Inside the scheme: Language Paper 1

Transcript

Introduction0:00

This is Between the Lines, and this is the walkthrough of our Language Paper 1 scheme of learning. I'm Hannah. If you're teaching this scheme this term, the next half hour is for you. If you lead the department, it's for your whole team, and it's the simplest way I know to make sure that every class doing Language Paper 1 gets the same lessons, the same support and the same assessment, whoever is standing at the front. We'll go through the scheme as a whole, then into one lesson, so you can see Know, Apply and Master working on a source. We'll look at the three levels of support, Securing, Strengthening and Soaring, and how you move students between them in a real classroom. We'll go inside a Feedback Loop kit, the walking talking mocks, the independent practice booklets, the full paper at the end of the unit, the catch-up sheets for missed lessons, and the inclusion guide for students with SEND, students with English as an additional language and pupil premium students. Nothing in this video is a sales pitch. You already have the files. This is the staff meeting you'd have if I could come in and run it, so pause it, open the folders alongside it, and make notes on anything you want to change, because every

The scheme at a glance1:06

file is editable and we'd encourage that. Start with the file called Start here, because that is where I'd start a new member of staff. Language Paper 1 is written for AQA English Language Paper 1, explorations in creative reading and writing, in the format examined from June 2026. It's 20 lessons of sixty minutes, about five weeks, with three levels of support throughout. The lessons run in four sequences: Reading fiction: language, lessons 1 to 5; Reading fiction: structure and evaluation, lessons 6 to 9; Writing fiction, lessons 10 to 15; The exam, lessons 16 to 20. There are four assessment points. Three are Feedback Loop kits, each tied to one exam question: Lesson 5 on Question 2, language, Lesson 9 on Question 4, evaluation, and Lesson 15 on Question 5, descriptive or narrative writing. The fourth is the full paper, sat in Lesson 19 in one hour forty-five, with the feedback lesson in Lesson 20. The folder list on page two tells you what every file is and who it's for. The teacher handbook, the slides and the Feedback Loop teacher guides are yours. The student packs, the independent practice booklets and the catch-up sheets go to students. The inclusion guide is for you, and the key words list beside it is for them. And this scheme has a folder the Literature schemes don't: 07, walking talking mocks. Seventeen of them, one for every extract in the scheme, and I'll come back to those. Page three has getting started in four steps: read Part 1 of the handbook, print the student packs or share the PDFs, open the slides for Lesson 1, and look ahead to the kit lessons so you know when the progress checks fall. Page four explains how the scheme works and, because Language is marked differently from Literature, the pages after it set out the levels for every question: four levels for each reading question, and for Section B, AO5 in four levels each split into an upper and a lower band, and AO6 in four levels. The headings and the mark bands are AQA's, from the 2026 sample mark schemes. Keep those pages near you when you mark the first kit. The last page is the unit at a glance, every lesson with its big question and its assessment point.

The teacher handbook3:22

If you only pin one page to the department noticeboard, pin that one. The teacher handbook is the long document, and it's built so that nobody has to read all of it before Lesson 1. Part 1, about this unit, takes ten minutes. It opens with the big question the whole scheme is answering: How do writers make readers see, feel and wait, and how can you do the same? Then the intent, and what students can do by the end: answer the multiple-choice questions by testing each option against the text; analyse words, images and sentence forms for Question 2; analyse structural methods that create a named effect for Question 3; evaluate a statement with evidence and a judgement of their own for Question 4; and write a description or a story opening with a clear focus, deliberate structure and precise vocabulary. It sets out the exam: one hour forty-five, eighty marks. Section A is one fiction source with four questions: four multiple-choice questions on a named part, language, structure and a statement to evaluate, forty marks in all. Section B is one piece chosen from two tasks, a description from your imagination, often with a picture, or the opening of a story, forty marks, twenty-four for content and organisation and sixteen for technical accuracy. Part 2 is the unit map, the four sequences and then every lesson in a table. Part 3 is the lesson notes, and this is the part a teacher opens every day. Every lesson has the same layout: the big question and outcomes, a lesson at a glance table with timings and the slide numbers for each phase, the Do Now answers, the vocabulary and the reading, the exploded quotation, the hinge question with a note on what each wrong answer tells you, the Master task at three levels, a model, the exit ticket, and then teacher notes: subject knowledge, common misconceptions, how to adapt the lesson, and the inclusion notes for that lesson. Part 4 is the assessment guide and Part 5 is the knowledge bank, which runs to several pages, because we think the person at the front should know more than the slide says. We wrote these notes with two readers in mind. The experienced English teacher who wants to check the reading of a line before they teach it, and the teacher who didn't train in English and has been given a Year 11 class in September.

