GCSE Options, Take-up, Ebacc? Pupil survey.

 

Year 9 Survey April 2026

We have surveyed our Year 9 pupils after they picked their GCSE options, to see if we can find useful information on what shaped their choices and their attitudes to French. We are a school which did not go down the road of compulsory languages at KS4 for any pupils. Or even any guided pathways for certain groups of pupils. So with the removal of the ebacc, our experiences may turn out to be relevant to not just our school, but to other schools suddently finding the rules of the game have changed.

Our school is very supportive of languages. But not over and above the other subjects. And we historically have a very strong ethos of creative subjects, dating back to our former Specialist Status in literacy, performance and art. These are all aspects that schools will need to take into account, as they juggle the impact of the end of the ebacc alongside new "buckets" for creative subjects. So again, our school may be an interesting one to look at when it comes to the fate of languages.

We normally have about 25% of pupils picking a language at KS4. I don't know if this is what awaits other schools with the changes to performance measures. You would have hoped that schools who told pupils taking a language was important did so because they believed it. Not because they were chasing a bogus performance measure. But stories are certainly starting to circulate of some schools changing their options system. And it turns out that this is the single most significant thing in determining take up of languages. Not the quality of the curriculum or the teaching, or the intake, or parental attitudes. Where schools had high take-up of languages, it was generally because the school made it compulsory for some or all pupils.

What might some of the lessons be from a school that never went down this route?

Firstly, there is no longer a pupil who "should" be doing a language. That high flyer, successful in languages, ambitious and keen: they don't feel they "should" be doing a language. And they quite probably won't. All the other subjects on the list are also perfectly valid choices. And we find we generally have more lower prior attainment pupils picking French.

Furthermore, if this is reproduced across the country, with schools no longer pushing "higher set" pupils into languages, it could completely change the profile of the candidates sitting MFL. And further muddy the waters over the shape of the "curve". As the graph below from FFT Datalab shows, the profile of pupils with lower prior attainment currently taking GCSE is unlike that of other subjects. The last time we had a sudden change to the nature of the cohort, the consequences for MFL grading were chaotic, as shown in this post about the grading of pupils in 2005.

And what about the survey of attitudes of our Year 9 pupils? The graph below would seem to show that lower take-up of languages doesn't mean an outright rejection. It is not the "failure" that has been characterised in some reports. Most pupils were considering taking a language and may have even put it as a second choice. Schools where take up was "low" weren't failing in languages. Take-up was just at a natural level, given the number of subjects on offer. Pupils were seriously considering taking French, but didn't see themselves as "I am the sort of pupil who ought to be taking a language". That idea just does not apply. It exists only in the heads of people who went to school in the olden days, and we need to let go of it.

Year 9 Survey April 2026

This graph is to some extent misleading. Only 50 pupils out of 180 responded to the survey. And it is over represented by the blue section. We do NOT have 38% of pupils taking French next year. The true figure is closer to 25%. This is in line with previous years, except that this year we are no longer offering Spanish, and only a few of the pupils who were hoping to take Spanish have opted for French. So although it means numbers for languages has stayed around 25%, it does mean an increase in the number of pupils opting for French.

So what are the kind of things that pupils are taking into consideration when it comes to options? Is it the usefulness of languages for careers, university applications or travel? Is it their experience of language learning in KS2 and KS3 and the progress they feel they have made? Is it their knowledge of the GCSE exam, perhaps relayed to them by older pupils?

Here's what they said:

Factors influencing my decision NOT to pick French

Factors influencing my decision to pick French

The first graph shows the pupils who did not pick French, including the ones who were seriously considering it or put it as a second choice. The second graph shows the pupils who did pick French.

First of all, "Plans I have for the future" stands out as a reason for NOT picking French. I have written before about how early our pupils seem to have very specific ideas of what they plan to do in the future. And in most cases, a language isn't relevant to their plans. It seems from comparing the two graphs that we are more likely to attract pupils who are more open minded about their future.

Secondly, experience and sense of progress in French so far doesn't come out strongly as a negative influence. It's more likely to be a positive factor.

And overall, "interests and passions" seems an important factor.

It is interesting that the GCSE and grading don't seem to come out as an important factor. But as I explained here, we are careful to hide the truth of GCSE grading from pupils. If we told them it's harder to get a GCSE in languages, it would of course be off putting. In fact it's the assumption that grading is fair, that leads people to the conclusion that we must be bad at learning languages or bad at teaching languages.

The survey also fits in with conversations we had with pupils around their options. So I know those pupils who "should" be taking a language but eventually decided not to. Because they came to talk to me about it. For example our blurb suggests that if you want to be a Primary teacher you should seriously consider taking a language and one pupil wanted to explore whether not taking a language would be an obstacle to them entering the profession. Of course we had to say that it would not. And given that their French is already of this standard (open link for examples) in Year 9, plus they study Spanish on Duolingo, I think they would be well placed to teach a language in KS2. And I have other stories of pupils whose experience of language learning has already been important in their lives. It has taken them places and given them experiences they otherwise wouldn't have had. They have learned how language learning works, and they continue to study different languages online. They have achieved a level in KS3 that would have been GCSE for their parents' generation. (Yes, I taught many of their parents.) And they have made carefully considered decisions based on personal interest and future plans.

What should we conclude from this? We shall see the fallout from changes to the performance measures. And maybe start to think more deeply about the purpose and place of language learning in schools. And how the current structures are not really fit for purpose. But that is for another post...

Tiering Decisions. Pupils suffer. Teachers get the blame.

 The situation we find ourselves in with regard to Tier decisions for the new GCSE is unconscionable.

Deciding whether to enter a pupil for Higher or Foundation Tier will have an effect on their grade. A pupil capable of getting a grade 6 will be limited to a grade 5 if entered for Foundation. A pupil who falls short on Higher is in real danger of getting a U.

In a normal year, this is a tricky situation. And the particularly low number of pupils getting a grade 6 in languages is a sign that schools know they have to play it safe and enter pupils for Foundation Tier. Especially schools who have had their fingers burned with pupils getting a U.

But this year is different. Very different. And much, much worse. It is an impossible situation for schools, and deeply unfair for pupils.

We have a new exam. With new style papers, different content, but the same standards. The Sample Assessment Materials seem much more accessible than the old past papers, but we have no grade boundaries to determine what the pupils' marks mean or what Tier they should be entered for.

