Like in many other schools, our key stage 3 students sit an English exam every year. It’s an important opportunity for them to have the experience of working independently and in silence on tasks that help to prepare them for the challenge and rigour of the GCSE curriculum.

Often, the writing section of the paper is where many students’ weaknesses become glaringly obvious. It is an extended task with a picture stimulus, and they have to do so many things at the same time, from planning to punctuation for effect. It’s no wonder that my students this year - many of whom have low prior attainment, SEND or English as an additional language - struggled with the cognitive load that the exam requires.

Reading their responses, the first thing I noticed was the run-on sentences. Because they were focused on creating a narrative, their writing emerged in a stream-of-consciousness style without full stops or capital letters. Even capital letters for proper nouns were often absent. Secondly, their use of tense was inconsistent. Mixing past and present tenses in the same paragraph - or even the same sentence - made their writing incoherent and confusing.

These were skills I had previously identified as weaknesses and I had already delivered some targeted teaching to help them to improve their accuracy. But they were still making the same mistakes.

Since my teaching practice has become more research-informed, I’ve realised that the
crucial thing that I can do in response to issues like this is to create opportunities for deliberate practice. Tom Sherrington emphasises the importance of actions as feedback and in his blog he sets out five ways of doing this effectively; one of these is “rehearse and repeat”.

Thus my SpaG bootcamp was born. I made it my mission to train students in these specific skills to break the bad habits that had become entrenched. I structured these lessons in a five-part workout-inspired sequence.

1. Warm up

Start with a very simple “do now” activity that focuses on one very specific thing. For example, since many of my students’ handwriting confuses upper and lower case letters, I simply asked them to write out the alphabet in pairs of upper- and lower-case letters.

2. Cardio

Have a five-minute quickfire task that involves a series of short recall tasks; I gave my students six sentences with a total of 25 missing capital letters for them to add. This was followed by some speedy self-assessment with the answers on the board.

3. Personal trainer input

Explicitly teach students the rules for the skill you are teaching. I reminded my students of the reasons why we use capital letters and full stops, including some specific guidance on the number of coordinating conjunctions to use in a compound sentence.

4. Stamina

This is where you challenge students to do a longer task that involves continuous independent writing. I gave my students a seven-sentence paragraph without any full stops or capital letters to rewrite accurately in full.

5. Cool down

End with self- or peer-assessment of the extended task with corrections added in a
different colour.

Of course, no workout is complete without a soundtrack; the classic Eye of the
Tiger was an obvious choice!

Heather Greatbatch is an assistant headteacher and head of English at a school in Manchester.