A spreadsheet containing all the grade boundaries for all English Language 8700 exams – 12 in all at present. It also includes the TAG years (just in case people think they are missing papers from those years!). Importantly, the spreadsheet shows the text or subject of the texts for each year – so no more opening files to check that it’s one paper or another anymore. It also shows a quick view of the marks needed for a grade 4 on each paper plus the difference between a grade 3 and 4. So if you want to see how many marks achieved a 5 in 2017 and compare it to 2022 (and so on!) then this is the spreadsheet for you. It’s also a very quick way to find the year a certain paper was published and used. I have tried to use colour effectively on the spreadsheet so you can differentiate between a June and a November paper, plus have used conditional formatting for the information about Grade 3 and 4 which appears on the right hand side of the spreadsheet. Have fun! The spreadsheet isn’t locked so you can adapt this to your heart’s content.

This short lesson was devised to help students to learn what the markers are looking for if they are asked to write a letter in GCSE English Paper 2 Question 5 (AQA). The letter, it must be stressed, is a great example but this would probably not be achievable in the 45 minutes available for this task in the exam. However, it covers all the necessary skills to get 40/40 for the question - or if not that, pretty close to it! There are a series of short exercises too. These cover the “Content and Organisation” skills, as well as those for “Technical Accuracy”. Students are encouraged to discuss the assessment objectives associated with these skills.