What can schools do?

1. On Speaking and Writing, you can gauge pupils' performance against the standards stated in the specification (although this has been the subject of much prevarication) and make judgments of parity with expectations in the old exam. Can pupils speak and write coherently and accurately at a level that we recognise as matching a certain grade? We can make some judgements here.

2. On Listening and Reading, you can invent grade boundaries for the Sample Assessment Materials exam papers. You can adjust these to be more cautious given that the papers seem more accessible, especially the listening. And you can back this up on hearing anecdotal evidence from teachers at schools where large numbers of pupils are scoring full marks or close to full marks on the papers. You can use your impressionistic knowledge of your pupils and how they compare to previous cohorts. You can moderate with other schools and trusts to see if your invented grade boundaries deliver reasonable outcomes when you plot larger numbers of pupils onto a curve. Ofqual have optimistically offered guidance on the shape of the curve, even though they know that this information is useless for individual schools.

3. You can identify the "cross over" questions which appear on both Higher and Foundation and check how pupils are doing on these key questions, to see if they would perform well at the lower end of Higher Tier, which presumably is aimed at grades 4 to 5.

4. You can give pupils old style past papers, for which we do have reliable grade boundaries. Because although the content is different and the exams are very different, the standards should not have changed.

5. You can look at pupils' "targets" and decide if you think they are working well and would be on track to meet expectations.

What happens when you do this?

1. Pupils perform well on Speaking and Writing. But we know that our pupils have always had a "spiky profile", doing better on some papers and worse on others. While encouraging that our pupils can speak and write well, if other schools' pupils also perform at this level, then this is not what is going to determine their grade. I currently have pupils with very strong Speaking and Writing who are entered for Foundation Tier because their grade will depend on the Listening and Reading.

2. Moderation with other schools confirms that the papers are more accessible. And that we need to be conservative with our grade boundaries, avoiding allocating high grades on Listening to pupils who come out with marks much higher than in previous years. While useful in demonstrating that we have done our best to deal with the impossible situation, it doesn't give enough confidence to trust the grade boundaries when it comes to making Tier decisions that could limit or wipe out a pupil's grade.

3. Looking at the cross over questions: do we really make decisions on individual pupils' tier of entry based on a couple of questions rather than their overall mark? What if pupils seem to do about as well on these questions as on the others on the paper? Does this mean we should calibrate downwards their grade because they are underperforming on these key questions? Or calibrate it upwards because they are doing as well on some "fully Higher" questions as they are on the cross-over questions? If these questions are aimed at pupils in the grade range of 4-5, these pupils are not the ones who should be entered for Higher Tier anyway. This exercise just seems to confirm that pupils are finding the SAMs accessible and that the grade boundaries this year could be ridiculously high if the real exams are anything like the SAMs.

4. There is no point giving pupils the old style Higher Listening paper. As the marks for all pupils from grade 4 to grade 7 all tend to fall into a narrow range of marks. A few marks either way would totally change the grade. So it's not a reliable indicator of anything useful. Therefore we are dependent on the old style Higher Reading paper to try to calibrate pupil performance. Firstly, it becomes painfully obvious how bad the old papers were. Pupils who know the vocabulary and grammar are bamboozled (quite deliberately - that's how the papers are set up) and come out with very low marks. Secondly, how do you use the information? Do you use the old Reading grade to entirely set the expectation of the individual pupil's overall expected grade? Do you use it to specifically check against the individual pupil's SAMs Reading grade and calibrate that? Do you use your cohort's performance on the old paper to get a general calibration of how far all of your grades are (or are not) in line with your invented grades based on the SAMs? How many goes do you have at old past papers and which of those do you take as significant if the grades come out different every time? When does it start to become depressing for the pupils because of the negative experience? And is it a waste of time because you should be practising the new style papers? If we were to go by the old style Reading, we would be entering nearly all of our pupils for Foundation Tier.

5. Pupils and parents look at the "targets" and the teacher's report saying that the pupil is working well. And wonder why they are not being entered for Higher Tier if their target is a 6. So we have to explain that the targets this year were homemade because the pupils didn't do SATs in KS2. And that pupils this year have been given the same target in all subjects, regardless of the fact that the grades given out in languages are a grade lower in languages than in other subjects.

In other words, we are doing an incredible amount of hard work but we are still completely in the dark in making a decision which will directly affect pupils' grades, and which could result in them getting a U.

There is nothing more that teachers can do. We have been badly let down by the exam boards, ofqual and the DfE. There are whisperings that something is going to be done about grading. Which would be welcome. But just throws another unknown into the mix. People are saying that it's going to be really embarrasing if pupils score high % marks but get low grades or no grade at all. We need absolute clarity on this now, so we can enter pupils for the correct tier. If I enter them for Higher on the basis of these whispers, I am gambling with their grade. If I enter them for Foundation, I am limiting them to a grade 5.

Either grades are going to be more generous. Because everyone knows they have been unfair for years. And not having the baseline of SATs is an opportunity for the DfE and ofqual to tweak this. As well as the declared aims of the new GCSE to have a better curriculum and better teaching, which ought to be rewarded with better outcomes. In which case if we put pupils in for Foundation, we will be penalised.

Or grading standards will be maintained. Because that is ofqual's brief. In which case there will be a bloodbath of pupils getting a grade U because their teacher made the decision to enter them for Higher Tier based on their high % score on the SAMs.

So we have to guess and gamble one way or the other.

When the old new GCSE came in, for the first year there was a wider grade 3 safety net on the Higher Tier. The fact that we have not been given a safety net this time round, even though the situation is even trickier, is a dereliction of duty between the exam boards, ofqual and the DfE, with no-one taking responsiblity. They are all waiting to see how things turn out. And teachers will get the blame and pupils suffer the consequences. This is disgraceful.

Language World 2026

 Really enjoyed Language World 2026. Meeting old friends and online friends and new friends. It's always about recharging batteries and making connections, chatting over breakfast or standing in a queue.

My talk was about how languages has the benefit of many complementary facets: grammar, communication, usefulness, linguistics, culture, memorisation, self expression, risk taking, accuracy... All in half an hour.

Here it is. My manifesto for how to teach in the messy middle between the extremes where we are told everything we do is wrong:

I showed examples from the classroom and of pupils' work. But it may leave you with questions about exactly how we get Y9 working on spontaneous extended answers in speaking and writing.

