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Should Key Stage 3 practise GCSE-style tasks?

Ofsted’s 2024 English report found GCSE preparation shaping English in Years 7 to 9. The evidence favours practising the parts of reading and writing, with the full exam task kept for later and used sparingly. There is a fair case for some exam practice too, and we set it out.

Long read · 8 minute read

In March 2024 Ofsted published Telling the story, its subject report on English in primary and secondary schools. Its finding on Years 7 to 9 is blunt: “at key stage 3, schools often encourage excessive practice of a narrow range of writing structures to prepare pupils for GCSEs.”

The pull towards GCSE is easy to understand. A GCSE-style question comes with its own mark scheme, and it looks like preparation for the exams a school is judged on. Kneen and colleagues’ study of Key Stage 3 literature, which surveyed more than 170 teachers in parts of Wales and south-west England, reached the same conclusion as Ofsted from a different direction: “Literature teaching at Key Stage 3 is increasingly influenced by the demands of GCSE and exam accountability.”

What Ofsted found

Ofsted’s main findings for secondary schools start with writing. Schools “do not always identify the grammatical and syntactical knowledge to be taught for writing, and so do not build on what has been taught at primary school. Instead, written tasks are often modelled on GCSE-style assessments.” Later the report adds that in secondary schools “the writing curriculum often consists of frequent opportunities to practise writing exam-style responses before pupils have secured the more complex components.”

The same pattern shows up in reading. Across both phases, the report found that “in some schools, completing national curriculum test and exam-style questions is the main, extremely limited, method of improving pupils’ reading fluency and comprehension.” Its summary names the cost: “Schools expect pupils to repeatedly attempt complex tasks that replicate national curriculum tests and exams. This is at the expense of first making sure that pupils are taught, and securely know, the underlying knowledge they need.”

Paragraph frames are part of the same picture: “Writing weaknesses are often masked unhelpfully by narrow approaches, such as extensive use of PEE (point, evidence, explanation) paragraphs.” Our long read on What–How–Why paragraphs looks at what that means for any frame, ours included.

The report also records strengths: “At key stage 3 especially, schools offer a broad literature curriculum”, and “Summative assessment in secondary schools has improved.” The problem it describes is narrower: rehearsing the final task before the parts are secure.

What the curriculum asks for in Years 7 to 9

The Key Stage 3 programme of study is wide. It expects students “to read whole books, to read in depth and to read for pleasure and information”. The reading includes “English literature, both pre-1914 and contemporary, including prose, poetry and drama”, “Shakespeare (two plays)” and “seminal world literature”. The writing runs from “well-structured formal expository and narrative essays” to “stories, scripts, poetry and other imaginative writing”, “notes and polished scripts for talks and presentations” and “a range of other narrative and non-narrative texts, including arguments, and personal and formal letters”. A GCSE-style question practises a small corner of that.

The programme of study also names the parts that GCSE questions draw on. Students should understand challenging texts through “making inferences and referring to evidence in the text”, and read critically through “knowing how language, including figurative language, vocabulary choice, grammar, text structure and organisational features, presents meaning”. Those are the components a GCSE answer puts together under time pressure. Key Stage 3 is where they can be taught one at a time.

Practising the parts and rehearsing the whole

Daisy Christodoulou set out the difference in a Tes article in February 2017. She drew on K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology, who defined deliberate practice as “a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance”. Her distinction is between the performance and the learning that makes it possible: “Performance depends on the detailed, knowledge-rich mental models stored in long-term memory. The aim of performance is to use those mental models. The aim of learning is to create them.”

Her example is a writing programme called Expressive Writing. The English lessons Ofsted praised at the time, she wrote, “generally tended to involve pupils doing lots of writing”. The programme “breaks down the skill of writing into a number of quite small and specific tasks, and then gets pupils to practise those over and over again in different contexts”. Its very early tasks ask students to change a present tense verb to the past tense. Others deal with run-on sentences, and each lesson ends with a structured piece of writing that applies what was practised earlier.

