver a line or what comes before and after a key moment. We want our students to be contextualising references through phrases such as ‘Macbeth questions…’, ‘Scrooge retorts…’, ‘In this moment Sheila changes from…to…’. Hopefully students will indeed feel ‘freed’ from the intimidating straitjacket of the memorized ‘quote’.

3.    We need a curriculum of ‘big ideas’. The Language and Literature examiner reports repeatedly use a series of (unsurprisingly) abstract words: ‘imagination’, ‘thematic’, ‘concepts’/ ‘conceptualised’ and ‘thoughtful’. In this series of Language papers, this meant students writing maturely about the theme of abandonment, analysing an extract in relation to the struggle between mankind and nature and discussing the notion of celebrity through the lenses of ‘politics, economics, gender, aesthetics, class, morality, psychology and even philosophy’. In the Literature exam report, students are directly advised to ‘think about why the writer has written the text; what do you learn from it about people,

human nature, society?’. Of course, this ideological approach also meets AQA’s helpfully holistic definition of context as thematic (rather than bolted on historical facts). Although I note this in a summary of exam tips, there is no doubt that we cannot pigeonhole this as ‘a GCSE skill’. Students won’t develop an understanding of ‘big ideas’ solely in a two-year GCSE course because there is cultural capital at the heart of such a concept. The core aim of developing students’ capacity to think and discuss ideologies needs to underpin our long-term plans from the moment students join our school. AQA’s list of ‘politics, economics, gender, aesthetics, class, morality, psychology and even philosophy’ is proving to be a useful curriculum evaluation tool in our department and one we will keep returning to in our new curriculum planning.