Section A: Directed Writing Read Text A and Text B and then answer Section A, Question 1. (a) Re-read paragraph 2 of Text A. Explain how the writer uses lan...

How the 40 marks are divided

Part (a) is worth 5 marks and is marked point by point, one mark for each creditable comment up to a maximum of five. Part (b) is worth 35: up to 10 for the content you take out of the two texts and up to 25 for the quality of the writing itself. The two strands in part (b) are marked separately and then added, so a fluent speech that never engages with the texts still forfeits most of the reading marks, and a shrewd reading expressed in disorganised prose still forfeits most of the writing marks.

Part (a): what the question is actually asking

This part is new to the paper and it is not a comprehension question. It does not ask what paragraph 2 of Text A describes. A candidate who writes that the hall is silent, that the desks are in rows and that a girl is nervous has answered a question nobody set. The instruction is to explain how the writer uses language to make the hall seem hostile, which means beginning with the words on the page and working outwards to the impression they plant in a reader. Every mark therefore rests on three linked things: a short quotation, an accurate account of what those particular words are doing, and the effect that follows for someone reading them.

Quote a few words at a time rather than whole sentences, and take everything from paragraph 2 only. Work down the paragraph in the order the writer wrote it rather than hunting for named devices. The paragraph is built to be read that way: it makes the room physically unpleasant first, then in its last sentence hands responsibility for that unpleasantness to the adults who selected it.

What separates a 5 from a 3. A three mark answer names techniques accurately and stops there. It says that the writer uses a simile, that the clock is personified, that the vocabulary is negative. Naming a device earns nothing on its own, because the question is about effect. The mark arrives with the word so. The clock is personified so that time stops being something that passes and becomes something with an appetite, feeding on the morning while the students watch it feed. A five mark answer performs that move five times, on five separate details, and never leaves a quotation sitting on the page uncommented.

These are the creditable points available in this paragraph. One mark each, to a maximum of five, and two genuinely different comments on the same quotation may both be credited.

A model answer for part (a), about 120 words

The hall is made hostile before a single question has been read. Desks standing "in rows like gravestones" bury the candidates in advance, so the tidiness a school would call good order is made to look funereal. They are "spaced so that nobody can lean on anybody", which re-reads an ordinary rule about furniture as a statement about the students: isolation has been designed into the room. The air "smells of floor polish and fear", yoking an institutional smell to an emotion until dread seems part of the building rather than a private feeling. Overhead "a clock swallows the minutes", giving time an appetite, and "a hundred children sit and watch it eat" leaves them spectators of their own morning being consumed.

Part (b): 35 marks, and why summary will not earn them

Ten marks here are reading marks, and they are not given for reporting what the two writers say. They are given for weighing it. The difference shows immediately in a sentence. Summary sounds like this: one writer thinks work gathered across the year is fairer and the other thinks the examination is fairer. Evaluation sounds like this: the first writer's strongest evidence is a study of 1,430 students in which the two methods agreed to within four percentage points, while the second writer's is a re-marking of 6,200 pieces in which nearly a third of teacher marks had to be altered and almost all of the alterations were downwards, and the second of those findings is about who does the marking rather than about the method itself, which is why it does not straightforwardly cancel the first.

Read both texts twice before writing. On the first pass, find each writer's claim, the evidence offered for it, and the concession each makes. On the second pass, look for the places where the two texts touch, because that is where the highest marks live.

What each reading objective rewards against these two texts

Where the reading marks are actually won

• By setting one text's evidence directly against the other's and saying which is the better evidence, and why. The Whitmoor study followed students assessed both ways, so it compares methods; the Bramfield re-marking compares markers. Saying so is worth more than either figure on its own.
• By noticing the convergences. Neither writer defends the present arrangement. Both write from inside schools. Both treat teachers' marking time as a real cost that any reform has to pay for. Both argue from the same premise, that assessment should show what a student can actually do, and reach opposite conclusions from it.
• By noticing that the second text proposes a third route, several shorter examinations spread across two years and marked outside the school. The governors are therefore not choosing between two options, and a speech that presents them with two has misread the material.
• By applying a little scepticism in both directions: whether one academy's results transfer, and whether twenty two years of doing both jobs produces expertise, attachment to the familiar, or both.

Shaping a speech of 250 to 350 words

The form is named in the task and it is marked. A speech to a governing body has a room in it: people who must decide something, a fixed slot in an agenda, and a mixed audience of staff, parents and students. Address them directly at the start, keep the register formal without becoming stiff, and let sentence length change when the argument turns, since that is what makes prose sound spoken rather than merely written down. Do not use headings, and do not announce your view in the opening line: a conclusion reached in front of the governors is evidence of evaluation, while a conclusion announced first turns everything after it into justification.

At roughly 300 words you have five short paragraphs. This outline maps material from each text onto each stage.

Where the 25 writing marks go

They go to five things: expressing a case with conviction, ordering it so that the order itself argues, choosing words precisely, pitching the tone at this audience, and writing accurately. The commonest avoidable losses on this question are borrowed wording and mechanical structure. Long stretches carried over from either text depress both the reading strand and the writing strand at once, because copied material is not selection and is not your vocabulary. A paragraph that merely summarises Text A followed by a paragraph that merely summarises Text B is orderly but inert; the marks are in paragraphs that carry an argument forward. Concede one point to the side you do not take, place the concession where it strengthens rather than weakens your case, and make the last sentence do more than repeat the first.

Content: 10 marks (R1, R2, R3, R5)

R1 grasp what a text states openly. R2 grasp what it implies, including attitudes beneath the surface. R3 examine, weigh up and build on its facts, ideas and opinions, backed by evidence. R5 select information and put it to work for a particular purpose.

Quality of writing: 25 marks (W1 to W5)

W1 articulate experience and express what is thought, felt and imagined. W2 arrange and shape ideas so the order itself works for effect. W3 draw on varied word choices and sentence patterns that fit the situation. W4 pitch formality and tone to suit the situation. W5 spell, punctuate and use grammar accurately.

These lists are indicative, not a checklist.