When English and maths teachers meet their GCSE resit class for the first time, they will know very little about their new charges.

But there are some common experiences that many of the learners share, says Diana Martin, vice-principal at Dudley College.

“They’ve sat an exam, often on multiple occasions,” she says. “They know what it feels like to be a failure at GCSE English or maths. They can do some aspects of the GCSE, but they may struggle with other aspects. It’s a certainty that they’ve probably forgotten much of what they’ve learned up to June. Many don’t have a positive attitude towards English and maths. And the thought of doing another GCSE course doesn’t thrill them - so we’ve got that disengagement from the start.”

If, as a student, you haven’t achieved that all-important grade 4 (or C under the legacy qualifications) in either subject at school, the only certainty is that you’re stuck with it. Since 2014, students with a D grade (or 3, under the reformed GCSEs) have been required to take the qualification again if they remain in education.

Those with a lower grade have the option of taking an alternative qualification, such as functional skills, instead.

Over the past five years, a received wisdom has built up in the sector: the best approach to re-engage disillusioned students is to present the subject in a different way from how students experienced it at school.

In 2017, even apprenticeships and skills minister Anne Milton suggested that teachers should “be doing something very different” when it came to the teaching of GCSE English and maths in a college environment.

Does this approach work? It certainly can for some. In 2017, for instance, 69,000 16-19 students who hadn’t managed this benchmark at school reached the point of achieving a “good” pass in both subjects.

But while it works for some, the collateral damage for the wider cohort is significant. Among the 161,139 entries in GCSE maths from 17-plus students in 2017, only 22.7 per cent achieved a grade 4 or higher - down 14.3 percentage points compared with the previous year.

But what if, instead of going for a radically different approach to English or maths in an attempt to jump-start students’ interest and re-enter the exams as quickly as possible, college teachers adopted a more school-like approach?

In this respect, Dudley College is something of a pioneer. It has taken the strategic decision to teach post-16 GCSE English and maths over a two-year programme and employ setting to give each student the best chance of success. While the approach is unusual, there is some evidence to support it.

A 2016 review of post-16 English and maths teaching by the Education Endowment Foundation, for instance, shows that “significant and sustained input is required in order to achieve positive impacts”. “Such interventions are useful where the intention is to improve English and mathematics outcomes more generally over a two- to three-year period,” the researchers say.

Having witnessed the sometimes damaging impact of pushing students to resit their GCSEs at the earliest possible opportunity, Martin is minded to agree.

“Nine months just wasn’t long enough,” she says. “The learners who didn’t achieve in that first year were back in the same GCSE class in September. So it was really repetitive and a little bit soul-destroying for teachers and students alike.”

Students can get sucked into a vortex of failure by the GCSE resit policy. Research published in 2018 by Cambridge Assessment shows that each time a student resits their GCSE in English or maths, the chance of passing it goes down. Last summer, data analysis by Impetus-PEF for Tes revealed that some students were resitting their GCSE English and maths exams as many as nine times.

The Commons Education Select Committee heard last year that the policy of compulsory GCSE resits was having a detrimental impact on some young people’s mental health. So the way English and maths is delivered is crucially important for the welfare of young people.

When a new group of students arrives in September, the teacher at the front of the classroom has little information about their strengths and weaknesses.

College staff do not have access to the breakdown of how the students fared in their exams last time around. While staff in school sixth-forms may have some information on prior attainment to go on, their counterparts in colleges have to start from scratch. Arranging the necessary diagnostic assessments to find out this seemingly basic information can take up as much as six weeks at the start of the course.

There have been attempts to rectify this. Pearson, which runs the Edexcel GCSE exams, ran a pilot giving a small number of colleges access to the breakdown of results for resit students (see box, page 59). Pearson has rolled this out on a national basis with around 350 centres currently using this functionality, with approximately 5,000 learners’ results retrieved.

This presents a big barrier, because grade 3 covers a wide range of abilities. A Department for Education-commissioned report by CFE Research looking at effective teaching practices for post-16 students, published last year, identified this challenge, with researchers finding that “knowledge of the mark itself is useful to providers because it helps [teachers] improve their diagnosis of a student’s ability - especially within the [former] D grade distribution”.

Martin sets out the difficulties that college teachers face. “What we don’t know is how close or far away from a grade 4 [students] were. There’s a significant difference between those learners who have been in scope for achieving a grade 4 at secondary school and those who just scraped into that grade 3 band,” she says. “We don’t know what their skills gaps are. We don’t receive any information from secondary schools to inform what we do when they get to college.”

This is where the innovative approach adopted by Dudley College kicks in. After an initial “settlement period” to ease students back into the classroom, teachers run various diagnostic exercises to address this lack of data. The results of these tests are then used to stream learners into three categories within the first two weeks they are at the college: a higher group, an intermediate group and a foundation group.

