Getting More Students to Grade 7 and Above

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Most departments I speak to have a settled plan for grade 4 and grade 5. There is an intervention group, a folder of past papers and a named teacher who owns it.

The grade 7 to 9 cohort is often less well served. Those students are quietly competent, they rarely cause concern in a data drop, and we assume they will find the extra marks themselves.

They usually do not.

The gap between a grade 5 and a grade 7 is not a longer list of topics. It is the ability to hold two ideas together in one question, to justify a step, and to keep going when the first method stalls.

That is a curriculum and questioning problem, not a revision problem. It has to be planned into Years 10 and 11 rather than bolted on in April.

Identify which students could achieve grade 7 or above

Their previous teachers already have a view on who those students are. Ask them first. That professional judgement is the most useful filter you have and it costs nothing but a conversation.

Then back it up with predictive baseline data. Most secondary schools already hold at least one of the following:

• CAT4 from GL Education, where the quantitative and non-verbal batteries are the two worth reading for maths, alongside GCSE indicators.
• FFT Aspire from the Fisher Family Trust, which gives you benchmark estimates and lets you set targets at a chosen level of challenge.
• MidYIS from Cambridge Insight, formerly CEM, now part of Cambridge Secondary Insight (Baseline), which predicts to GCSE and IGCSE from a maths, vocabulary and non-verbal profile.

Use the data to challenge the list, not to write it. No baseline test knows how a student responds to a hard question in your classroom.

The students to watch are the ones whose reasoning scores run ahead of their book work. They are the clearest candidates for grade 7 and above, and they are the easiest to miss.

Once you have the names, look at their end of Year 10 exam papers. Not the unit tests, the full papers.

Ask three questions of every paper:

• How did they perform on the reasoning and problem solving questions?
• Could they articulate a response to a show that or prove question?
• Could they connect several topics or skills together inside a single problem?

These are the skills that matter most. They tell you far more than a strong score in one unit of work.

A student can make excellent progress through a unit on percentages. Ask them to combine percentages with a histogram, or to calculate a percentage error from bounds, and they fall short.

That gap is the difference between a grade 6 and a grade 7.

This kind of teaching is difficult to plan for in a scheme of work. It lives in how questions are posed, not in the order of the topics.

So put it in a faculty meeting instead. Twenty minutes spent looking at how these questions actually appear in papers builds teacher subject knowledge and makes staff far more confident to pose the same questions in class.

The lessons and resources on Mr Mathematics are written to support that, so teachers are not building connected questions from scratch.

Build the depth into the scheme of work

If the stretch only lives in the last twenty minutes of a lesson, it reaches the students who were already going to get there.

The GCSE Higher scheme of work for Years 9 to 11 sequences the higher grade content so it is revisited rather than met once. For this cohort that matters more than the order of any single unit.

The topics that decide grade 7 and above are the connected ones.

Proof and circle theorems are the clearest examples, because both reward students who can explain rather than calculate. Algebraic fractions, vectors, functions and surds behave the same way.

When you audit your Year 10 plan, check that each of these appears at least twice. The second visit should ask for reasoning, not repetition.

What to do after the Year 11 mock

Formal revision starts after the Year 11 mock, early in the Spring Term. Everything before that point is still teaching.

The mock is the trigger, and it changes what students need from you.

Learning content is not the same as learning how to work through an exam paper.

An exam paper changes topic from one question to the next. It regularly puts two or three topics inside a single question. A typical lesson does the opposite and stays on one topic for an hour.

Working through a full paper is exhausting. It needs stamina, and stamina has to be trained. Students only build it through practice and exposure.

The Spring 1 and Spring 2 grade 7 to 9 programmes are sequenced for this term, covering trigonometric graphs, complex quadratics, non-linear sequences, inverse and composite functions, geometrical proof, surds and vector notation.

If you would rather build your own sequence, the grade 8 and 9 revision lessons and the grade 6 and 7 lessons are grouped so you can take the parts that match your gaps.

Two homeworks a week for six weeks

Homework 1: complete the paper

One past paper a week, set as homework.

In class: peer marking with no mark scheme

On the day it is due, students work in pairs and mark each other’s paper.

Do not give out the mark scheme. Students decide whether an answer is correct based on their mutually agreed understanding of the question.

As soon as a mark scheme appears, the answer becomes definitive and the conversation stops. It is the conversation about whether an answer is valid that develops their reasoning.

Give them 35 minutes for this while you circulate.

You are listening for one thing: the questions these students needed to get right and could not. That is where you model and feed back to the class.

Homework 2: mark it formally

Hand out the student friendly mark scheme. Edexcel and the other UK boards publish one for most papers.

Students then mark their own paper properly against it, using the standard marking codes. The guidance on marking mathematics exercise books sets out the codes to use.

Repeat the cycle for six weeks.

You do not need the scores. This process is there to train the student, not to summatively assess them.

The weekly cycle at a glance

Make the reasoning visible

Grade 7 and above rewards students who can say why a method works.

That habit is built in ordinary lessons, mainly through the questions teachers ask after a correct answer. Two follow-ups are enough for most classes.

Why does that step work? What would change if this number were different?

The guidance on literacy in mathematics and on developing mathematical thinking beyond procedural fluency both cover this in more detail. The second comes with a one page faculty meeting guide you can print.

For lessons designed around reasoning rather than fluency, the problem solving sequence gives you four lessons to trial with one class before you commit the whole team.

Protect the marking that actually helps

For this cohort, a tick on a correct method teaches nothing.

What helps is a short next step written on the one question they abandoned, and five minutes at the start of the next lesson for them to respond to it.

The guidance on marking mathematics exercise books sets out a version of this that is sustainable across a full timetable.

Frequently asked questions

Your next step

Take one Year 11 mock paper to your next department meeting and mark up every question worth grade 7 or above.

Count how many of those questions your scheme has explicitly prepared students for since September. That number is usually the honest starting point for the rest of the year.