Why school alone rarely produces a grade 9

Nobody is handed a black belt for effort, or for having attended enough classes. If your child has ever taken karate, or swimming lessons, or graded music exams, they have already met a system that builds a skill properly.

A white belt works on white belt things until those things are right, and only then does the next belt open. The early stages feel slow, and most children want to hurry through them. Yet that slowness is the training itself, rather than a queue to be endured before the real learning starts.

Now think about how a GCSE is taught. Most parents we speak to assume it works in the same way: if my child goes to school, does the homework and listens in class, the grades will follow.

For a pass, that is often true. A grade 9, though, rarely arrives that way, and the reason has little to do with effort. Your child’s teachers are almost certainly working hard, so none of this is a complaint about schools. So why does hard work at school so often stop short of the top grade?

The answer is a mismatch between the job a school has to do and the thing the exam actually measures. Once you can see that mismatch, a great deal about GCSE English starts to make sense.

A school runs on a timetable, because it has to

A school has a fixed amount of time, a syllabus to cover and a date by which it must be covered, so the class moves at the speed of the calendar.

That is the job rather than a fault in it. A teacher with thirty students and one term cannot wait until every child has mastered every skill, and so they have to keep going.

Now picture what that means in a single classroom. A topic is taught for three weeks, and then there is a test. One student scores 90%, while another scores 60%. The next week, both students move on to the next topic, a harder one built on top of the one they have just done.

The student who scored 60% now has a gap. Nobody ignored it, since the test is what found it. But the class had to move on, so the next topic gets built on top of the gap. After two years of this, the gaps stack up.

Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, explains how gaps stack up better than anyone. He asks you to imagine building a house the way we do school. You give the builders two weeks for the foundation, and after two weeks the inspector says the concrete is still wet in places. “I’ll give it 80%.” Good enough, you say, so the builders start on the first floor, and then the second. Somewhere around the third floor, the whole thing falls down.

His real point comes next. We did inspect, and we did find the problem, and then we built on top of it anyway.^[1]

In English, stacked gaps are why a student says “I’m just not good at analysis”. Usually the trouble lies further back: they never fully mastered inference, which means reading between the lines, and now they are being asked to do something harder that depends on it.

The exam measures writing, not coverage

Here is the second half of the mismatch. A school is judged on covering the course, but the exam mostly measures something else: how well your child writes, on the day.

This is bigger than it sounds, because writing is not confined to one question at the end of a paper. In GCSE English, almost every mark your child earns is earned by writing something. Look at what your child actually has to produce:

• English Language, Section A. The questions are about a text your child has never seen before, and every answer is a written paragraph, not a ticked box. Understanding the text is only the entry ticket. The top marks go to answers that are perceptive and convincing: close analysis, critical thought, the right terminology, an argument that holds together. All of that has to be written down clearly, in the paragraph, under time.
• English Language, Section B. A full piece of writing from scratch: a story, an article, a speech. On AQA and Edexcel it is one task worth 40 marks. On Eduqas, the transactional paper splits those 40 marks into two shorter pieces at 20 marks each, so your child writes two. Either way the marks split the same way: 24 for content and organisation and 16 for technical accuracy, meaning vocabulary, sentence structures, spelling and punctuation (12 and 8 per piece on Eduqas).^[2]
• English Literature. Both papers are essays, start to finish. To reach the top band, the exam board is looking for “a critical, exploratory, well-structured argument”.^[2] On the modern texts, up to 4 further marks are given purely for technical accuracy: the board asks students to “spell and punctuate with consistent accuracy” and to use vocabulary and sentence structures “to achieve effective control of meaning”.^[2]

So a student can know Macbeth extremely well and still lose marks, because knowing the play and building a clear written argument about it are two different skills.

To reach the top of the writing paper, the examiner needs to see writing that is “convincing and compelling”, with “a wide range of punctuation… used with a high level of accuracy” and “secure control of complex grammatical structures”.^[2]

Could your child revise any of those the night before? None of them is a fact to be learned. Every single one is a skill, something you can only do because you have practised it.

So the mismatch fits in two sentences. School is built to deliver content in a fixed time, while the exam is built to measure skill.

The misunderstanding that keeps good students at a 6

Among able students, one misunderstanding comes up more often than any other in our experience.

When we ask a new student what the examiner is actually looking for, the answer we hear most often is some version of: to show that I understood it.

There is nothing wrong with that answer, except that it is aiming at the wrong height.

Understanding is comprehension, and comprehension is what your child was tested on at eleven, since it is much of the purpose of the Key Stage 2 SATs. A student who is still writing to prove they understood the text is answering a primary school question in a GCSE.

Where does “understanding” actually sit in the mark schemes? The middle bands are the ones that say “some understanding” and “clear understanding”.^[2] Climb to the top and the vocabulary changes completely: “convincing and compelling”; “critical, exploratory”; a “well-structured argument”.^[2]

Every item on that list describes an effect your child has to produce in a reader, rather than anything your child knows.

And the reader is a real person. An examiner sits down with your child’s essay and decides how many marks it earns. If that examiner is not convinced, persuaded or compelled by the writing in front of them, they cannot award the top marks. They are not being harsh when they hold those marks back, because “convincing” is literally the word they have been given to look for.

So the job at the top of this subject goes beyond demonstrating comprehension. Your child has to interest somebody, argue something, and control the writing well enough that the examiner stays with them. Those are skills, and they behave like every other skill: they are built by doing them, badly at first, with correction, until they are reliable.