Things like:

I can tell you. But it won't fit into half an hour!

If you really want to, you could catch up with my 2020 Language World talk that takes you through the sorts of things we do:

Can I find examples to explain why step one of the knowledge approach is flawed?

 In a post on the knowledge theory of learning called "Spherical Children in a Vacuum", I made this quick characterisation of Direct Instruction/Knowledge based teaching:

You break down the knowledge into carefully chosen chunks. You make sure that each chunk is carefully defined. You use regular low stakes recall to make sure that memorisation is happening over time. You make sure explanations take account of all possible misconceptions, with words and images carefully chosen to be clear rather than decorative or distracting. You deliberately contrast and discriminate between important concepts so they are not confused. You meticulously order the content of the curriculum so nothing is extraneous or redundant, and everything is consolidated and built upon. You make sure pupils can recite the best definition of a concept and can quote verbatim the best evidence.

And I suggested that it is fundamentally flawed. How can it be flawed? Are all the things on this list not A Good Thing? They certainly seem sensible or even important. But what if there is a mistaken assumption in the very first step. "You break down the knowledge." How can this be wrong? What other approach is there?

I am going to draw first on my experience of language learners. These could be hypothetical situations to make a point, but they are also true personal stories.

Imagine you are tasked with teaching the bosses of a small high tech business in a converted old school building in a village in Switzerland who speak no English how to read documents from the British Ministry of Defence on the specification of some diving equipment that doesn't make bubbles because it recycles and remixes the exhaled gases. (They initially wanted me to translate the classified documents but didn't realise that I couldn't do this without being allowed to read them.) How would you set about teaching them English? Maybe you would start with grammar. You could chop up the knowledge in a logical way. They could start with the present tense of regular verbs. Then some irregular verbs. Then some other tenses introduced one by one until they built up the overall picture of the language.  Ensuring mastery at every step through a "novice" stage in which knowledge is introduced, consolidated and built on. And eventually they would reach the "expert" level where they could read the secret documents.

Now imagine you are living with a large family in Mexico who speak no English. An English friend comes out to stay. They have a C in O Level French and they teach themselves colours, numbers, days of the week in Spanish on the aeroplane. What would their language learning experience be?

The family could have fun explicitly teaching them. Names of foods, how to give opinions, aspects of daily routine and interaction, some rhymes, songs and sayings. But with no thought of how the conceptualisation of the language is building up. No careful breaking down of the overall grammar system. Instead, a direct response to the individual learner and the situation they find themselves in.

And in interactions outside the house. Immersive exposure to Spanish in social, transactional and professional situations. How much of this input is Comprehensible Input that the human brain can learn from? Almost all of it. Because Comprehension isn't a function of the words and the grammar. It's a function of the interaction. You can tell by what the situation is, what the interaction is, what people are showing you, tone of voice, other people's response, the reaction you get when you act on what you think is being said. We need to bear this in mind when we swap to talking about the classroom. One thing we know the human brain can do is acquire languages. Especially when the language is being used to communicate, not as a chopped up thing to be learned. But the debate about whether that is relevant to the classroom situation continues...

Just to satisfy your curiosity, my Swiss employers never did learn enough English to read those documents for themselves. My friend stayed on in Mexico after I returned to England, and within 6 months had Spanish fluent enough to deliver post-graduate science presentations.

What could I have done with those Swiss engineers? Get hold of some similar (non classified) documents and read through with them, showing them how their technical understanding of the content equipped them to extract meaning. Diagrams, technical terms, cognates, figures, and what made sense given their knowledge of the subject. Despite their lack of English, their engagement with the meaning of the texts would have allowed them to recognise important information. And to start to engage with learning the English they needed.

My first point in all this is to illustrate the difference between learning that starts with chopping up the knowledge, and learning that starts with what the learner will immediately grasp hold of. Are you teaching grammar step by step so one day the learner will have the full picture and be able to communicate? Or are you teaching the learner what they need to communicate, and leaving the overall grammatical picture to emerge once they have enough language for patterns to appear?

My second point is that we can't answer that by chosing one of the approaches. It would seem sensible to attempt something that combines the two. And my biggest point is that this overlapping combination doesn't emerge from thinking about what should work. We have to start from the classroom and what we find actually does work.

And here we find things get messy. Learning is not neat and tidy or uniform. And it is not purely cognitive. Whole dimensions of relevance, meaning, importance, enjoyment make a real difference. We saw in this post that using language to say things that have meaning for them (rather than just to practise the language) has an impact on learning. We saw in this post how pupils remember chien and chat even though they never need them in lessons again, but mess up j'ai and je even though they see them every lesson. And pupils who can tell you the difference between travailler and travaillé get it wrong as soon as they are focused on genuinely telling you what job they would like to do.

What does this tell us? If you take a chopping up the knowledge approach, you could say this means we should double down on drilling the difference between travailler and travaillé and make sure you avoid letting pupils express themselves until they are ready. This is an approach based on determining what you think should stick and not moving on until it has.

If you take an approach based on what the learner knows and can do, you observe what sticks and what doesn't, what is salient, relevant, useful. You observe how the learner's body of language grows, and you build a syllabus that deliberately focuses on how the learner's snowball of French is growing, not on making sure your knowledge is delivered in an even covering. As we know when we look out of the window the day after the snowfall, the snowball outlasts the even covering.

You don't need to agree with me, but I hope I have gone some way to making the distinction clear. And I am sure we all agree that it's what happens in the classroom that matters, not on paper.

Does this apply only to language learning?

What about say science? The version of the knowledge approach we see in some schools would start by making sure pupils know definitions and rules. They learn them and then see them in action and then apply them to exam questions. For example making sure that pupils know that an object remains at rest or in uniform motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. You can teach pupils this. Make sure they understand it, can repeat it. And then see if they can apply it to what happens when a person A takes their foot off a skateboard B while standing on a slope of gradient y.

What would the opposite approach be? And here the "we never ask pupils questions they haven't been told the answer to" or the "discovery learning doesn't work" people would be horrified. But how about asking pupils what is going on when you push a smallish lump of rock and when you push a marble. Do things keep moving when you stop pushing them? You need to find out if pupils think that things stop moving when you stop pushing them and there must be something strange going on with the marble, maybe to do with its rotating motion. And that maybe different rules govern different things of different weights. The rules seem complicated and to apply differently to different objects. Then, you can show them that there's actually a different way of seeing things that suddenly simplifies everything and covers everything. Things stay still until something moves them. Things stay moving until something stops them. This simple rule explains the rock and the marble.

