Prepping year 11 for the maths GCSE: my best tips and tricks from Nicola Whiston

Getting year 11 ship shape for the maths GCSE can be a bit of a juggle. When do you introduce mock papers? Should you put on revision sessions? How do you get them to said revision sessions? We asked experienced maths teacher and TES maths teacher of the year 2018, Nicola Whiston to share her year 11 timetable.

Download a printable version of Nicola Whiston's guide to year 11 GCSEs.

I think this is my eleventh cohort of year 11s through their exams, and every year I still feel the same excitement and anticipation building up to the big day that is Maths paper 1. I know I am completely biased, but I feel like this is the exam the students are most excited about as well!

I’m lucky enough to have a reasonably successful track record for year 11 outcomes at both higher and foundation tier. A lot of the success of my year 11 groups has come from a combination of serious nagging; parental involvement; brainwashing that maths is the single most important subject to exist; and making the students believe they’re “there” or it’s within their grasp to achieve whatever grade they want.

Some of the techniques to be successful listed above can’t really be explained in a blog post, they’re built from relationships with your classes and school. However, there are some logistical steps in the year 11 teaching process I rely on heavily that really help boost grades in the final months, and I often follow the same pattern each year.

September -Two-week tests

Since my first leadership in maths post one of the things I believed most strongly in was the students should become really familiar with maths papers, but also see how quickly progress in maths can improve by learning one or two topics, and how quickly this can translate to test scores.

Benefits of two-week tests

Every year 11 class completes one paper every two weeks in my departments. This means over a half term they complete a full suite of exam papers. As I’ve always taught the Edexcel specification, we’ve always had access to the maths emporium, and their ever-growing supply of practice papers and past papers means that the supply can easily be met.

Tips for two-week tests

• At the beginning of half term, I would write to every parent and include the dates of the “in class” papers with an attached revision list of the topics on each paper. Once those papers were completed, the next half term’s letter also included their paper scores from the last one.

• Make it fun – we renamed the paper sets (normally using a Disney or Harry Potter theme). For example, the November 2022 papers were renamed the “Harry Potter Set”, all foundation papers are named after the good characters, e.g. Paper 1 (Harry Potter), Paper 2 (Ginny Weasley), and all the higher papers are named after the “baddies”, Voldamort, Bellatrix Lestrange etc. It adds nothing at all to the maths, but it does add to the conversation around the tests and helps build the relationship with maths the students have.

• They only get one hour… I know that is shorter than the papers but at the beginning of year 11 we have very few students who can complete the whole paper and it’s about the process of building up test resilience and exposure as much as it is about the outcomes.

January – Books to folders

Up until now, I’ll have followed and most likely finished teaching the content needed for the exams. There will be some topics missing but I can still pick them up in the next process.

All students up until now have been working in books, but now we transition to working from folders. Within our department, we have a bank of resources that we have developed over the last couple of years, they are broken down into a topic a lesson. This includes note sheets with examples and then a set of exam questions about that topic.

Benefits of maths folders

This helps to organise my students with their revision notes and shows them how much they have learnt over the last 5 years in school. They are able to group together a summary page of notes and a set of questions they can practise from. My favourite places to get the exam questions from are either Maths Genie or Corbett maths.

Tips for using maths folders

• Bulk order big A4 ring binders (you’ll fill them!) If the students want to buy their own, they can, but we always provide this for the whole cohort. Send the printing straight to the printer having it stapled and hole punched at the same time! It will save you so much time. The cost of the folders and printing balances out against the cost of books and glue we find as they spend their last term and a half working like this.

• Take one lesson to use filed dividers and organise the folder into starters, algebra, shape, data, number, and exam papers.

Related content:

6 power moves for the maths GCSE

7 revision strategies for maths GCSE to teach and learn

Behaviour management in the classroom: a guide to 9 strategies you can use

January onwards - Increase the challenge of the starter

From January onwards the starters become all about thinking and thinking harder. Once they have their folders I print a month’s supply of starters off. On entrance, the class finds the corresponding day: no time wasted. There are a couple of starter booklets I use depending on the need but mostly I use the Corbett Maths 5-a-day starters or the Mathsbox Focus starters. The goal is to stretch them by April to the highest level of challenge, but at this stage, I often start them a few stages below.

Benefit of increasing challenge

It might only be 5 questions they’re asked to do, but the interleaving of topics really helps their exposure to different materials and starts to help recall by repetition. I don’t mind if some of the students are only able to be successful in one question so long as they’re trying and listening to the explanations for the rest.

Tips for increasing challenge

• Higher tier classes I often start on the foundation plus booklets for January but move to higher by February at the latest and aim for the Higher Plus by Easter.

• Foundation classes – don’t be afraid to use the numeracy questions first! They’re great for tackling misconceptions that I can often take for granted.

• Printing them A4 gives suitable space to write and correct work where needed.

February Half Term – up the homework!

Workload is a huge priority for me, so all of the above are reasonably low-workload tasks and activities but have a high impact on progress. The next thing to step up now is homework and the mantra the only way to learn maths is to do maths. All homework I set at this point is online so it is self-marking, I’ve used multiple platforms for this over the years including LbQ.org.

I have to stick strong to the school behaviour system through this point. If students choose not to complete the homework I really work hard to follow the sanctions and communicate with home about the benefit of it. I also set homework on platforms that are able to be completed on mobile phones which support access.

Benefits of upping homework

It’s the forced push some students need to start of revision. They need to be starting to do little snippets of maths independently.

Tips for upping homework

• Set topics they have been successful with previously

• Include at least one exam-style question in each homework

• The homework tasks are designed to take no more than 20 minutes

• Provide each student with a whiteboard & pen to use at home if they don’t have access to this already. Sometimes I just cut an old class set in half and make them a little smaller.

After the spring half term – Increase the papers

Alongside the once every 2-week paper which is done in test conditions, I introduce another paper or half paper every week where they can sit and work together through it.

Benefits of increasing papers

For more able students they love this because they can work and I mark as I circulate, but for my less able students this is all about building exam resilience. Each year I will have at least one group where a handful of students just refuse to take the test, or give up as soon as the question includes words not just numbers. This is about doing the questions together or with their peers to show them how much they can actually access.

Tips for increasing papers

• For really low-ability students, I completely focus on the foundation papers and only questions 1-10. So they do as many papers as I can find and we only focus on the first 10 questions.

• Explicitly point out the repetition of certain types of questions. Make sure the foundation tier realises that at the start of every paper series, there will be a unit conversion, an FDP conversion, or a fraction of amount question and build their confidence in this topic. In the higher tier, for example, any changing subject question after the staples will always include a factorising.

There are normally a set of final mocks in this half term that disturb the teaching pattern so I keep the steps all listed above running for the rest of Spring 2 until Easter.

After Easter, I start to include some more in-class teaching and learning strategies that build on students working together and challenges to help them link subjects together. This half-term is all about confidence and self-belief!

If you'd like access to LbQ's practice papers, sign up to a free 6-week, no obligation trial.