More practice is not enough

We know quite a lot about how people get good at things. The short version is that doing more of something is not enough. What a learner needs is practice aimed at their specific weaknesses, with feedback and correction each time.

Anders Ericsson spent his career studying how experts are made. His finding, in his own words: “Nobody becomes an outstanding professional without experience, but extensive experience does not invariably lead people to become experts.”^[3]

So the obvious fix, writing more essays, builds experience without guaranteeing improvement. What does change a grade? The answer is narrower and less comfortable: you find the exact weakness, work on that one thing and get it corrected, then do it again until it is fixed, and only then find the next one.

Most schools do some of this. Very few can do it for every student, every week, because of the same problem as before: thirty students, one teacher, and a calendar.

Grade 9 is rarer than most parents realise

This is where the numbers matter, starting with what a grade 9 is. The exams regulator, Ofqual, is explicit that it is a different thing from the old A*: “Grade 9 is not the same as A*; it’s a new grade, designed to recognise the very highest performing students… there will be fewer grade 9s than there are currently A*s.”^[4]

Ofqual even publish the formula. Roughly one in five of the students who reach grade 7 or above will get a grade 9.^[4]

Now look at what that means in English. These are the official figures for 16-year-olds in England in summer 2025.^[5]

Start with the first column. In English Language, fewer than 3 students in 100 get a grade 9, which is about one child in every thirty-four.

Around one student in five reaches a 7 or above, so a 7 is a strong grade held by a decent minority. Of that group, though, only a small fraction go all the way to 9.

So a grade 9 sits in the top slice of the top fifth, a long way beyond “a very good grade”. And when the reformed GCSEs came in, the content was made “more demanding” on purpose.^[6]

English is hard to mark, and parents are rarely told

Ofqual studied how consistently examiners mark. They compared normal marking against the mark a senior examiner would give, which they call the “definitive” mark.

Maths came out at 0.96, which means that 96% of the time you get the definitive grade. An English language and literature qualification came out at 0.52.^[7]

Are English examiners careless, then? Carelessness is not the reason: English is genuinely harder to judge than maths, because there is no single right answer.

Two details keep those numbers in proportion. First, Ofqual point out that “definitive” is a strict test: one senior examiner’s mark, treated as the only correct one, so if other reasonable marks were counted, the numbers would be higher. Second, getting the definitive grade or the one next to it is above 95% for every qualification.^[7] So the marking is far from chaos, and your child is not going to get a 3 when they deserved an 8.

There is one detail in that report, though, that changes how you should think about all of this. Ofqual found the probability of getting the definitive grade “dips in the mark region near the grade boundaries and is highest at the extremes of the mark distribution.”^[7]

Put simply, if a piece of writing sits right on a borderline, it is much more likely to be marked inconsistently, and if it is clearly strong, it is much more likely to be marked correctly.

That finding is a powerful argument for mastery, and we rarely hear anyone make it. A borderline answer asks the examiner to make a difficult judgement under time pressure. A genuinely strong answer asks for no such judgement, because it is easy to recognise and easy to reward.

Mastery earns the marks, and it also removes the doubt.

Fix the achievement, not the time

The idea behind mastery learning is old and simple. It comes from an educational psychologist called John Carroll, in 1963. He argued that “aptitude” really measures how much time a student needs to learn something, rather than whether they can learn it at all.^[8]

That gives you two choices, and only two.

– Fix the time, and let the achievement vary. That is school: everyone gets three weeks, some get 90%, some get 60%, and then the whole class moves on. – Fix the achievement, and let the time vary. Everyone keeps working on a skill until they have actually mastered it, however long that takes.

The second choice is the karate belt. It is also the swimming badge and the driving test. Outside school we build almost every serious skill this way. Nobody finds that controversial.

Sal Khan puts it simply: what should be variable is “when and how long a student actually has to work on something”, and what should be fixed is “that they actually master the material”.^[1]

Why, then, did schools not choose it long ago? For a long time the second option was considered impractical. It was tried in schools in Illinois a century ago and judged impossible to scale, because one teacher cannot run thirty different tracks at once.^[1] That objection was about logistics rather than about whether mastery works, and the logistics have changed.

When mastery-style teaching is studied properly, the results are good. A review of 108 studies found mastery programmes improved exam performance, and, importantly for worried parents, “the effects appear to be stronger on the weaker students in a class”.^[9] The same review is honest about the cost: mastery “may increase student time on instructional tasks”.^[9] The trade is time: mastery takes longer.

Where mastery learning has been tested most strictly of all, in training doctors, the question is whether the trained clinician actually performs better on real patients. There too, it holds up.^[10]

The calendar was never built for the top grades

None of this means school is failing your child, since school is doing the job it was designed to do.

It does mean that if your family is aiming at a grade 7, 8 or 9, you are aiming at something the school calendar was never built to deliver. You need three things that the calendar cannot easily give.

1. Time that varies. Your child keeps working on a skill until it is mastered, as in the karate class, rather than until Friday.

2. Correction that is specific. Instead of “add more detail”, the correction names this sentence and this technique, explains why it did not earn the mark, and asks for the sentence again.

3. Enough practice on the right things that the writing becomes clearly strong, strong enough that no examiner has to make a borderline judgement about it.

That is exactly what we built Sophicly to do.

If you would like to know where your child stands right now, our free assessment takes five minutes and gives you a predicted grade, plus the specific skills holding them back.

Sources