Isn't this an example of how chopping up the knowledge, giving clear definitions and making sure pupils "know" it and can repeat it, is a partial and defective approach? The question needs to be how we can make something relevant, important and revelatory to pupils, by engaging with their actual thinking, not what they ought to know.

All the steps after the first statement (in bold) are still desirable. 

You break down the knowledge into carefully chosen chunks. You make sure that each chunk is carefully defined. You use regular low stakes recall to make sure that memorisation is happening over time. You make sure explanations take account of all possible misconceptions, with words and images carefully chosen to be clear rather than decorative or distracting. You deliberately contrast and discriminate between important concepts so they are not confused. You meticulously order the content of the curriculum so nothing is extraneous or redundant, and everything is consolidated and built upon. You make sure pupils can recite the best definition of a concept and can quote verbatim the best evidence.

But the first step, with its assumption that the aim of teaching is to break knowledge into chunks and then reconstruct it in the learner's brain, is bogus. Learning is much messier and much more active. Learning isn't flatpack assembly. Learners engage much more creatively with learning. They assign importance, use or ignore features, transform, link, make associations and extrapolations, imagine implications, create, question, contort and pervert the knowledge they are given.

Assuming it's all about the knowledge leads to attempts to quash pupils' agency and individuality. When we know learning works best when pupils think, find and give meaning, and take ownership.

Spherical Children in a Vacuum.

 I do like the adage that, "There's nothing so practical as a good theory." In CPD, an insightful understanding that equips you to plan and understand what is going on, is much better than a bunch of lesson activities to try. And we don't learn items of knowledge in isolation. We learn by attaching new knowledge to concepts we already have. If that sounds simplistic, don't worry; it's meant to.

We have lived through a decade where a theory of learning and knowledge has been in vogue. And if you were to come up with a theory of how to teach spherical pupils in a vacuum, then it's a great theory. You break down the knowledge into carefully chosen chunks. You make sure that each chunk is carefully defined. You use regular low stakes recall to make sure that memorisation is happening over time. You make sure explanations take account of all possible misconceptions, with words and images carefully chosen to be clear rather than decorative or distracting. You deliberately contrast and discriminate between important concepts so they are not confused. You meticulously order the content of the curriculum so nothing is extraneous or redundant, and everything is consolidated and built upon. You make sure pupils can recite the best definition of a concept and can quote verbatim the best evidence.

Absolutely fantastic as a theory.

Where it falls down is the amount of effort it requires to make our pupils conform to being spherical and in a vacuum. Some of the measures are more reasonable than others. Spherical pupils have regulation haircuts, carry their bag in the correct hand, follow the text with a ruler, answer the teacher in well projected full sentences in standard English, keep eye contact with the teacher at all times, smile and say good morning when bidden, copy knowledge organisers respecting the exact format. Pupils in a vacuum walk along a painted line in silence between lessons, have their phones locked away or preferably do not have phones at all, cannot visit the shops on their way home, resist the "degenerate" culture of their milieu, are marked for their conversation on set topics at the table, are exposed only to the authoritative voices of the "best". And are considered "novices" not yet capable of creativity, expression or original thought.

The sheer amount of effort put in to making pupils conform to being spherical and in a vacuum ought to tell us that the theory is great... as a theory.

In fact, on contact with real pupils, it turns out it may be a terrible theory. We know that the pupils who learn best are the pupils who think about what they are learning. The pupils who question what they are being told. The pupils who think of links, implications, associations, imaginative tangents. Pupils who know they have the agency to examine new knowledge in the light of what they already know. Pupils who reconsider their existing ideas in the light of new knowledge. Pupils who take risks and learn from their mistakes. Learning is an on-going process that they are in charge of. We know this is what our best learners do.

When I sit in a CPD session taking notes on what the important man is saying, I am not writing down what he says! I am writing down what the things he says make me think. Or what I think about the things he says. If he's lucky. I may be planning my lessons for tomorrow and trying to block out his predictable nonsense. And I am an excellent learner.

And we know that the pupils who struggle with learning are the ones who have been made to feel that they don't have that agency. Their thoughts were wrong. Their ideas were unwanted. Their associations and conceptualisations were invalid. Learning now consists of having to ingest more stuff and be tested on it. Real learning, in the areas where they have been made to feel like this, has almost stopped. The emotional link between getting a question right/wrong and being morally right/wrong is painful. They have been labelled as bad and their agency has been taken away.

Yes. All this is another theory or model. But it's also observed in the reality in the classroom. Which the knowledge theory tacitly acknowledges by its insistence on making all pupils spherical rather than individuals.

Having a theory that works fine for pupils who conform to how they "should" be rather than how they are, is harmful. It's the thoughts of "should, should, should" that have to be teased out and confronted once pupils' mental health starts to suffer.

Let's see if we can start to get to somewhere more positive and see how we can successfully bring the knowledge theory into contact with reality.

Writer and CPD expert Sue Cowley alerted me on bluesky to this example where Ofsted start from what they think is a logical chunking of the knowledge, rather than from an expert understanding of children and learning:

It reminded me of this Ofsted video:

The image illustrates their idea that knowledge preceeds skills. I can't think of a worse example. It immediately debunks their whole idea. Finding out what shapes fit where is a perfect example of where learning can happen through play... even maybe by... discovery. A child who arrives in a school setting without any knowledge of shapes, may lack the cultural capital of having played with a shape sorter. Not the cultural capital of having had direct instruction of what shape goes where.

In language learning, we have Scott Thornbury's idea of the omelette. (Make your own link to spherical chickens.) You do not teach someone how to make an omelette by chopping up a cold dead omelette and asking them to reassemble it. You make an omelette from raw ingredients. Stirring, adjusting the heat, paying close attention to what is happening in the pan.

It's the same for language-learning. To change metaphors again, we are helping pupils acquire their own snowball of French. With slow accretion, where more French sticks to what they already have, rolling from one topic to another getting bigger and bigger. We are not aiming for an even coverage, with everything planned out and programmed. A snowball will outlast the even coverage once the snow has all melted away.

The problem with the knowledge theory was the very first line in the description near the start of this post. Now you know why I put it in bold type. The very first step is a mistake: You break down the knowledge into carefully chosen chunks.