How a lesson works: Know and Apply5:41

Both get the same page, and both get what they need from it. Every lesson runs the same way: Know, Apply, Master. Students learn the shape in the first week, and after that their effort goes into the thinking, because they already know what's coming next. Each lesson uses a different extract to teach one skill for one question, which matters in a Language scheme, because the exam will give them a text they've never seen and the skill is the only thing they can take in with them. Let me show you with Lesson 3, Images and senses. The big question is: How do images make a place feel alive, or dead? Know takes about fifteen to twenty minutes. The Do Now is five quick questions from memory, on earlier lessons, and students self-mark from the answer slide. Then vocabulary. We teach four words explicitly, not twelve. Here it's imagery, desolate, grotesque and transcendent. Then the reading: the valley of ashes from The Great Gatsby, printed exactly, with word help underneath, and it's in the student pack as well as on the slide. Apply is about fifteen minutes, and it has two parts. First you explode one quotation together. In this lesson it's "ashes grow like wheat". Before you reveal anything, students try the four empty boxes on the first explode slide: method, zoom in, effect, purpose. Then you think aloud through the full version. The method is a simile that compares a dump to a farm. The words to zoom in on are "grow", a word for living things, when ash is what is left after something has burned. The effect: the reader pictures a harvest of waste, a farm where only dead things come up. The purpose: Fitzgerald turns a place of life into a place of decay, so the valley feels unnatural from the first sentence. That is the whole analytical move the reading questions reward, done out loud, once a lesson, for the whole scheme. Then the hinge question, on mini-whiteboards. The ash-grey men "move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air". What does "crumbling" suggest about them? The right answer is B: they seem made of ash, falling apart like the land around them. And this is the bit I'd ask every teacher to use. The handbook tells you what each wrong answer means. A student who picks A, that they are tired after a long day, has a sensible but literal reading that misses the image, so you recap that imagery makes a picture and ask what usually crumbles. A student who picks C has added facts the text never gives, so they start on Securing and you model how to stay with the words on the page. The hinge question is how you decide, in thirty seconds, who starts on which level of

Master: one task, three levels8:27

support. That's what it's for. Master is the last twenty-five minutes, and it's where the three levels do their work. Everyone in the room answers the same task. In Lesson 3 it's in the style of the exam: Look in detail at the first paragraph. How does the writer use language here to describe the valley of ashes? In the style of Paper 1 Question 2, eight marks. Securing, aiming for a 4, gives a choice of exact quotations, here "ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens", "ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air" and "gives out a ghastly creak", a worked example on a different quotation, and sentence starters for What, How and Why. Strengthening, aiming for grades 5 to 6, gives prompts instead of starters: a clear point for What, then for How, choose a quotation, name the image, simile, metaphor or personification, zoom in on one word, and say which sense it appeals to, with a checklist. Soaring, aiming for grades 7 to 9, gives a debatable statement to argue with: Fitzgerald makes the valley of ashes more frightening than beautiful. How far do you agree? Two paragraphs, the second beginning with an alternative reading. Same source, same question, same standard. Only the scaffolding changes. Then the model is shared in the last five minutes. The What line in this one is: Fitzgerald describes the valley of ashes as a place where everything, even people, has turned to waste. And the exit ticket is a sentence to finish: The workers in the valley of ashes seem less than human because... Collect those and sort them into three piles, and you've planned the start of the next lesson. Now, how the levels work in practice, because this is the part that matters most for consistency across a department. The levels describe the support and the target grade. They don't describe the student. We never say lower ability or top set in these resources, and I'd ask you not to either. Students start where the hinge question and the last exit ticket put them, and they move up the moment they can work without the support. That can be within a lesson. The adapting notes say it plainly: anyone who completes the Securing frame in ten minutes moves to the Strengthening prompts for a second paragraph. A student who starts the scheme on Securing should not be on Securing in Lesson 20 because nobody moved them. In the reading lessons the task is usually a What–How–Why paragraph in the style of the question: a point, a short embedded quotation with the method named and one word explained, and the effect on the reader. In the writing lessons it's a piece of the Question 5 task, a description, a story opening or a viewpoint, built one skill at a time, so by Lesson 15 students have written

