Learning Is Change

In The Empire Strikes Back, a Star Wars film from 1980, a young man called Luke Skywalker is trained on a swamp planet to become a Jedi, one of the warrior-monks of the story.^[1] His teacher is Yoda, a very small and very old Jedi master. Luke learns to lift stones using only his mind. Then his spaceship sinks into the swamp, and Yoda asks him to lift the ship as well. Luke protests that a ship is completely different from a stone. Yoda replies: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Luke tries, gives up and watches Yoda lift the ship out of the water himself. Storytellers call the shape of his story the Hero’s Journey. The hero hears a call and resists it, often by holding on to what he already believes. A mentor guides him through an ordeal, and at the end he comes home as a different person from the one who left. Joseph Campbell described this story pattern in 1949, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.^[2] It is a way of seeing a change, not evidence that one will happen.

What Yoda asks of Luke is harder than lifting a ship. Luke has to stop being the person who decides, before he even tries, what is possible for someone like him. Every hero has to let an old self go, and in most stories the old self puts up a fight.

Our students already plan stories with this shape. In our creative writing course, the protagonist is not simply the main character but the character who changes the most, and every plot structure is a version of the Hero’s Journey. At the end of the course, we ask students to describe their own learning in the same way.

A GCSE student is on a journey of the same shape. Four in five of the students who come to us hear the call, because they want a grade 8 or a 9. However, many would like to reach that grade as the student they are today, writing the same paragraphs, with the same punctuation and the same weekly routine. Helping a student let that student go is the hardest part of our work, and to see why, we need to begin with a question that sounds simple: what is learning?

Learning shows on the page

Most psychology textbooks define learning as a change in behaviour that comes from experience.^[3] Other researchers describe it as a change in long-term memory: “If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned,” wrote Paul Kirschner, John Sweller and Richard Clark in 2006.^[4] We think the two definitions meet on the page for a GCSE student, because when what a student knows has changed, what they write changes too.

So the definition we use is a practical one. Learning is a lasting change in what a student does when it counts. A paragraph that improves for one mock and slips back by June was a good performance on the day, and The Mock Trap explains why families so often mistake a good performance for learning. A paragraph that is still better in June is learning, because the student who wrote it now writes differently.

That definition is why we call ourselves an evidence-based learning programme. We use educational research, more than a decade of our own teaching and the data we collect on every student’s work for one purpose: to move what each student does towards what that evidence supports.

Learning also comes before grades. Before a student’s work changes properly, they have to understand how the subject works, how the mark scheme works, which techniques to use, what the subject is asking of them, and what they are getting right and wrong. In our experience, that takes two to three months. A mock or a school test taken in that time measures the student before the change, not after it.

Wanting an 8, writing like a 5

In 2026, across every exam board, half of all English Language entries got a grade 4 or lower, and half of all English Literature entries got a 5 or lower.^[5] Across every exam board, the grade that students got most often was a 3 in English Language, about 1 in every 4 entries, and a 5 in English Literature, about 1 in every 5.^[6] About 7 in every 100 Language entries, and fewer than 10 in every 100 Literature entries, reached a grade 8 or 9. These Language figures include students retaking the exam after Year 11, and only about one in five of them reaches a grade 4. Those retakes pull the numbers down. Among 16-year-olds taking the exam for the first time, about 7 in 10 reach a grade 4 or above, compared with 6 in 10 of all entries.

The students who come to us aim far higher. On the self-assessment they fill in before joining, 106 gave a grade goal between June 2025 and June 2026. The lowest option on the form was a grade 6, and 87 of them chose a grade 8, a grade 9 or full marks: 82 in every 100.^[7]

On the same form, 64 students gave their latest school grade in both subjects, and by their own report half of them had a 5 or lower in each. So their goal is a grade that fewer than 1 in 10 students reach, while their starting point is an ordinary one. In our experience, most families are not going to be happy with a grade 4 or a grade 5, even when their child has climbed from a 3. In Language, a move from a 5 to an 8 means rising into roughly the top 7 in every 100 entries. Can a student get there by doing more of what they already do? Research from outside school suggests not. Niteesh Choudhry and his colleagues reviewed studies of how well doctors do their job. In 32 of the 62 evaluations they reviewed, doctors’ performance fell as their years in practice went up.^[8] Years of doing the same thing had not made them better. Those were doctors rather than students, and the reasons are debated. Even so, it is why we do not believe a student covers that distance as the same student who wrote the 5.

The old self has habits

Why is it so hard to stop being that student? The psychologist Daphna Oyserman has spent years studying how the way people see themselves shapes what they do. In 2010, she and Mesmin Destin wrote that people prefer actions that fit who they think they are.^[9] If a task feels like something people like them do, finding it hard makes it seem worth the effort. If it feels like something that is “not for people like me”, the same difficulty feels like a reason to stop. Imagine two students trying a new paragraph structure for the first time, and both find it hard. One sees herself as a grade 8 writer and thinks, “This is hard because it matters.” The other still sees himself as a grade 5 student and thinks, “This is not for someone like me.” The structure is the same, but only the first student keeps going.

