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Teaching the Section B writing questions

The two Question 5s carry half the marks in GCSE English Language. The marks split the same way on both papers, the examiners’ reports name habits that are easy to spot, and a five-minute plan with regular sentence work deals with most of them.

Quick guide for teachers · 5 minute read

Question 5 is the same size on both AQA Language papers: one piece of writing for 40 marks, with 24 for content and organisation (AO5) and 16 for technical accuracy (AO6). The two Section B questions carry 80 of the qualification’s 160 marks. The specification weights AO5 at 30% of the GCSE and AO6 at 20%, and defines AO6 as using “a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation”.

The two tasks

Paper 1 asks for description or narrative, a choice of two tasks, in response to “a written prompt, scenario or visual image”. In June 2023 the choice was “Write a description of a zoo or wildlife park as suggested by this picture” or “Write a story about a human meeting an animal”. AQA’s 2026 changes adjusted this question: the prompt now reminds students that they can use their imagination and do not have to describe the exact picture, and students who choose the narrative option may now write just the opening of a story. The marks are unchanged.

Paper 2 asks students to write for “a specified audience, purpose and form” and give their own perspective on the theme of the reading sources. In June 2023 that meant a speech to council members about a statement on cars and public transport, and the examiners’ report notes that “Students were free to agree or disagree with the statement”.

How the marks work

In the June 2023 mark scheme, AO5 has four levels: 1 to 6 marks, 7 to 12, 13 to 18 and 19 to 24. Its descriptors are split in two. Content covers register, tone and vocabulary chosen for the audience and purpose; organisation covers the shape of the whole piece, paragraphs and the links between them. AO6 has four levels of 1 to 4, 5 to 8, 9 to 12 and 13 to 16, and looks at full stops and sentence boundaries, the range and accuracy of punctuation, a range of sentence forms used for effect, Standard English, spelling and vocabulary.

AO6 is judged across the whole piece, so a lively story full of comma splices still loses marks there.

What the examiners praise and warn about

The Paper 1 report for June 2023 praised focus: “The stronger responses used the image as a prompt to their own experiences and/or their imagination.” It was blunt about the tour-guide description: “Taking a step by step approach, as though walking around the zoo or wildlife park, meant that many students stayed in Level 2.” In the stories, “Talking animals tended to be a feature of less successful answers.” It noted that “planning the piece can often maintain the original focus”, and that words such as “‘obsidian,’ ‘lackadaisical,’ and phrases from poetry drawn from the English Literature specification continued to creep in”.

The Paper 2 report for the same year found that students “write best when they know what they are writing about and have an opinion about it”. It also found a small number of “wholly pre-prepared responses”, written from “a template for a generic written argument”. Answers in the lower levels “often lacked any structural features, such as paragraphs or discourse markers, to organise their ideas”.

Read together, the two reports ask for the same things: one moment in a description or story, a real opinion on the statement actually set, words chosen because they are exact, and paragraphs that show the reader the shape of the piece.

A plan in five minutes

Our schemes divide the last 45 minutes of each paper into 5 minutes to plan, 35 to write and 5 to check for AO6. The plan is in notes, never in sentences, and each task has its own shape.

A story plan fits on six lines: one moment, a character, an opening image, a turn, an ending that returns to the opening, and one sentence form saved for the turn. A description plan decides where the reader looks first and where they look last, moving from a wide view to a close-up. A viewpoint plan names the form and audience, the stance (agree, disagree or partly agree), the opening, three points with a counter-argument among them, the ending and one method held back for a single moment.

Practise the plan on its own against a timer, more often than the full piece.

Sentence-level practice

The EEF’s guidance report Improving literacy in secondary schools says “There is consistent evidence supporting sentence-combining activities”, and that there is evidence to suggest that “by focusing on the micro elements of writing for longer, students will ultimately be able to write longer, high quality responses”. Ofsted’s 2024 English report found that “Schools do not always identify the grammatical and syntactical knowledge to be taught for writing”.

Short, frequent sentence work does both jobs. Five minutes at the start of a writing lesson is enough:

  • Combine two or three simple sentences into one, with a subordinate clause or a participle phrase.
  • Correct a paragraph of comma splices, then write a paragraph of your own with none.
  • Write a long sentence that builds tension, then a short one that breaks it. Our model story opening in Lesson 18 of the Language Paper 1 scheme does this with “Then the hum stopped.”
  • Use a colon and a semicolon correctly in a viewpoint paragraph, once each.

Then make checking a habit. Two or three minutes on full stops, capital letters and spelling, at the end of every timed piece in class, is the habit students need on the day.

In our Language Paper 1 and Language Paper 2 schemes, Lessons 10 to 15 teach Question 5 with a mentor text in each lesson, Lesson 14 works on sentence forms and punctuation for AO6, and Lesson 18 is the five-minute plan. Feedback Loop kit 3 assesses Question 5 in Lesson 15 of each scheme. For students, Planning your writing for Section B sets out the same plans in their language.

Sources

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