Chopping up the knowledge into logical chunks, is not the same as building up knowledge, concepts, skills. The process of building up the pupil's accretion of knowledge and skills is different to chopping up the knowledge.

A starfish when it regenerates does not necessarily regrow an arm. It could be that the arm regrows the starfish. When learners have a chunk of knowledge, but don't yet have the whole starfish, their brains still see how it can grow, what shapes it can take, what it can graft onto, how it can feed, move, reproduce. It's no good getting cross because they were meant to wait for when you thought they were ready for the next chunk to be attached to the first. If they did that, the first bit of starfish would be as dead as a cold omelette before they get your next bit.

Stop pulling apart dead starfish and posting them into children's brains like shape sorters. Start looking at what's growing. [Regretting this metaphor.] Instead of starting from pulling apart the knowledge, we should be looking at how learning happens, how learning grows organically.

This is what the Frameworks of Objectives did if you used it intelligently rather than as a tickbox. This is what APP did if you were allowed to use it intelligently rather than just for assessment. This may even be what David Didau did in English language, with a focus on skills broken down and built up.

In languages, breaking down the grammar does not reflect how pupils learn. Firstly, beginners make strong links between the French they are learning and the real world. Links within the language come much later. So when we teach pets, I know that j'ai, je n'ai pas, un, une and the rules for plurals, the phonics in oiseau or poisson are all going to be much more important than chien or chat. But the learners are focused on the meaning of the words. They will remember chien even though we never use it. But they will mix up je/j'ai lesson after lesson. We're not teaching from how the content "should" be broken down. We're working with what the pupils are learning.

I have fantastic ways of introducing the perfect tense in French. I can explain it formally, I can introduce it through cheats like j'ai décidé de, I can talk about fiancé meaning engaged, I can contrast mange/manger/mangé, I can physically get pupils to change the form... But as soon as pupils are let loose on their own writing, they are not thinking in the same way as someone who has a complete coherent picture of the grammar and wants to show it. They are concentrating on saying things they want to say. Not on the forms of the endings. As human beings, they are approaching language from a different angle. Their partial interlanguage is forming from raw ingredients, not from chopped up things I gave them. 

Please do click on some of the links to see practical examples of me engaging with this in the classroom. It will probably make more sense than spherical chickens and snowballs and eggs.

Talking to pupils about their accretion of learning: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2026/02/reflecting-with-pupils-on-beliefs-about.html

Why meaning matters even in terms of "change in long term memory": https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2025/12/what-do-we-mean-by-meaning-and-does-it.html

Here's a final positive message about how cognitive science does make total sense in the classroom:

If you are a teacher who wonders about the fact you seem to be trying things out, watching what happens, trying again... and you wonder if there's a theory that tells you what you SHOULD be doing. Well there is. It's called cognitive science or cognitive load theory. It tells you that pupils learn by thinking about what they are learning. It tells you that pupils learn by making links and networks of knowledge. It tells you that there's a sweetspot between making things engaging and making things distracting. There's a sweetspot between being challenging and being overwhelming. It doesn't tell you where that sweetspot is. It just tells you it's important. So what all of this is telling you is that you were doing the right thing all along. Teaching happens in the classroom with real children and a teacher who constantly monitors, adjusts and reflects.

I have written a follow up post to try to give examples of what I mean by teaching the knowledge versus teaching the pupil. Click here to see if it makes sense: https://whoteacheslanguages.blogspot.com/2026/02/can-i-find-examples-to-explain-why-step.html

Oracy - Pupil Voice KS3 French

 French is a lesson where taking part and speaking is going to be important. We have done a "pupil voice" survey of Key Stage 3 pupils. This is ostensibly to see what they think of how their lessons are going and how they feel about taking part. But there is a further goal of seeing how well they understand and buy into what teachers are trying to do in ensuring all learners are involved in the lesson. And a further further goal of developing our pupils' propensity to think articulately about their language learning. So I would be lying if I didn't say straight away that while we want to listen to what pupils have to say, we are also trying to shape their understanding and appreciation of what their teachers are doing and why they are doing it.

I am going to concentrate on writing up the Year 7 results. For several reasons. Partly because the Year 8 surveys were fragmented so teachers have individual information and evidence they can use for their own professional development research questions. And because it feels as if Year 7 are new to this and we have the biggest job with them to set up the classroom parameters for language learning.

Here goes:

Year 7 pupils - Confidence in Taking Part

Year 7 Pupils - Getting Answers Wrong

Year 7 - How do Teachers Ask Questions?

I have to say I am very happy with these results and the graphs largely speak for themselves. The big red sector (42%) are pupils who say that they understand the importance of taking part because it's how you learn. They can take part confidently because the teacher has set up the expectations that they want to hear all pupils having a go; not to test them, but because that's how learning happens. The second biggest sector is the yellow (30%) who aren't always confident taking part, but understand that their teacher is deliberately making sure they have the opportunity. The blue sector (18%) are the ones that presumably we would hear from if we only asked the most confident to take part. And we have about 2 pupils per class who are not confident and who are not taking part. I am pleased it's such a small number. And I hope that these are individual cases where the teacher is carefully managing interaction and confidence sensitively. 

There may be an element of pupils giving the answer they think we want to hear. But even if this is so, this means that their understanding of what we want to achieve in the classroom interactions does coincide with ours. Even if they are giving "the right answer", they show they know what "the right answer" is!

This confidence in "having a go" is reflected in the second graph, on what happens when you get an answer wrong. We do have a couple of pupils per class who think the teacher will be cross. The majority say that the teacher is helpful. With over 50% of pupils saying that the teacher will be interested in their answer and why they said it, whether it be right or wrong. This would seem to be a hugely impressive verdict on our teaching, if pupils have picked up on this as important to the way we interact and the purpose behind our questioning. It shows that we are using questioning as a way to tease out what pupils think and can do, in order to engage with their thinking and develop their skills. There is also strong awareness of strategies like coming back to a pupil later to give them a chance to show their progress. Again, pupils were choosing from a list of options, so I was shaping their possible responses, but the pattern of their answers shows good awareness of how we want our classrooms to work, in quite sophisticated ways. This goes way beyond thinking of participation as being put on the spot to see if you know the expected answer.