Can a student’s view of themselves change? In one study, Oyserman and two colleagues gave American students of about 13 and 14 a short programme of sessions, and compared them with similar students who did not take part.^[10] Grades and test scores went up, absences and misbehaviour went down, and the effects lasted for the two years the researchers followed them. The researchers were clear that picturing a future self was not enough on its own: it worked when that future self was linked to strategies the students believed they could use.

A new identity, then, has to come with new actions, and habits make new actions hard. After reviewing the research, the psychologists Wendy Wood and David Neal concluded that habits “do not shift appreciably with current goal states”.^[11] A student can want a grade 8 very much and still write, arrive and practise exactly as before. In our lessons, the old identity usually shows itself in six habits.

Comfort keeps the old technique

The first habit is the technique a student arrived with. Students are used to writing a particular way and feel comfortable with it. Many arrive with PEE, which stands for Point, Evidence, Explain, or with one of its relatives, such as PEEL or PETAL. PEE is fine for average marks. However, it does not cover everything the mark schemes ask for. English Literature gives marks for context: what was happening when the text was written, and why that matters. Nothing in PEE asks for context. In both English Language and English Literature, one of the main things the mark scheme rewards is explaining how the writer’s choices create effects for the reader.^[12][13] PEE does not ask for that either, and each of its relatives leaves out something else. In our experience, a student who keeps to PEE usually reaches a 4, a 5 or a 6, sometimes a 7, and rarely more.

That is why we teach TTECEA instead. Each letter is one part of the paragraph, in this order: the Topic sentence, which states the argument; the Technique the writer uses; the Evidence, a quotation and what it suggests; Close analysis of particular words; the Effects on the reader, usually two; and the Author’s purpose, which is why the writer wanted those effects. In English Literature we add a C, for context. Together, these parts cover the main things the mark schemes reward in both subjects.

Even after we teach it and explain why it scores higher, some students go back to the paragraph that has been earning them a 3, a 4 or a 5 while they aim for a 7, an 8 or a 9, and a few even suggest they should keep it. When that happens, we sometimes do not mark the work at all. We have already explained that the old structure limits the grade, so marking it again would only repeat the same feedback.

The same habit shows in how students plan a whole answer. Many think of an essay as four or five paragraphs to fill. They do not think of it as an argument, which has to be introduced, built paragraph by paragraph and then concluded.

Even experts can be held by the familiar. Chess experts were shown a position with two ways to win: a familiar pattern that took five moves, and a less familiar one that took only three. The players said they were searching for something better, but their eye movements went back, again and again, to the five-move solution they already knew.^[14] Merim Bilalić, Peter McLeod and Fernand Gobet called their 2008 paper “Why good thoughts block better ones”. Yoda would recognise the problem: what a person has already learned can hide what they need to learn next.

Ayaan wrote to us after his results that he had “improved 4 grades from a 5 to a 9”. Safwan went from 3s and 4s to an 8 and a 9 over two years (The Number That Proves a Method). Both also had marking, lessons and a great deal of practice, so we do not claim the structure did it alone.

In our experience, a new structure feels slower at first, because each part asks for a decision the old way never needed. Just Tell Me How? explains why knowing a structure is different from using it, and Two Methods Are Worse Than One what mixing it with an old method costs. What we ask of a student, then, is to keep writing the new way while it still feels slower than the old one.

Full stops are not optional

The second habit is smaller, and in some ways more stubborn. Some students arrive writing sentences with no full stops and no capital letters, and want to carry on writing that way. We tell them that it is not acceptable. Even in a short answer, writing with poor spelling, punctuation and grammar is not acceptable in English.

So our marking takes off half a mark for faults such as a run-on sentence, or a spelling or grammar error that makes the meaning unclear, on every question we mark, including the short ones. Our writing tools also point out any sentence that begins with a small letter. A capital letter costs nothing to write, so leaving it out is a habit, and a habit is something a student can change.

A blank page teaches nothing

The third habit is an excuse. A student who has not tried a new technique will sometimes tell us, “I don’t understand it,” and arrive with a blank page. Before any student attempts a technique, we teach it several times and show examples several times. Even when the difficulty is real, a blank page is not acceptable, because learning is an active process, not a passive one. A student has to try, make the mistakes and see what they were, so that they can correct them.

