There is one thing that I dread seeing on a mock exam script above all else: a totally blank page.
That’s right. After all the hard work, all the practice, you realise that a student has simply written nothing. It’s a heart-stopping moment, made more pertinent by the knowledge that the disruption of the past few years has made mock exams more important than ever in helping to decide those all-important final grades.
GCSEs: How to handle a blank page in a mock exam
So what can a teacher do to help the student who has written nothing? I think there are several steps to take.
1. Offer support, not punishment
Although your initial response as a teacher might be frustration that the careful teaching you delivered didn’t translate, it is important that this isn’t communicated to the student.
Instead, it’s about ensuring that steps are taken so that this doesn’t happen in the next formal assessment.
Communication with the student and their parents is key here - the importance of mocks can’t be underestimated for college or sixth-form places in the face of continuing uncertainty around whether teacher-assessed grades will be used again. You need to explain this clearly, and then start a dialogue about why the student felt they weren’t able to write anything. Identifying that reason is the only way to ensure that the barrier can be removed. Was it timing? A knowledge gap? A feeling of being overwhelmed?
A good exercise is to ask students to write down - anonymously, if necessary - what their feelings were around each question. That way, you can start to plan for change.
2. Focus on feedback
While it might seem like a good idea to simply say to your student to “have another go”, this is likely to be a waste of time: as mentioned above, they obviously didn’t attempt this question for a reason. So don’t make them repeat the experience immediately. Instead, focus on giving the most useful feedback you can to the whole class.
One important part of this is showing what “good” answers look like. This can be done in several ways: either downloading answers from the exam board, using anonymised good answers from other students or simply writing them yourself as the subject expert.
However, simply providing the good answer isn’t enough - you need to break down the process by which the answer was reached. A simple, visual approach is to provide colour-coded phrases in the example answer against the mark scheme. A visualiser is a godsend for physically annotating a good answer, too.
All of this helps to take away the “mystery” of how to climb up the mark scheme.
3. Provide a structure
The fact is, all answers at GCSE have a “formula” - even in the essay-based subjects like English. Whilst this can be limiting at the very top end, it is essential to take away the fear of the blank page for those leaving whole questions or sections blank.
We have had great success with what we call “structure strips”. These are printed strips of paper that can be stuck into the margin of a page: they provide sentence stems for memorising how to formulate an answer, but also indicate the “ideal” length that the answer should be.
Again, a visualiser is a useful tool here, as you can model how to write against the prompts on the strip in real time before pupils attempt to do this alone.
4. Make it automatic
The only way that students are going to truly overcome the fear of the blank page is by building automaticity into their answers.
Once they have become confident in answering previously blank questions using a model or structure strip or “starter sentences”, this scaffold can be gradually withdrawn.
You then need to integrate regular, timed practice into lessons. This doesn’t only mean practising full answers but also the process of retrieving the necessary information to develop an answer.
This needn’t be a lengthy exercise each time - a quickfire quiz on, say, “Paper 1, question 4” can be a five-minute starter activity that will keep students revisiting the material and help to build familiarity with the process.
Laura May Rowlands is head of English in a secondary school in Hampshire