The diagnostics regime continues through the two-year model, with students taking part in a “skills assessment” each half-term to ensure that they are matched to a relevant intervention strategy.

The first-year summer exam is a consideration only for those who are most able; those in the foundation group will not sit any GCSE English or maths exams in their first year.

“It’s much more about skills gap analyses [in the foundation group], and diagnostics and mock results to inform what’s delivered in the second year - rather than just repeating what they’ve done in the first year, and what they probably did in Year 11,” explains Martin.

Lesley Morton, the curriculum manager for English and maths at Dudley College, says the foundation programme focuses on key skills - such as spelling, punctuation and grammar or times tables. “That’s something that follows them through their GCSE course and it’s something that needs to be nailed for them to progress,” she says.

The college deploys its additional support team and practitioners as part of its GCSE strategy, in particular to support foundation learners. Morton adds: “We think it’s worth the investment at this time. For these learners to have a fighting chance of achieving in their second year of programme, they need to be upskilled quite significantly in that first year.”

The aim of the first-year foundation programme is to get learners up to the level of the intermediate group. “That way they’re in a much healthier place, come the start of the second-year programme, to actually make some distance travelled,’ Morton explains. “And they may be within distance of passing their GCSE exam in the summer.”

For students on the intermediate programme - dubbed “borderline learners” - teachers spend additional time to support the weaker aspects of their learning and to practise applying exam strategies. Booster groups are delivered, sometimes outside of lesson time. Only learners who are ready to sit their exam will be entered for the summer.

The higher programme is for students who already have the essential skills and only need a little bit more practice at exam strategies and GCSE course content. It is expected that all of these students will sit the summer GCSE exam in their first year. “It’s about stretching and challenging this group, too,” Morton says. “We try our best to reach for those higher grades - to try to get those 5s and 6s - but that is a difficult job.”

First- and second-year learners are separately timetabled so students in their last year will be in a class with fellow final-year students rather than being mixed with first-years. This also has the result of reducing class sizes in the final year, which helps to deliver a “focused intervention”.

Behaviour is an issue for teachers of GCSE resit classes, too. CFE Research found that some students have low levels of motivation to study English and maths and often “exhibit various avoidance behaviours ranging from a refusal to attend classes to the creation of disruption in class, to a passive non-participation even though the student attends the lessons”.

At Dudley, mixing students with peers from other courses has improved behaviour. “It breaks them away from the cohort that they mix with on a day-to-day basis, and gives them an opportunity to mix with other learners from other vocational areas, and it has had a marked impact on behaviour,” Morton says.

In the second year, intermediate and foundation learners, and some higher learners, are again split based on ability.

CFE researchers also found that it is hard to apply “best practice” to the whole sector, because methods have to “align to a providers’ unique context”. The researchers note that “successful colleges test solutions, learn through trial and implement innovative solutions to the challenges they face”.

They add: “The sector is typically flexible and adaptable to change. A few sectoral approaches and concepts related to effective teaching and delivery were found. The quality and nature of the student-teacher relationship was central to nearly all college delivery.

“Most tried, wherever possible, to foster an adult-to-adult relationship between the teacher and student to create a counterpoint to the child-adult relationship which had been unsuccessful (in terms of GCSE passes) at school. Students recognised a higher level of support provided to them at college compared to school and, in a number of cases, learning difficulties that where either unknown or unreported from school were diagnosed by college support teams. College teaching and delivery works well when the systems in place to manage the student transition from school to a more mature environment work quickly and effectively.”

So while taking something of a “back to school approach” - a two-year model and setting by ability - may improve outcomes at some colleges, it may not work everywhere. However, a markedly different approach to the teacher-learner relationship may prove beneficial more universally.

“These learners, they need their confidence boosting, so it’s more of a family vibe, which we feel makes learners more settled. It’s very targeted and very diagnostic-driven and we focus on re-signposting that borderline group,” Morton adds.

Martin says the scheme has already started to bear fruit. The proportion of students achieving a grade 4 (a C under the old grading system) in English increased from 38 per cent in 2015-16 to 72 per cent the following year; in maths, the pass rate increased more modestly from 51 per cent to 52 per cent.

But there are no easy answers or quick fixes, she acknowledges: while the pass rate in both subjects were well above national averages in 2017-18, they dropped below those achieved the previous year.

“This system has been running for a couple of years and it helps,” Martin says. “But it’s not a magic wand in any shape or form.”

George Ryan is a Tes FE reporter

This article originally appeared in the 15 March 2019 issue under the headline “Back to school for GCSE resits?”