Feedback Loop kits11:13

every part of a forty-mark answer at least once. Three times in the scheme, the Master phase is a Feedback Loop kit: a twenty-five minute progress check that fits inside the lesson, and each one practises one exam question. Kit 1 is in Lesson 5, on Question 2, and its question is: How does the writer use language here to describe the pit and the countryside around it? The teacher guide tells you how to run it, step by step. Students read four common mistakes and a tip for three minutes. For this kit one of the mistakes is naming a method without saying what it does: "flames like red sores" is a simile, but the mark comes from explaining that the pit-bank looks diseased and painful. The tip is to zoom in on the verbs, because the engine is "clanking, stumbling", the smoke "sank and cleaved to the rough grass", and the verbs are where machines and nature both seem tired or ill. We put the misconceptions at the start on purpose. After ten years of marking this question I know what students are going to write, so instead of correcting it afterwards, we tell them before they begin. Then nine minutes on three short questions, one each for What, How and Why: two details from the opening that show the countryside is wintry or dying; to name a method in "flames like red sores" and explain what it suggests about the pit; and why the writer might make the countryside and the machines seem equally worn out. The teacher guide has the acceptable answers with marks. Then thirteen minutes on one What–How–Why paragraph in the style of Question 2, with words to describe and terms to analyse printed above it, describing words such as bleak, oppressive and polluted, and terms such as connotation, semantic field and personification, and a checklist to tick before they hand it in. You place the paragraph in one of AQA's four levels for that question, using our indicative content. There is no raw mark, and that's deliberate. A four out of eight tells a student one thing, that they got four. A level, in AQA's own words, tells them what the answer does now and what the next one asks for. Then the sheet that saves the evening: the whole-class feedback sheet. You read the paragraphs, note the patterns, and fill in one sheet for the class. What went well, for example, most of you chose short quotations such as "red sores" and named the method before you explained what the quotation suggests. Even better when, and we always say when, never if, for example, zoom in further: pick one word, such as "licking" or "stagnant", explain its connotations, then say how the word shapes the picture of the place. The four common mistakes are listed with a tally. A level spread, so you know where the class sits. Students to praise and students to support. And a box for what to re-teach at the start of next lesson. That one sheet goes in your mark book, and for a head of department it's the quickest honest picture of a class you'll get. Finally the improvement tasks, one for every level, done in green pen at the start of the next lesson, in place of the Do Now. Level 1: write one sentence saying what the countryside is like, add "The fields were dreary and forsaken", then one sentence explaining what "forsaken" tells you about the fields. Level 2: name the method in "flames like red sores", then write two sentences on what the noun "sores" makes you picture and why that picture is unpleasant. Level 4: compare the machines and the natural world, using "clanking, stumbling" and "withered oak leaves" to argue that the writer makes everything in the place seem worn out. Nobody rewrites the whole thing.

Walking talking mocks14:45

Everybody improves one answer from the level they reached. Now the folder the Literature schemes don't have. A walking talking mock is a mock paper you sit together, one question at a time, with the teacher thinking aloud through what each question wants before anyone writes. There are seventeen of them in this scheme, one for every extract in the scheme, so students practise the whole paper, Questions 1 to 5, on a text they already know from a lesson. Each one has an editable slide deck that thinks aloud through every question, a student answer sheet, model responses for every question, a marking guide and a feedback sheet for each student. One teacher guide holds every answer, model and marking guide. Mock 1 uses the Lesson 1 extract, the opening of To Build a Fire, and the teacher guide walks through all five questions on it, with the right answers for Question 1 and why each wrong option is tempting. How to run one is on page two of the guide. Students read the source in silence for fifteen minutes, underlining anything that strikes them. For each question you show its slide, then think aloud through the walkthrough slide while students annotate, briskly, two or three minutes. Students answer in silence for the time on the slide, which is the real exam timing for that question. Then the answers and the models go up, students tick what they did and add one improvement in a different colour. You mark with the marking guide, a level for each question, no raw mark, and the feedback sheet goes back with each level circled and one comment in each column, and students write a target and respond to it. A full mock takes about three lessons, or you can split it: Questions 1 to 3 in one lesson, Question 4 in the next, Question 5 in a third. When to use them: after the skills are taught, before a mock exam, or as revision in the spring. For a department, this is the answer to the question of what Year 11 does in the weeks between finishing the scheme and sitting the paper. There are seventeen rehearsals ready, and each one is a text the class has already

Independent practice16:42

met. The independent practice booklets are six weeks of homework, about twenty minutes a week, and they do for Language what the reading pages do for a set text: they keep the skill warm between lessons. Each week has one short piece of fiction written for the booklet, followed by four questions in the style of the exam. The six weeks are a frozen lake at dawn, the senses; a market closing, moving the focus; a storm reaching a harbour, pace; an empty school at night, sound; a hospital waiting room, small details; and a train pulling out, endings. Students read the whole text, then read it again and underline the three things that matter most. They answer every question in full sentences, looking back at the text so they're never guessing. And where a question asks them to, students use the same method in a paragraph of their own, so the booklet practises Section B as well as Section A. Every level covers the same text and the same questions each week. Securing has word help and sentence starters; Soaring asks for more. A student can move up a level whenever they're ready, just as in lessons. Set it from week one and collect it on the same day each week, and by the end of the scheme every student has read six more fiction texts closely and answered twenty-four more exam-style questions than they would have otherwise.

