Research School Network: GCSE English resits: managing multiple exam boards How Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College prepares for November GCSE English Language resits across multiple exam boards.
—
Blog
GCSE English resits: managing multiple exam boards
How Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College prepares for November GCSE English Language resits across multiple exam boards.
Share on:
by Bradford Research School
on the
Sarah Birkett
Associate Assistant Principal with responsibility for Teaching and Learning and Head of English at Notre Dame Catholic Sixth Form College
Sarah has worked in both secondary and post-16, with experience in middle leadership and leading teaching. Her work centres on improving teaching and learning, using evidence informed approaches to ensure that teaching secures the best outcomes for a diverse range of students. She is committed to ensuring that students succeed in their post-16 studies, regardless of their circumstances.
A survey from the EEF dropped in my inbox recently. Its purpose was to enquire whether my setting aligned the exam boards we use for our GCSE resit courses with those used in our feeder schools. Given that the GCSE English Language resit students at my setting arrive from over 100 different feeder schools, I did chuckle slightly at the assumption behind the question! Navigating the complexity of GCSE resit, with its November entry, summer entry and variety of different options when it comes to exam board choice, is no mean feat.
The EEF’s Post-16 GCSE Resit Practice Review (2023) highlights the challenges of transition from secondary school to post-16 education and identifies a need to better understand how decisions about the organisation of resits affect students’ outcomes. Our approach to November resits is one way we’ve tried to respond to these challenges.
Our approach
We adopt what some might view as a slightly unorthodox approach to the period between the start of September and the November resit exams that take place in the week directly after October half term. We devote this period entirely to preparation for the resit exams (we call it ‘Countdown to November resit’.) Crucially, however, we prepare each student to sit the SAME board that they took in the summer. Any one class, therefore, usually has some students preparing for AQA, some for Eduqas and a small handful preparing for OCR or Edexcel
Navigating the practicalities
We have prepared an extensive suite of lesson resources that have different options for each of these groups of students. All resources used for the preparation of the reading sections of the papers use the same basic text, with different tasks or practice questions aligned to the requirements and question styles of each exam board. The same fiction extract for paper 1, for example, will have four different options for a task designed to get the students practising the skill of ‘finding explicit information’ – Eduqas asks them to find five pieces of information, for instance, whereas Edexcel breaks this task into two separate questions, one asking for one piece of information and a second asking for a further two pieces.
Some challenges we have encountered
Preparing such resources was time consuming, especially for my colleague who leads the GCSE course and who produced the lion’s share of these. Luckily, specifications stay in place for long enough to make the resource production a worthwhile endeavour.
Managing a whole class of students in which there are four slightly different tasks being completed at any one time can be quite tricky! It certainly tests our teachers’ skills, but we are experimenting with seating plans – sitting all the Eduqas students in one area of the classroom for example – which does help to make it more manageable. We also give out hard copies of each task so that each student has the right one for them.
Our teachers have to develop a working knowledge of the intricacies of the ‘best’ ways to approach the different styles of questions for all of the exam boards which isn’t always the easiest thing to do. We access as much PD provided by the various boards in order to keep the teachers up to speed.
What underpins our approach?
One of the messages from the EEF’s practice review is the importance of designing resit provision around students’ starting points and the particular demands of post-16 education. For us, this means recognising that students arrive with experience of different exam boards, and that the short period before November gives us limited time to prepare them for another examination.
We want to give our young people the best chance of securing their GCSE grade in the autumn and we truly believe this is the best way of doing so, not least because there simply isn’t the time to retrain everyone in the specific approaches that each exam board seem to require for GCSE English before October half term. Whether the approaches should vary so much from exam board to exam board is probably the subject for another blog – and doesn’t seem to be a consideration for my maths colleagues, who quite happily enter all their students for the same exam board in November. In 2025, almost two thirds of our English Language GCSE resit students achieved the 4 (or higher) that they were hoping for in the November resit. While we can’t attribute these results to our choice of exam boards alone, they give us confidence in continuing with an approach that we believe works well for our students.
After November
Given that we have until early June to prepare, we then have enough time to teach all our students the skills for the same exam board. We use Eduqas from this point forward, a choice that we are currently very happy with.
So I answered the survey and clicked the ‘We try to align the exam board for English resits only’ option, but, as you can see, this doesn’t really tell the whole story.
