Lauren* has sat and failed GCSE English five times.

When she started at The Sheffield College, she was utterly demoralised and really struggling with a sense of failure. As with so many other students, Lauren was stuck in what seemed to her to be a never-ending cycle: sitting the exam, failing, losing all confidence, resitting the exam and failing again.

In 2016, the government introduced the GCSE resit policy. This requires colleges to put all students who did not gain a grade 4 or above in GCSE maths and/or English through a resit study programme in order to obtain funding for them.

The government’s intention was well meant; young people with grade 4s in these subjects are more attractive to employers and are more likely to progress to higher-level courses and/or university. However, many school leavers are simply not ready to repeat the qualifications. The curriculum and its assessment methods are not suitable for all young people.

Unfortunately, the policy means that if students like Lauren want to continue their vocational training at college, there is no escape from the resit cycle, besides passing the exam.

From when students first start their education, maths and English are at the core of everything they do. If a student repeatedly fails these subjects, a fixation on not being good enough or clever enough can become a barrier to progress. They lose confidence, feeling unworthy and deflated.

Yet when you observe these same students in music studios, kitchens and construction workshops developing vocational skills, they are often very different in their behaviour. In those subjects they are learning something new, feeling confident and building an identity separate from that sense of failure.

What if colleges could take the feelings that students have about their vocational studies and help them to apply that way of thinking to their GCSE curriculum learning, too?

This is exactly what we set out to do at The Sheffield College. We realised that in order to help students like Lauren to finally break the cycle of failure, we needed to help change the way they feel about themselves.

This would require a consistent approach to building students’ sense of self-worth; we needed to work together to develop a range of activities that could be embedded in our curriculum, along with a programme of training for teachers.

We started the project in September 2019. I applied for project funding from the Education and Training Foundation’s Outstanding Teaching, Learning and Assessment scheme and was successful.

From the beginning, I wanted the action research to be a team effort. This meant that before we could change students’ attitudes, we had to first consider how the attitudes of some members of staff might also need to shift.

In September, I had some challenging conversations with more sceptical members of the teaching team. They would tell me: “The students won’t get it”, “They aren’t interested in trying new ways to help them pass”, and so on.

But in reality, that was not the case: a large sample survey we undertook showed that 80 per cent of 509 students on the GCSE study programme really wanted to achieve a high grade in the qualification. Yet of the 509 students surveyed, only 18 per cent believed that they would gain a grade 4 or above.

It was clear to me that if a student believes they will fail, they are far more likely to do so. We needed to explore teaching and learning approaches that would reverse this way of thinking.

So, how did we do it? While there are many resources available in this area, such as The GCSE Mindset, by Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes, we found that working collaboratively to develop a bespoke scheme of work and a range of resources to be the best approach. It helped us to focus on our students and their ways of working.

We decided to trial our new approaches in English lessons to start with.

The activities, which usually last for around 10 minutes, get students to explore their attitudes towards themselves and learning. Resources focus on developing visualisation, reflection, organisational and verbal skills.

For example, a reflection activity that we call “Epic Fails” encourages students to look at their experiences of failure, explore what they’ve learned from their mistakes and think about how they can use that information to shape their future actions and choices.

In another activity, called “Excuses, Excuses, Excuses”, we ask students to consider all the obstacles to learning that they put in their own way, why they do this and how they can overcome those obstacles in the future.

Other activities, such as “My Belief Wall”, encourage students to focus on their strengths, shifting the focus away from what they perceive to be weaknesses or failures.

Underpinning all activities is a focus on the language used by teachers and students. A crucial aspect of the work we have been undertaking is developing a constructive vocabulary to use in dialogue around the challenges of life and learning. Our aim is to support students in reframing their disappointments, difficulties and frustrations in a more positive light.

I encouraged teachers to adapt the activities to their style of teaching and their students. For me, this is a really key point. With any new approach, teachers need to be able to take ownership of it, work collaboratively and see for themselves how something that they’ve introduced and shaped has gone on to have a positive impact on their students.

Teachers need space to experiment: this will only work if you, as a manager, give them the flexibility to find which activities and delivery approaches work best for their style of teaching and their class.

However, the activities themselves were only part of the solution. Our team also needed to regularly touch base about the project. We already had a weekly staff meeting and I made sure the action research project was always top of the agenda.

Maintaining that momentum has been one of the biggest challenges of the project. When you are dealing with a resit curriculum that squashes two years of learning into nine months, the exams and students’ curriculum progress naturally take precedence.

But for a project like this to work, it needs to be discussed at every opportunity, until the activities become an intrinsic part of teachers’ planning and delivery. Leaders have to keep supporting and encouraging teachers to reflect on the new approaches. Crucially, it’s important to never allow focus to slide.

That’s why, on top of the weekly meetings, we would also get together once a half term for a dedicated discussion about the progress of the project and to collaborate on new activities or ways to enhance existing ones.

Making space for discussion wasn’t the only challenge. As a manager, I had to work closely with staff who were less confident about delivering the activities, supporting and encouraging them. Continually working to secure buy-in is so important.

So, this has been our process. But what about the outcomes? At the moment, it is difficult to quantify just how much the activities have impacted directly on student progress in English, but since introducing them, we have seen greater engagement in learning and a significant decrease in staff seeking support with positive behaviour management.

Anecdotally, we can see that the activities have increased students’ sense of self-belief and allowed them to recognise their positive qualities and abilities. Many are happier to be in the classroom, and happier in themselves, too. For many, their language around learning has also completely changed, and they are much more positive about their work.

The change in students’ attitudes has had a knock-on effect for our teachers, too. It can be challenging to teach six to eight sessions of GCSE a week to students who appear to be disengaged from their learning. But since introducing the activities, student engagement has increased - and student-teacher relationships have improved.

While the team always developed very good working relationships with their learners, the project has helped staff to build greater understanding of the barriers to learning and the emotional challenges that students might be facing. In turn, this increased understanding has led to students being more willing to open up to their teachers, and to approach them for help.

Of course, students like Lauren will not have to resit their GCSEs again this summer. Resits, like all exams, have been cancelled by the Department for Education in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, our staff will be submitting their judgements on what they think the students would have achieved if they had sat the exam.

However, engaging in the activities has helped Lauren to value her unique qualities as an individual. She now has coping strategies to draw on when learning becomes especially demanding. Undoubtedly, this would have helped her to face the challenge of yet another resit examination.

Overall, the project already feels like a success - even if we won’t have traditional exams this year to prove it.

Emma Ireland is the head of academy for English at The Sheffield College

*Names have been changed to protect students’ anonymity

This article originally appeared in the 15 May 2020 issue under the headline “GCSE resits: are better results all in the mindset?”