This is one of the most common things parents say when they contact a tutor: “She’s clearly very bright. She reads well, she communicates articulately, her teachers say she’s capable — but her English grades just don’t reflect it.”
It’s genuinely common, and it’s usually fixable. The gap between a student’s evident capability and their exam performance in English almost always has a specific cause. Here are the most frequent ones.
1. They Write Fluently but Don’t Respond to the Question
Confident, fluent writers often fall into a particular trap: they write well, but they write what they want to write rather than what the question asks for. A question asking for a formal letter of complaint gets a thoughtful piece of writing that doesn’t look or sound like a formal letter. A comprehension question asking for specific evidence gets a beautifully written paragraph about the theme of the text without answering what was actually asked.
The fix: teach the discipline of reading and re-reading the question before and during the answer. Strong writers sometimes feel this is beneath them — it isn’t. The question is the contract, and an answer that ignores it will always lose marks, regardless of its quality in other respects.
2. They Analyse Content Rather Than Language
“The writer thinks that climate change is serious” is content analysis. “The writer’s use of the verb ‘devastate’ — with its connotations of irreversible, catastrophic damage — emphasises the severity of the threat in a way that a more neutral word like ‘affect’ would not” is language analysis. IGCSE English Language questions almost always ask for the second, and many students who read well and think clearly are giving the first.
The fix: explicitly teach the difference between writing about what a text says and writing about how it says it. Then practise language analysis on short extracts until the instinct to analyse language — rather than summarise content — becomes automatic.
3. Their Writing Is Good But Not Structured for the Exam
Some students write in a flowing, associative style that works well in casual contexts but loses marks in exams that reward clear paragraph structure, consistent register, and obvious form markers. A strong natural writer who doesn’t know how to signal the difference between a speech and an article in their writing will lose form marks — even if the content and language are excellent.
The fix: study the conventions of each form explicitly. What does a formal letter look like? What does a speech opening sound like? What distinguishes a broadsheet article from a tabloid one? Practice writing in each form until the conventions are second nature rather than something to remember to apply.
4. They Work Too Slowly Under Time Pressure
Thoughtful students often lose time they can’t afford because they want to get every sentence right before moving on. In an exam where there are multiple questions with strict mark allocations, this tendency is costly. A student who spends 40 minutes on a question worth 10 marks and rushes the one worth 25 marks has, in effect, made the wrong bet.
The fix: timed practice, repeatedly, until the pacing feels natural. Teach the rule of thumb: spend approximately one minute per mark. A 15-mark question gets 15 minutes; a 25-mark question gets 25 minutes. This feels mechanical, but it builds an instinct for time management that pays off under exam conditions.
5. They Don’t Know What a High-Grade Answer Looks Like
Many students have never seen a high-scoring IGCSE English answer. They produce work of broadly similar quality every time — not because they can’t improve, but because they don’t know what “better” looks like in concrete terms.
The fix: study mark schemes and exemplar answers. Cambridge publishes past papers, mark schemes, and examiner reports — all of which are freely available and enormously instructive. Reading a mark scheme alongside an actual student response to the same question makes the gap between a 6 and a 9 legible and specific rather than vague and frustrating.
All of the issues above are addressed directly in Thorogood English’s IGCSE English classes — with small groups that allow Jacqueline to identify each student’s specific gap and work on it with them. Join the waiting list for January 2027.
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