In a 2019 blog post she returned to an analogy from her book Making Good Progress? and put it in two sentences: “Put simply, you wouldn’t train for a marathon by trying to run 26.2 miles in every training session. And in the same way, you shouldn’t prepare for an exam by doing exam-style activities in every lesson.” She adds that grades and scaled scores “can tell us something useful about the final academic performance, but they aren’t really that useful in individual lessons.”

The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance on improving literacy in secondary schools makes the same move for writing in every subject. Its fourth recommendation is “Break down complex writing tasks”, and it explains: “Teachers can break writing down into planning, monitoring and evaluation, and can support students by modelling each step.” Ofsted’s recommendations ask schools to “provide sufficient high-quality opportunities to practise these key components in the planned curriculum”.

In English the parts include knowing the story well enough to find any scene, having the words to describe a character precisely, writing sentences that carry a quotation and a point together, choosing a short quotation and the one word in it worth explaining, and saying what a writer wanted readers to think or do. Each can be practised in a few minutes, checked quickly and practised again, which a 45-minute essay cannot.

Our Feedback Loop kits show the idea at the scale of one paragraph. The first A Christmas Carol kit asks three short questions before students write anything longer. What: two ways Scrooge keeps other people at a distance in Stave 1. How: one method in “edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance”, and what it shows. Why: why Dickens might want readers in 1843 to see Scrooge as an outsider. Only then do students write the paragraph. Nothing in that shape depends on the exam, so it moves easily to Year 7 and a different book.

The case for some exam practice

The case is real. AQA’s Literature specification has five sections across two papers, all closed book, and Paper 2 alone lasts 2 hours 15 minutes. Writing at length about a whole text from memory, against the clock, is a skill in its own right, and students need more than one attempt at it before their first mock. Extended analytical writing is Key Stage 3 work anyway, since the programme of study asks for essays. And an occasional full task shows a teacher what breaks down when everything has to happen at once, which a short exercise on one skill cannot show.

Christodoulou’s own sentence leaves room for this. It turns on the word every, so the analogy allows for an occasional long run. The disagreement is about proportion and timing.

What the curriculum review said about Key Stage 3

The Curriculum and Assessment Review published its final report on 5 November 2025. Its proposal for Year 8 was a diagnostic check. It recommended “developing diagnostic Maths and English tests to be taken in Year 8”, and gave the aim: “to support teachers in identifying and remedying any problems before students progress to Key Stage 4.”

The government’s response, dated November 2025, went further on reading: “We will therefore introduce a new statutory reading test for all children to be taken in Year 8, designed to check both fluency and comprehension.” For writing and maths it said: “We will expect all schools to assess pupil progress in writing and maths in Year 8 and will support them to draw on a range of high-quality products to do so.” It plans to “publish a revised national curriculum in 2027 for first teaching in 2028”.

A national test of reading fluency and comprehension in Year 8 is one more reason to protect reading time in Years 7 and 8. In some schools, Ofsted found, exam-style questions are already the “main, extremely limited, method” of improving both.

What we would do

For a department planning Years 7 to 9:

  • Read whole books, and protect the time for it. The programme of study asks for two Shakespeare plays across the key stage: read them in full, at a good pace, and keep the slow, close work for a few scenes. Our long read on reading the whole text has the evidence.
  • Teach and test the parts: the story, vocabulary, sentence control, choosing a short quotation and explaining one word, a writer’s purpose. Use short, frequent, low-stakes checks, with retrieval practice at the start of lessons.
  • Write in the forms the programme of study lists, essays included, about whole texts the class has read.
  • If you use a paragraph frame, decide in advance when it comes off.
  • Leave GCSE question formats and GCSE grades out of Years 7 and 8. In Year 9, set a full GCSE-style question once or twice, late in the year, on a text students know well. Use it to find what breaks down, then feed back on the parts with whole-class feedback.
  • Hold to the same principle at GCSE. In each of our three set-text schemes, one lesson in 24 is a full exam essay (Lesson 23). The other lessons build towards it a paragraph at a time, and the Feedback Loop kits split even the paragraph into What, How and Why questions before students write it.

Sources

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