The full paper and the feedback lesson18:03

For the students who find unseen texts frightening, that is where the fear goes. The end of the unit is the full paper, sat in Lesson 19 under exam conditions: one hour forty-five, eighty marks, with the opening of a short story by D. H. Lawrence. Lesson 18 before it plans Question 5 in five minutes, and Lessons 16 and 17 practise the timing of Section A, because timing is a skill in this paper and we teach it as one. The teacher guide for the paper gives you the running order for the lesson, with the minutes for each question, then level guidance for every question, with our indicative content, and three complete model answers to Question 5, written at Securing, Strengthening and Soaring and each labelled with its AQA level, upper Level 2 for AO5 with Level 2 for AO6 at Securing, upper Level 3 and Level 3 at Strengthening, and upper Level 4 and Level 4 at Soaring, with notes on why each one sits where it does. Papers come back with a level for each question and a comment, and no mark, for the same reason as the kits. Then Lesson 20 is the feedback lesson: whole-class feedback for Section A and Section B, including the timing pattern and the AO6 pattern you saw, the model answers read in order for Question 4 and the opening of Question 5, and then the improvement task in green pen: students find their level group and redraft one reading answer and one part of their Question 5 piece, with the last two minutes for an AO6 check. For a department, the useful thing is that every class in the cohort sits the same paper, under the same conditions, placed in levels against the same indicative content.

Missed a lesson: the catch-up sheets19:38

That makes moderation a conversation about student work, which is what it should be. Attendance is the thing none of us can fully control, and it has a bigger effect on outcomes than most things we can. So every lesson in this scheme has a one-page catch-up sheet, in folder nine, Missed a lesson, and the page numbers match the lesson numbers, so you print page 3 for a student who missed Lesson 3. Here's Lesson 1. What you missed, in three bullets, for example: Paper 1 Question 1 is four multiple-choice questions on a named part of the source, each with three options and one right answer. The four key words with their meanings. The quotation to know, "The trouble with him was that he was without imagination", with a sentence on what it shows. Then catch up in about fifteen minutes: three short steps. For Lesson 1 that's to read the Lesson 1 source once, for who, where and what happens; reread the first paragraph and write one true statement about the man and one false one that borrows a word from the passage; then write a What–How–Why paragraph on what the opening suggests about the man. A check question: why must you test all three options in a Question 1 multiple-choice question? And at the bottom, the teacher check-in box: caught up, talked it through with me, needs a catch-up session, and your initials. The answers to the check questions are on the teacher's page at the back. The onus is on the student to catch up, and the sheet says so. But our most struggling and most disengaged students will not do it on their own, and they are the students who can least afford the gap. So the sheet is only finished when that box is ticked, and the check-in is the class teacher's job at the start of the next lesson the student attends. My suggestion is the one I'd use myself. When the student comes back, they do the catch-up sheet instead of the Do Now, and the sheet is stapled into their book. If a student misses a kit, they sit it as soon as they're back. A student who misses the mock in Lesson 19 sits it on their return, before the feedback lesson. And when someone asks what the department does about students who miss learning, the