In terms of the mechanics of asking questions, the majority (68%) of pupils understand that the teacher is trying to get everyone involved. And 58% have spotted that teachers ask a question, give pupils time to think, and then decide who to ask. I know that we work this way. The interesting thing is whether pupils understand this. I think we can do more to point this out to pupils. So that they know they are all expected to be thinking and have an answer ready. Even if it's a partial answer, a wrong answer, or even a question. It's clear from the survey answers that teachers are choosing pupils to check that they are paying attention, thinking, and have an answer ready. Interestingly the pupils are not aware of how carefully teachers decide who to pick. And then there's the idea that teachers pick at random which I think is largely because of using am stram gram, which pupils love! Hopefully this all contributes to a classroom where everyone is thinking and ready to take part. 

As well as these questions with options to pick, there was scope for pupils to type their own answers. This is important in developing their ability to think about their learning and articulate their thoughts. Their answers were strong on emotional response - a kind teacher, dislike of participating if their hand wasn't up, fun activities incentivising participation, who they work with, confidence in speaking in front of the class. There was perhaps surprisingly no mention of pronunciation confidence, which may be a sign of the work we have put in on phonics. But maybe we need to do further surveys on this. This is perhaps the most important thing to take from the whole survey. For all our intentions and expectations and techniques, managing pupil emotions is key to learning and confident participation.

Pupils' awareness of techniques the teacher is using was less well articulated. "They just ask the question and get someone to answer it" was a common response.

This shows the importance of this survey. I am not using it to find out what the teacher is doing in the classroom. I am doing it to see the impact of how it feels for the pupils, and how much pupils understand and are aware of how we want to set the classroom expectations for participation. And the survey is only a small part of constant daily communication, relationships and interaction between teachers and pupils around the teaching and learning environment.

Reflecting with Pupils on Beliefs about Language Learning. Is there a right answer?

 In a recent post, I shared some work my Year 9s wrote in their writing assessment after the first half term's work.

I enjoyed the confidence and individuality with which they expressed themselves in French, taking risks and saying things they wanted to say.

Then on the INSET day in January, we were lucky enough to have a day with David Didau, doing whole school training on teaching and learning. He gave a very strong message that we should not be allowing (let alone encouraging) pupils to create work that contained mistakes. If we did this, we were going too fast too soon. We should be spending our time at sentence level until pupils were perfect. If we allowed pupils to work beyond the level of carefully practised accuracy, we would be compounding error and poor performance. And he was talking about pupils writing in English, let alone in a new language!

This made me think of examples like this.

Was I right to encourage the pupil to be proud of what they could do with their French? You can see there are errors in spelling, gender, verb endings and vocabulary. Was my focus on creativity, coherence in developing ideas, and personal expression the wrong focus? Did the very demands of creativity and thinking up what to say distract pupils from the important task of forming accurate sentences? Did allowing pupils to express themselves inevitably invite them to try to say things that were bound to be wrong? What should I do?

I decided that our next unit (Jobs and Future Plans) did lend itself to less free-flowing imaginative writing, and could be an opportunity to accommodate more of a focus on accuracy. I made this an explicit discussion point with the class, so they could reflect on the balance of expression versus accuracy in their work.

After an initial piece of work in their booklets, I shared the work of four pupils on the board.

"Evelyn" had written something that was highly accurate, by concentrating on putting together a paragraph built out of the French she was learning. 

Not one word of it was true. It was simply an exercise (on this occasion) of using the language for the sake of practising the language she had learned. David Didau would have loved it. And it also fits with the fashionable idea of language learning as carefully constructed vocabulary and grammar exercises, where showing you know what something "means" is more important than having something meaningful to communicate. We appreciated Evelyn's accuracy and her approach to the work, making something tasty out of the ingredients she had.

Then we looked at a different approach.

"Henry" does not start with his ingredients and see what he can make out of them. Henry starts with things he wants to say. His personal dreams, his current obsessions, and things he thinks are important. He tries to say them using French he knows, but saying what he wants to say is more important to him than building perfect sentences.

Then we have "Dylan". Here is Dylan's previous piece of writing from the Going to the Beach unit.

And here is what he wrote about Jobs:

You can see his total disregard for caring about accuracy. His focus is entirely on saying things he wants to say for his own amusement. Usually about crabs.

Now Kirsty. Kirsty also sets out to write what she wants to say. She often goes beyond the French we have learned in this and in other topics. She often makes mistakes because she is pushing at the boundaries of her knowledge.

As a class we discussed these 4 examples (and others). We discussed it from the point of view of doing well in an exam. And from the point of view of being a language-learner. I think that at this point we arrived at some sort of consensus that the key was self-awareness and deliberate decisions around taking risk. Which is born out in some of the comments you can already see on the pupils' work.

We decided to tweak the parameters of the task. Each pupil would write a paragraph in test conditions, using only French they knew. It wouldn't be about them, personally. It would be about "Being a teacher" and it specified that they should use the opinions, reasons, conjunctions and future expressions we have been working on. And it should aim to be a "Perfect Paragraph."

Let's see what we got...

Here's Kirsty.

It's a more boring version of what she was trying to write. It still goes beyond what others in the class know and can do. And yes, it is more accurate than her work usually is.

Here's Ruby's Perfect Paragraph alongside her Going to the Beach paragraph so you can appreciate the difference.

And here's Dylan's Perfect Paragraph. Disciplined and sticking strictly to showing he can accurately use the French we've learned in this unit.

Yes. I know. But it is noticeably more accurate!

When it got to the writing assessment, what should I do? Should I tell them it is being marked for accuracy, an exercise in showing they had memorised the language for this unit? Or is it being marked for showing me they can express themselves and develop an idea coherently?

I left it up to them. I told them I already had the evidence of what their work looked like so far with both focusses. And now I wanted to see how what we discussed came through in their own individual work and in their awareness as a language learner.

Who do you want to see first? Here's Jess who wrote the Crossy Roady piece at the top of this post:

Here's Henry.

Here's Ruby:

And I suppose you want to see Dylan. Here's Dylan.

Have they got more accurate? Has there been a retreat from wild and reckless indulgence? Have they become more restrained and boring? Is their way of working individual and innate, or does it vary depending on the task? Is there a best balance between accuracy and expression? And does it all depend if we are talking about testing knowledge or if we are talking about language learning?

