It’s bad enough feeling rushed all the time as you slog through the bulging GCSE spec. But it’s even worse when you realise many students won’t have enough time to understand at the depth GCSE requires. However you divide KS3 and GCSE there’s too much stuff. When we did a curriculum time analysis for AQA, […]

You might have heard that it takes ‘10,000 hours’ to excel at something. But there’s a lesser known finding from research into expertise that could radically improve your students’ results by questioning our assumptions about learning. It is this: while ability matters at the beginning, in the long run it’s the quantity and quality of practice that […]

It’s a sobering thought – with new GCSE, teaching the content in the specification only prepares students for 40% of the marks. For the rest, they have to apply and analyse, and experience show many students never learn this. Enter ​Blueprint: a 5-year plan based on the KS3 Science Syllabus we built for AQA. Blueprint is designed backwards from the 3 GCSE Assessment Objectives. It’s organised around a progression of essential concepts and scientific thinking […]


 … The more problem-solving students do while learning, the better they will perform in exams. Conventionally students listen then do. They’re fine at recalling knowledge, but come unstuck when the context of an exam question is different to what they were taught (aka ‘inert knowledge’). How do you avoid inert knowledge?  Students need to connect […]


 … 80% of student achievement comes from understanding 20% of the syllabus. That’s right, much of what we teach has little impact on exam results. But 20% of it really sets students up for success. What is the 20%? It’s the key concepts in science: fundamental ideas like force and interdependence, and scientific models […]

The Mastery Practice Book can help your low and middle achievers do better. In the recent AQA Year 10 mock, the average was only 30%. One of the biggest areas for improvement, according to the examiners, was ‘applying knowledge to unfamiliar contexts’. Apply is worth 40% of the marks, so how can your students capture […]

What’s the simplest way to boost understanding? Give students more targeted practice at using ideas and skills. I don’t mean simple recall and filling in boxes, I mean practice in ‘Apply’ –  being able to transfer what you know to unfamiliar situations. Most students struggle with recognising which idea to use where. So it’s obvious they need […]

If you were tutoring one student, would you hop over to TES, download a PowerPoint and just present it? Thought not. You’d probably act more like a doctor: ask some diagnostic questions to find out what she didn’t know, and then teach to fill the gaps. Benjamin Bloom, yes, the same Bloom, invented a system for […]