When a parent first talks to us about their child’s English, they almost always describe a specific problem. Over the years we have heard four again and again.
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.
Four different problems. Four different-sounding fixes: a spelling programme, an essay structure, a better set of notes, more revision.
In our experience they are usually the same problem wearing four coats. The child is not writing very much.
The habit has genuinely shifted
This is not a feeling. 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 things must be said honestly. The first is that these numbers are about free time, not lessons: 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 is still a low. And the practical position for most families is unchanged: outside school, a lot of children now write almost nothing longer than a message.
None of this is really about phones, and it is certainly not about children being lazier than they used to be. It is about how a generation communicates. The same survey found 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 by well over a third.[1] Meanwhile the formats that involve holding a thought still long enough to develop it — a diary, a letter, freewriting — are three times more likely to happen on paper, which is the thing far fewer children now reach for.[1]
There is nothing wrong with any of that. Children have always used whatever the age gave them. But almost none of it asks a young person to build an argument and sustain it for four hundred words, which is precisely what the exam asks for.
Why that hits English harder than any other subject
Because 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. For the writing paper, the examiner is looking for work that is “convincing and compelling”.[3] For a literature essay, “a critical, exploratory, well-structured argument”.[3]
Not one of those words is understood. Understanding sits lower down the ladder — the 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 is not asking whether they understood the text. The examiner is asking whether they have been persuaded.
You cannot become persuasive by reading about persuasion. It is a skill, and skills are built by doing the thing and being corrected.
Writing is not the record of the thinking. It is the thinking.
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]
This is the part most revision plans miss. A student who reads a chapter of Macbeth and highlights it feels like they are working, and they are — but nothing is forcing them to commit to a position.
Ask that same student to write one focused paragraph and everything changes at once. They have to decide what they actually think. They have to choose which quotation earns its place. They have to put their points in an order that makes sense to somebody who is not inside their head. They have to finish a sentence.
Every one of those decisions is thinking. The page is where it is forced to happen.
This is why writing beats re-reading
There is good evidence 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, not the study’s finding. But the mechanism is the same one, and it explains something parents notice constantly — 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?
It does not mean write more essays. A child can write ten essays and repeat the same three weaknesses in all ten, because nothing in the process ever isolated them.
It means working on one thing at a time, and having it corrected before moving on:
– One paragraph, aimed at one skill — introducing evidence, say, or explaining an effect. – Specific feedback on that one skill, not 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 four problems from the beginning of this article start dissolving 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, not read about structure once. Understanding of the text deepens, 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.
What this really buys them
Exam marks are the reason most families come to us, and this approach earns them.
But it is worth saying plainly what else it does. A young person who can hold an idea steady, decide what they think, order their reasons and put it on a page in a way that convinces somebody else has learned something considerably larger than an English grade. That 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 it because it matters, rather than mattering because it is measured.
The fastest way to get better at it has not changed. Write, get it corrected properly, and write again.
