Why almost every problem comes back to writing

When a parent first talks to us about their child’s English, they almost always describe one specific problem. Over the years we have heard the same five again and again. They sound like five different problems.

Their spelling and punctuation let them down. Their essays are all over the place. They don’t really understand the texts. They revise for English and nothing seems to change. They run out of time in the exam.

If this were your child, which of the five would you try to fix first? Each one seems to call for its own remedy: a spelling programme, an essay structure, a better set of notes, more revision, or simply writing faster.

In our experience, the five are usually one problem that shows up in five different ways. Before we name it, look closely at the last complaint on the list, because the fix parents reach for there is the wrong one.

A child who runs out of time is rarely writing too slowly. They are spending the first part of the exam working out what the question is asking, what they are being marked on and how the answer should be built. A practised student has made those decisions before they walk in. Nobody can know the answer in advance, but anybody can know the method in advance, and knowing the method is what buys the time back.

What children write when nobody asks them to

The National Literacy Trust runs an annual survey of children across the UK, and the 2026 one covered 125,375 children and young people.^[1]

Of the 8- to 18-year-olds, just under 3 in 10 said they enjoy writing in their free time, and about 1 in 9 said they write something daily.^[1]

Then there is the figure that matters most to any parent reading this. Broken down by age, 14- to 16-year-olds report the lowest writing enjoyment of any group, at one in four.^[1] That is exactly the age at which the whole qualification starts asking them to write.

Two details keep these numbers fair. The first is that they describe free time rather than lessons, so no child is being accused of doing nothing at school. The second is that the trend is actually improving: writing enjoyment hit a fifteen-year low in 2025, and 2026 recovered a little.^[1][2]

But a recovery from a fifteen-year low still leaves children near the bottom. For most families the practical position is unchanged, because outside school a lot of children now write almost nothing longer than a message.

Is that about phones, or about children being lazier than they used to be? Neither, in our view: it is about how a generation communicates. The same survey found that the writing children do on a screen is overwhelmingly conversational: messages inside video games, sent by more than two thirds of them, and direct messages, sent by well over a third.^[1] Meanwhile the formats that involve holding a thought still long enough to develop it, such as a diary, a letter or freewriting, are three times more likely to happen on paper.^[1] Paper is the thing far fewer children now reach for.

There is nothing wrong with any of that, since children have always used whatever their age gave them. Almost none of it, though, asks a young person to build an argument and sustain it for four hundred words, which is precisely what the exam asks for.

So here is the one problem underneath all five complaints: the child is not writing very much.

Why that hits English harder than any other subject

English measures what your child can do, on the day, with a pen, far more than what they know.

Look at the words the exam boards use for their top marks. On the writing question in AQA’s GCSE English Language, the examiner is looking for work that is “convincing and compelling”.^[3] For an essay in AQA’s GCSE English Literature, the top band asks for “a critical, exploratory, well-structured argument”.^[3]

Other exam boards use their own words for the top marks. On Edexcel’s GCSE English Language Paper 1, the top level for the writing question includes the line “Shapes audience response with subtlety”.^[6] We have not compared the wording on every board.

Where, in those descriptions, is the word understood? It sits lower down the ladder, where AQA’s mark schemes use “some understanding” and “clear understanding” for the middle bands.^[3] By the time your child is aiming at the top, the examiner’s question has changed, and what they want to know is whether the writing has persuaded them.

You cannot become persuasive by reading about persuasion. Persuasion is a skill, and skills are built by doing the thing and being corrected.

Writing is where the thinking happens

Ruth Culham has spent a career on how writing is taught and assessed. Her description is the clearest we have found:

“Writing is thinking aloud on paper. In the same way we continue to clarify our thinking as we read, speak, and listen to others, we need to make sure our writing reflects our best, most thoughtful selves as we rework it through multiple drafts.”^[4]

Most revision plans miss what Culham is describing. A student who reads a chapter of Macbeth and highlights it feels like they are working, and in a sense they are, yet nothing is forcing them to commit to a position.

Now ask that same student to write one focused paragraph, and watch what happens. They have to decide what they actually think. They have to choose which quotation earns its place. They have to put their ideas in an order that makes sense to somebody who is not inside their head. And then, at the end of all that, they have to finish a sentence.

Every one of those decisions is thinking. The page is where the thinking is forced to happen.

Why writing beats re-reading

The obvious way to learn a text is to read it again. There is good evidence, though, that producing something from memory is a far stronger way to learn than reviewing material. In one well-known study, students who read a passage and were then tested on it remembered substantially more a week later than students who simply studied it repeatedly.^[5] The re-readers did better after five minutes and worse after seven days.

That research used short recall tests rather than GCSE essays, so we should be careful: the step from “recall beats re-reading” to “essays beat highlighting” is our inference rather than the study’s finding. The mechanism is the same one, though, and it explains something parents notice constantly, which is that a child can spend an evening on English revision and have nothing to show for it.

Writing about the text is retrieval. It is also, conveniently, the exact thing being marked.

So what does “focused and structured” actually mean?

Does it mean writing more essays? No, because a child can write ten essays and repeat the same three weaknesses in all ten when nothing in the process ever isolates them.

It means working on one thing at a time, and having it corrected before moving on:

– One paragraph, aimed at one skill, such as introducing evidence or explaining an effect. – Specific feedback on that one skill, rather than a grade and a general comment. – The same skill again, deliberately, until it is reliable. – Then the next weakness.

Do that for a term and the five problems we began with dissolve into one another. Punctuation improves because the child is using punctuation for a purpose rather than revising rules. Structure improves because they have organised an argument thirty times instead of reading about structure once. Timing improves because the decisions that used to cost the first part of the exam, about what the question is asking, what is being marked and how the answer should be built, have already been made thirty times over. Understanding of the text deepens too, because the fastest way to find out what you do not understand about An Inspector Calls is to try to argue something about it in writing.

More than an English grade

Exam marks are the reason most families come to us. Focused writing is how those marks are earned.

Focused writing also does something beyond the exam. A young person who can hold an idea steady, decide what they think, order their reasons and put them on a page in a way that convinces somebody else has learned something considerably larger than an English grade. The same skill is what a university application is, what a job application is, and what most difficult conversations in adult life turn out to be.

Your child’s English exam is measuring that skill because it matters, rather than the skill mattering because it is measured.

Three things to do this week

1. Ask to see what was written, as well as what was read. After an evening of English revision, a finished paragraph shows you that the thinking happened.

2. Swap one highlighting session for one focused paragraph. Choose a single skill, such as introducing evidence, and write about the text with only that skill in mind.

3. Get the paragraph corrected, then write it again. Stay on the same skill until it is reliable, and only then move on to the next weakness.

Five complaints, then, have one answer. The fastest way to get better at writing has not changed: write, get it corrected properly, and write again.

Sources