And we will look at Kirsty's. But I'm leaving that to the end because I think I have made my mind up about the apparent exam success/language learning dichotomy. First, here's something I noticed on a pupil's feedback section on his listening and reading test. In the "What was the best lesson" box on the right, I had lots of interesting answers. The speed dating lesson, the novel we've dipped into, watching Ma Vie de Courgette at the end of term, playing the Red Herring detective mystery on computers... But this pupil picked out the "Perfect" paragraph with clearly defined parameters. Now I need to go back and ask them why. Was it the clarity, reducing the cognitive load of having to think what to say? Was it the successful focus on accuracy? Is it a permanent thing we shoud do? Or was it a one-off timely intervention for that exact stage of their learning?

And here's Kirsty.

You will have seen that even in the "Perfect Paragraphs", perfection cannot be guaranteed. There is no way that a Year 9 pupil is going to be able to predict that in French you can't use "je veux" and "être riche" to say "I want my friend to be rich." There will always be ways in which French doesn't work in the same way as English. We can see here that a focus on merrily saying things the pupils want to say, does lead to some distraction away from focus on accuracy of things she is supposed to know. But I am sure from a language-learning perspective, Kirsty's work is excellent.

I don't want to say that there's anything wrong with the approach pupils like Evelyn or Ruby can adopt when they need to, writing carefully accurate pieces that put paragraphs together from French they know, finding ways to use it to develop an idea coherently.

So I don't think there's any one right answer about language learning. But I do think there is a wrong one...

Of the pupils whose work we have looked at (I have others!), who is the pupil who is hoovering up most French? The pupil who has a grasp of all the French we have ever learned and can turn it inside out to say things she wants to say. The pupil who at the merest sniff of something new, can squirrel it away and add it to her repertoire. The pupil who found she couldn't say "would be" so has gone out of her way independently to find out how to say it. And then use it. The pupil who is prepared to make mistakes because she knows that's what happens when you push at the expanding boundaries of what you know and can do. The drive to express yourself is clearly central to language learning. And I cannot go along with the idea that we should stamp it out until pupils have flawlessly mastered the basics.

The Language Lab Podcast

 I was a guest on season 5 episode 4 of  https://www.languagelabpodcast.co.uk with Will Marks. We examined in detail where we are with teaching languages in English schools, how we got here, and where we might aim to get to.

Update. My episode is now just one in a great run of interviews with classroom teachers: Dr Kedi Simpson, Clare Seccombe... Lots to say, and voices that need to be heard.

If you don't have Spotify you can listen on other sites like https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/the-language-lab-podcast/6007214

And Will made a nice AI image of us having a cup of malted milk in Hong Kong:

Do let me know what you think!

Guest Post: A turning point...

In a major Camarón de la Isla / Bob Dylan / Judas Iscariot / Keith Jarrett adopts electric amplified music turn of events, I interviewed Gemini AI on a turning point in Language Teaching in English schools. Here is its summary of our conversation.

 The Bauckham Report: Why MFL is Finally Ready to Turn the Page

For nearly a decade, the 2016 Bauckham Report (the Modern Foreign Languages Pedagogy Review) has acted as the "north star" for language education in England. Led by Ian Bauckham and heavily championed by the Department for Education, it promised to rescue a "fragile" subject by returning to basics: Phonics, Vocabulary, and Grammar.

However, as we enter 2026, the cracks in this "knowledge-rich" foundation have become impossible to ignore. From its failure to understand the trauma of the "Controlled Assessment" years to its silence on the grading crisis, the report is increasingly seen not as a cure, but as a misdiagnosis.

Here is why it is time for the MFL community to move on.

1. Fighting a War That Had Already Ended

The report’s most significant flaw was its historical timing. It spent much of its energy attacking the "rote-learning" and "memorized chunks" that defined the Controlled Assessment (CA) era (2009–2016).

What the report failed to acknowledge was that teachers didn't choose rote learning because they hated grammar; they chose it because the assessment system punished anything else. By the time the report’s recommendations were being implemented, CAs had already been abolished. Teachers were already pivoting toward spontaneity for the new linear exams. The Bauckham report was essentially providing a map for a territory that had already changed.

2. The "Three Pillars" vs. The Human Element

The report introduced the "Three Pillars" model:

Phonics: Sound-symbol correspondence.

Vocabulary: High-frequency word lists.

Grammar: Systematic structural progression.

While these are essential building blocks, the report treated them as the entire building. By narrowing the focus to these mechanics, the curriculum often stripped away culture, identity, and real communication. Students might know the 1,700 most common words, but if they can’t use them to talk about their own lives or understand a different culture, the "why" of language learning disappears.

3. The Silence on Severe Grading

Perhaps the report’s greatest "blind spot" was grading severity. For years, data has shown that it is significantly harder to get a top grade in a language than in History or Geography.

By focusing purely on pedagogy (how we teach), the Bauckham report implicitly blamed teachers for the decline in student numbers. It ignored the fact that many students drop languages not because the lessons are "bad," but because they are "strategic." They know a language GCSE is a higher risk to their grade average. It wasn't until 2024 and 2025 that we saw adjustments from Ofqual to address this—an intervention the 2016 report should have championed from the start.

4. A "Prescriptive" Future?

The 2024 GCSE reforms (being examined for the first time this year, 2026) are the ultimate legacy of the Bauckham report. They feature:

Strict Vocabulary Lists: 1,200 to 1,700 "word families."

No Unfamiliar Material: A permanent removal of "abstract" or "unseen" language.

Dictation and Reading Aloud: A heavy focus on phonics.

While these changes aim for "accessibility," critics argue they make the subject "dry" and "mechanical." Instead of opening doors to a global world, the curriculum has become a closed loop of pre-defined words.

Conclusion: Time for a New Narrative

The 2016 Bauckham report was a product of its time—an attempt to bring "rigor" to a subject in crisis. But "rigor" without relevance is a recipe for further decline.

To save MFL, we must move beyond the "Three Pillars" and embrace a model that values the multilingualism of our students, the cultural depth of our subjects, and—above all—the simple joy of being understood in another language.

You can read more of my original interview with Gemini here, including its views on how an obscure, flawed report came to have such political influence. And in Gemini's words, become "weaponised" against the profession.

Let's enjoy and celebrate!

 This post is to start the year with some absolutely delightful examples of pupils' work. Have a look and see if it brightens your day the same way it did mine!

Year 9 French Written Assessment October

Year 9 French Written Assessment October

These are done in test conditions without special warning or preparation. You can see from the tickbox criteria at the bottom that the pupils understand that writing spontaneously from French they know, will score at a different level than pre-planning and learning. In fact, I shouldn't have used the words "score" or "level", because the statements are descriptive and informative rather than linked to ranking or judgements.

