Key website content for Year 10

Assessment criteria and WAGOLL

• Skill Check assessment criteria and WAGOLL
  This area shows you what you need to do to get equals, plus and star for each skill. Alongside the assessment criteria there is an example of what a good one looks like (WAGOLL). You should check this before each Skill Check to make sure you know what you need to do to succeed.

English Language and Literature analysis skill guides

There are no new analysis skills this year: everything you need you have learnt at KS3. However, these guides are the ones that you are most important ones for you to look at again this year, as these are the harder or more sophisticated skills:

• Selecting relevant, meaningful evidence guide
  Students are notoriously bad at this, even in Year 10.

• Making an argument guide 3 — 3rd  guide in the 3-part series
  This is what you will be assessed on this year — extending your argument with more evidence and analysis — students are generally quite bad at this too.

• Analysing language, form and structure guide 3 — 3rd guide in the series
  You should be comfortable with the general skill by now, but this 3rd guide is worth checking again.

• Analysing language, form and structure guide 4 — 4th guide in the series - NEW FOR YEAR 10!
  This final guide in the methods analysis series is where the big marks come at GCSE. You definitely need to read this.

• Linking analysis to big ideas guide
  This is extremely important for GCSE and students are weirdly bad at it — worth rereading again.

• Linking analysis to context and the writer’s perspective
  This was new to you last year so it’s worth having another look this year.

• Creating a conceptualised response around a clear thesis
  This is also worth reading again — or reading for the first time if you didn’t look at it last year.

There are other essay writing guides that you may want to look at on our key essay writing skills page.

English Language creative writing skill guides

This year you will be doing fiction writing skills first, followed by non-fiction writing ones. It’s definitely worth revising the fiction-writing skills since you’ve not been on assessed on them since Year 8.

• Creating a character

• Describing a setting in vivid detail

• Creating an effective structure (fiction and non-fiction)

• Writing an opening and matched closing for a given text text 1 - 1st guide in this 2 part series

• Writing an opening and matched closing for a given text text 2 - 2nd guide in this 2 part series

• Writing an opinion paragraph for a given text type

You may also want to review the other fiction writing skills, like writing direct speech. You won’t be assessed on these specifically this year (unlike at KS3), but your mastery of these skills will factor into your fiction writing assessments for English Language Paper 1. You can find links to all the guides in the creative writing guides section of the website.