Research on memory points the same way. In 1978, Norman Slamecka and Peter Graf found that people remembered words they had produced themselves better than words they had only read.^[15] Three decades later, Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork found that even a wrong attempt, followed by the right answer, helped people learn.^[16] These were memory experiments with word lists and quiz questions rather than essays, so we treat them as a direction rather than proof. Reviewing the research on errors, Janet Metcalfe concluded that mistakes help learning when corrective feedback follows, and suggested letting students make and correct errors where the stakes are low.^[17]

Why would anyone choose the blank page? Psychologists describe a common pattern called self-handicapping, in which a person puts an obstacle in their own way, such as not really trying, so that a poor result can be blamed on the obstacle rather than on their ability. A review of 36 studies, with more than 25,000 participants, linked the pattern to the fear of failing, and students who did it more tended to achieve less.^[18] Those studies measured a link rather than a cause. Even so, the trade is easy to see: a blank page protects a student from a bad mark, and it also protects them from learning anything.

The fourth habit is silence, which often grows from the same fear. In our lessons we ask questions of everyone and give every student the chance to answer. Some would rather say nothing, because they are afraid of being wrong. We tell them plainly that nobody is being judged and nobody is punished for a wrong answer. A mistake made in a lesson is corrected while the student is still in the room, which makes it one of the cheapest mistakes they will ever make. A student gets it wrong so that they can get it right.

Time is a habit too

The fifth habit is about turning up. Some students regularly arrive late, or miss lessons without letting us know. Students get a reminder on their dashboard the day before each live lesson and again 15 minutes before it starts, and parents get an email every Monday about their child’s week. Even so, a few students still miss lessons without a word. A reminder can tell a student the time, but only the student can decide to be someone who arrives on time.

The sixth habit is practice. On the same self-assessment, 69 of 106 students said they spent less than 30 minutes a week on English writing practice outside school, and 42 of them said they did none at all.^[7] Only two said they did two hours or more. These figures are self-reported, and not every student who filled in the form went on to join us.

We ask for much more. Students aiming for grade 9 practise about two hours a week, for example 20 minutes a day, at times they choose themselves, with a reminder before each one. Is more practice always better? Not necessarily, as research on deliberate practice shows. The psychologist Anders Ericsson and his colleagues found that the best performers stood out for their deliberate practice: effortful work designed to improve one part of a skill, rather than simply repeating it.^[19] A later review of many studies found that deliberate practice explained a real part of the differences between people in games, music and sport, but only a small part, about 4 per cent, in education.^[20] So we do not present two hours as a promise of a grade. We ask for it because deliberate practice takes time: redrafting a paragraph from its feedback, rewriting one weak sentence, or planning an answer to a question the student has never seen.

The return happens in June

A few weeks before the mocks, a keen Year 11 student will often ask us how to interpret a line of a poem. Our reply is nearly always the same: let’s see what your written assessment says first. We want our students to follow the data, and for each student the data starts with their own writing. Tests help students learn most when feedback and another attempt follow, according to a review of 222 studies with nearly 50,000 students, none of them about GCSE mocks.^[21] The exam is also far wider than any mock. In AQA’s English Language, “all texts in the examination will be unseen”, and AQA’s English Literature exams are “closed book”.^[12][13] We have come to see English as a subject that cannot really be finished. There will always be an extract, a question or a poem that a student has not practised, so what they carry into the exam hall has to be a changed way of working.

The old identity does not always belong to the student alone. In our experience, some families would like the programme to fit the way they already do things, such as keeping in touch through messages rather than the dashboard, or asking the tutor why something happened instead of asking their child. That is understandable, because the old way is familiar to parents too. The dashboard is where a parent can watch the new student appear: how many words their child has written, whether they arrive on time, whether they meet their deadlines, whether they work through lessons in order and redraft, and where they lose the most marks.

The last stage of the Hero’s Journey is the return. In June, one student who wanted an 8 still writes the paragraph they wrote a year earlier, leaves out the full stops, arrives late and hands in a blank page when the work is hard. Another arrives on time, answers in lessons even when unsure, practises at the times they chose and writes a different paragraph. Both wanted the same grade, but only the second let the old student go, which is what Yoda asked of Luke and what we mean by learning.

Five things to do this week

1. Find your old habit. Read your last marked essay and write down the mistake that appears most often. That is the first habit to change.

2. Check every sentence before you hand it in. Look for a capital letter at the start and a full stop at the end, even in a short answer.

3. Never hand in a blank page. Write your best attempt, mistakes included, and then ask about the part you found hardest.

4. Choose your practice times. Plan about two hours across the week, for example 20 minutes a day, and use one session to redraft an answer from its feedback.

5. Parents: ask about one habit, not the grade. Look at your child’s dashboard together and ask which habit they want to change this week, such as arriving on time or keeping to their practice times. Next week, ask about that habit again.

If you would like to know where your writing, or your child’s, stands today, our free assessment takes five minutes.

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