Supporting Our Year 11 Students Right Now

It’s no secret that students worldwide have had a tough time of it this last 2 years. There has been so much talk of lost learning and gaps because students have missed quality teaching and learning time in the classroom during various points of the pandemic and because of the instability of their education have suffered as a consequence, both academically and beyond.

Now students are back in the classroom, we are all trying to race with them to the finish line of exams – trying to cram in as much work as possible to fill those gaps. There’s always a tremendous amount of pressure on Y11 students – with revision, assemblies driving home constant messages of consistency and hard work, class work, homework, mock exams, reports, college applications and more and this year’s Y11s have that AS WELL as the weight of the pandemic on their shoulders and the sheer uncertainty of what’s going to end up happening in the summer. The support we need to be offering them HAS to be different because they are in a different position.

In the classroom is the PERFECT space to offer students that support. It’s likely that students are feeling the stress of possible upcoming exams, couple that with the constant uncertainty of whether they’ll be in school, isolating, whether it’s going to be TAGs instead of exams and you can imagine what kind of anxiety they may be experiencing. The first thing we can do is offer them CALM CONSISTENCY in our classrooms. Every lesson structured in a way they are familiar with, boundaries that don’t shift, calm teaching instead of teaching with a stressed-out energy that may come from our own anxieties around the above! We need to help them to feel safe. The safer and calmer they feel, the more information from our lessons will be absorbed and the more able they will feel to take on more in the form of extension tasks, homework, and revision.

Lots of students find revision quite difficult and with things being so up in the air, some students might be reluctant to even start. Supporting students with positive and manageable revision skills is going to be key this year. Taking some classroom time to model what this looks like in your subject can be really powerful. It might feel dangerous handing over valuable class time to this but it will hopefully provide students with the boost of confidence they need to feel able to start with their revision and be a bit more independent with it. This might look very different in different classrooms but a few things I have done with my Y11s that have worked include:

• Helping them map out their revision for my subject and plotting is alongside everything else they have to do! Also in this field comes modelling how to get really specific with revision planning – instead of just writing English Lit on their plan, or even Macbeth, they’re to write something specific such as Macbeth themes followed by practice question on ambition.
• Give them a framework to use for their revision. We have a one-hour model for revision at my school that our Achievement Team created and it works great as it splits the hour up into sections and offers guidance with what each of the sections could look like. So for example, the final section of the hour framework is practice and that might be completing an introduction, completing a full exam paper in timed conditions, completing a set of questions, completing a task they’ve built up to in the previous sections.
• Having some way of monitoring revision also helps. I have a chart in my classroom which tracks who has brought in revision to show me – whether it be a practice paper or some revision cards, it doesn’t matter, it gets a smiley face. This really helps to offer praise around revision and shows students that we care about what is being produced at home.

There will always be a handful of students who just don’t want to engage. Whether it’s fear or lack of confidence manifesting in tricky behaviour or defiance, it’s our responsibility to support these students too. It might be that a bit more of a targeted approach is needed for these students in the form of small group or one to one intervention. If students are reluctant to attend, try contacting home to see if that helps. Or tracking the attendance with a report of some kind. Find a member of staff that that student connects with and have them mentor the student. The aim is to get a bit more buy in and to increase their confidence little by little as this is the key to them having more motivation to engage on the whole with their education.

I think we also need to consider the way we approach the year group as a whole. The pressure is on, everyone knows it and everyone feels it – staff and students alike – but the messages of urgency and resilience and importance of hard work can be delivered in a calm way and still be received by students. Energy is so powerful and if students are being set up for the week with a long-winded assembly delivered with a fraught or manic energy mirroring the stress felt by staff around Y11 and the exams and results and their own general stress then they are going to absorb this energy and likely take it on as their own for the week. Try instead to offer manageable chunks of information delivered with a calm and rational energy, one that makes students feel safe and ready rather than worried and desperate.

It will come as no surprise that we also need to consider students’ mental well-being in and amongst all of the academic support we offer. How students have responded on the whole to the pandemic has been nothing short of inspiring – students across the world have dug deep and shown such an force of strength and resilience it has been incredible to see. But this being said doesn’t mean that it still hasn’t taken its toll. It doesn’t mean that every day is able to be met with that same strength and resilience. We know that as teachers. On the whole we have managed but there have been some tough, dark days along the way. We’re all human. We all struggle. Offer as much compassion, warmth and understanding as you can to your Y11 students. Listen to them. Work hard for them. Support them. Give them your time and energy when they need it. Go the extra mile for them. They need this right now. Try to imagine how you’d feel in their shoes and use this empathy to drive your support – this is not easy for them and they may not have adults supporting them with the whole process of preparing for exams at home. Identify what they need, whether it’s homework in smaller chunks, more regular marking of revision pieces, email support with homework, more group work opportunities in lessons, a mentor, support with structuring revision, one to one help, revision sessions, lectures, interventions and then work towards providing the provision they need to be successful. Knowing they’ve got you on their side, flying their flag and doing everything you can to support them might just be the encouragement they need to succeed.