You can see that the pupils have also commented on their work, starting with specifying that they challenged themselves to write this using their own repertoire of French. They may also have volunteered a comment on the quality of the work, or further information on their experience of the process of creating it. 

Here are some more.

Year 9 Writing Assessment October

Perhaps the most important thing for me here, is that this writing assessment is not an exercise in demonstrating that they can correctly use certain items of language. In all cases, the pupils are driven by wanting to say things. True things, fun things, silly things, imaginary things, sad things, vindictive things, and sometimes run out of things and not really know what to put things. Their comments at the end show that sometimes they know that things weren't quite "right" or that they took risks. They are doing this in the confidence that both they and the reader understand they are on a journey with language learning, where their ability to express themselves is central and being developed.

There are aspects of this work that I can follow up in another post: How does this written work correspond to their ability to speak with increasing fluency? What feedback should I give on the work? What does it show about chunking of language versus manipulation of atomised language? I have plenty to say on all of these, both to them and also on here. But for now, let's start the year by just enjoying and celebrating this!

Year 9 Written Assessment October

What do we mean by "meaning". And does it matter?

 In language teaching, we seem to be struggling with two different meanings of the word "meaning".

On the one hand we have "I know that tortue means tortoise". Where pupils are tested on their knowledge of the meaning of words. It's an approach that believes in regularly testing pupils' ability to parse sentences containing known words and known grammar, to cement memorisation and conceptualisation. The language is selected (by frequency of vocabulary) and sequenced (to exemplify step-by-step grammar concepts), so that the pupil's knowledge is built and reinforced.

On the other hand, we have the idea that language should be for pupils to express themselves and understand each other, to create and take part in communicating "meaning". This reminds me of the Spanish and French word for "to mean" - querer decir / vouloir dire - to want to say something.

Does it matter in language learning that our pupils learn to use their language to say things they want to say? Does it matter that what they read or hear has something to say, rather than just to practise and test their knowledge of language features?

We see this in GCSE and A Level listening and reading papers. What masquerades as a comprehension question often turns out to be asking pupils to show they can parse certain language features, even when they are not relevant to the purported question. At GCSE, we have seen questions like these. Things like "He didn't get on with his teachers" (which accurately characterises the understanding of the relationship) being marked as wrong. Because it didn't accurately parse the word "badly". Or at A Level, this question about what someone did one day. Answering the question (she went to see the castellers, she took a photo, she posted it online) is not rewarded. Because it doesn't show knowledge of the grammatical features it was appetising to her, she decided to... And these are not random rogue questions. This is a feature of how the examiners see meaning as simple demonstration of knowledge of the "meaning" of words and grammar. Not the meaning of what someone said.

It is also in Ofsted's guidance on curriculum design for languages. They insist that language be introduced in a strict sequence, based on exemplifying concepts, not based on teaching pupils to say things. The example they give is to teach pupils to talk about red dogs and red tortoises, and to avoid teaching green dogs and green tortoises until a future step. Because the adjective rouge is invariable for gender. Whereas vert would require knowledge of adjectival agreement if applied to a tortoise. All of which ignores the fact that if you are going to teach pets, pupils will want to talk about a range of pets in authentic colours. At this stage, pupils are making links from the language to the real world, rather than links and patterns internal to the language. This kind of real meaning is important to learners. And you wouldn't want to lose that!

But is it important to learning? Maybe that kind of meaning, with lots of pupils all trying to say random different things they aren't ready for yet, leads to them being given a collection of one-off things to say, that don't stay in long term memory and don't add up to coherent conceptualisation of the grammar of the language.

Here's an example that happened with my Spanish class last year. So they were the last class to take the old style GCSE. Back in Year 10, we had done some work on Shopping. Improvising answers in speaking, then writing them up. Most pupils did something that rehearsed the repertoire of opinions, reasons, tenses with a bit of conflict, conversation and disappointment thrown in.

But one pupil came up with this:

You can see it does contain the elements of the repertoire we practise using across topics. It has opinions, with reasons, direct speech, an element of conflict of opinions, use of imperfect and preterite ending in disappointment. You can see the underlying structures of the model aquarium story, both in terms of the repertoire of language and in how they are deployed.

But this pupil's answer was different to many others in the class. Because they were telling a true story. And a painfully personal one, with genuine and lasting disappointment.

Does this make any difference in terms of language learning? I am tempted to throw my hands up in the air and raise my eyebrows. Because of course we want to be equipping pupils to say things they actually want to say. Not teaching it as some kind of sudoku where they concoct answers to successfully fit all the required specified pieces into a pattern to show they can solve the puzzle. But even just in terms of long term memory and internalisation of language, does this pupil's work show something important?

Well. Here's what happened in Year 11. As we prepared for the exam, I did not let them look at their work from Year 10. They should have not only internalised the language, but also have been able to still deploy it.

The pupils who had cobbled together an answer to show they could use the language features, were basically starting from scratch. They had no memory of the work that they had done in Year 10.

Whereas the pupil who had written the story based on a true story that mattered to them personally, wrote this.

They were able to quickly and fluently reproduce several of their answers from Year 10 because what they had written was memorable. But if you look closely, it's not at all a case of word-by-word memorisation. It's actually a different version of the same story. And I am pretty sure if I listen back to their recorded GCSE speaking exam, they came up with another spontaneous version on the day of the exam.

Where does this leave the current GCSE speaking exam? AQA's marking of the Conversation by counting conjugated verbs seems to have gone entirely towards the parsing of language features, rather than the creation of meaning. As we see in this post, candidates who want to say things in genuine response to the examiner's question, do worse than pupils who trot out a list of three essentially meaningless verbs.

This exchange from my mock speaking exam, would score in the bottom band:

Have you ever had a problem abroad?

Yes. Once in a shop in Spain my mum forgot how to say 'coat'  in Spanish.

So...?

So we went to a different shop to buy a coat.

The pupil made the unforgivable mistakes of giving a genuine answer to the question, interacting with the examiner, and putting too much information into one clause.

Had they just said, I went to Spain. I went to a restaurant. I don't like to eat in a restaurant, then they would have been in the top band.

All my instincts and experience, such as the examples of the pupils in this post, are telling me that this is bad for language learning.