The inclusion guide: SEND, EAL and pupil premium21:39

answer is in their books, done, with a date and your initials on it. The inclusion guide is the document I'd most like every teacher of this scheme to have read before Lesson 1, and it's also the one that most often sits unopened in the folder, so here it is. It covers students with SEND, students learning English as an additional language, and pupil premium students, and it opens with our approach in one paragraph. A student working towards a grade 4 and a student aiming for a 9 both test the Question 1 options, zoom in on one word for Question 2, name a structural method for Question 3 and give a view on the Question 4 statement. Only the support around the question changes. In this unit the support is mostly about access to the source and to the skill: a boxed named part, a timer on the board, a grid that shows the shape of an answer, a frame for the first sentence, a picture for the Question 5 task. For students with SEND the guide works through a short list of moves: box the named part on every printed source, because every reading question names one; the same shapes all unit, so one shape per question and keep it, crossing out two options for Question 1, a camera icon and a tension graph for Question 3, an agree and disagree table for Question 4; visible timers; one sentence at a time in Section B; and read the source aloud first. For students learning English as an additional language: pictures for the setting, since the sources range from the Yukon to Dublin and Long Island; false friends and idioms, such as without meaning outside, and a blind street meaning a dead end; the question words taught directly, language, structure, statement, to what extent; frames for the first sentence; punctuation modelled in colour for AO6; and a translation column on the vocabulary list. For pupil premium students: build the background in one sentence, since several sources assume mining villages or a Victorian bandstand; printed copies of the sources kept in the student pack, so homework and revision never depend on a device; ask first, then build; equipment for the mock, down to lending a watch; and the catch-up sheet as a check-in, in the first five minutes of the next lesson. Then the part that makes it usable: lesson by lesson notes. For every lesson there are four lines. Pre-teach, the words or idea to cover with a small group before the lesson, in tutor time or at the door. SEND. EAL. Pupil premium. For Lesson 3 the pre-teach is imagery, desolate and grotesque, with a photo of an ash heap or a landfill next to a wheat field, because the contrast between the two pictures is the whole lesson. The SEND note is to give the first paragraph enlarged with the grey and ash words in bold, and have students sort three images into a simile and metaphor table before writing. The EAL note: gloss ridges, crumbling, powdery and leaden on the copy, explain motor road and railroad as American English, and use the frame, Fitzgerald compares blank to blank. And for pupil premium students, give one sentence on the novel, a wealthy man's parties near New York in the 1920s with this poor area on the road between the suburbs and the city, and question these students first. Those same four lines are printed in the handbook at the end of each lesson's notes, after Adapting the lesson, so the teacher planning the lesson sees them without opening a second document. Beside the guide is the key words list for students: the words from the unit, each with its word class, its meaning, an example sentence and a My notes column for a translation or a picture. Two things I'd say to a head of department. First, what helps students with SEND helps the whole room, which is why the slides are cream, the fonts are plain and nothing flies in from the side. Second, these notes assume you know your students' needs and access arrangements better than we do. They're a starting point written by a teacher, for a teacher, and they're there to

Fonts, printing, slides and editing25:39

be edited. A few practical things that save arguments. Everything uses Calibri for reading and Cambria for headings, because both come with Microsoft Office on Windows and Mac and with Google Docs and Slides. Nothing to install, and no reformatting when a file moves between platforms. The student pages are white, with colour only on small panels, so the packs are cheap to print in black and white. Students who find a tint easier to read can have their pack printed on cream, pale blue or pale lilac paper, which also covers the access arrangement for coloured paper without an overlay. The slides are cream for the same reason, with no slide numbers, no clutter and nothing animated, and every slide carries teacher notes, so in presenter view you see the knowledge students need to take from that slide. Print the student packs once at the start of the scheme. Every Do Now, every source, every task and every exit ticket is already in there, so nobody is at the photocopier at twenty-five past eight. If students work on devices, share the PDFs instead. A note on the texts: the extracts are twentieth-century fiction, copied exactly from public-domain texts, so every student can be given a printed copy to keep, and there is nothing to clear. And edit. If your class brings a different misconception from the one we've written into a hinge question, change the hinge question. If you want a different Do Now because you know what they got wrong last week, write it. The Word and PowerPoint files are there so you can. Your licence covers editing, printing for your students and uploading to your school's own secure platform. The only things it asks you not to do are share the files outside the school or put

Getting started as a department27:12

them on a public website. So, how to start as a department. Four steps, the same four that are on page three of Start here, and I'd do them together in one meeting. One, everyone reads Part 1 of the teacher handbook. Ten minutes. Two, decide who prints and who shares PDFs, and agree that every student starts on the level the hinge question puts them on, and moves. Three, open the Lesson 1 slides together and walk through Know, Apply and Master once, so the shape is shared. Four, put the kit lessons, 5, 9 and 15, and the full paper in Lesson 19, in the department calendar, so every class reaches each progress check in the same week or near it. Then two things I'd add. Decide now which walking talking mocks you'll use and when, because they're the bridge between this scheme and the real paper, and the decision is easier in September than in March. And after each Feedback Loop kit, bring the whole-class feedback sheets to the next department meeting. One sheet per class. The level spread and the re-teach box will tell you more about where the cohort is than any spreadsheet, and the conversation about what to re-teach is the CPD. That's the Language Paper 1 scheme. The same structure runs through every Between the Lines scheme, so a teacher who has taught one has taught the shape of all of them, and a student who moves classes mid-year lands in a lesson they recognise. Lesson 3 of every scheme is free at btl.education if you want to show a colleague what a lesson looks like before they open the folders. Thank you for watching, and good luck with the paper.