How can we support more able learners in the English classroom?

English teachers must move beyond superficial forms of challenge and devise sequences of lessons that genuinely push, inspire and develop more able learners – says Anthony Cockerill, Director of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE).

Teachers often rely on strategies that appear to support our most able learners but in reality do little to deepen their thinking. Giving students ‘extra work’ or ‘extension tasks’ can create the comforting illusion of challenge while preventing them from reaching their potential.

These surface-level approaches might tick boxes or keep students busy, but they fail to offer the intellectual stretch and rigour that truly cultivates high attainment. It’s helpful to think more carefully about how we can support more able students at each stage of the learning process.

What are our students learning?

Expose learners to ambitious, complex texts and concepts.

Choose material that stretches students beyond the typical diet of set texts – and this doesn’t necessarily mean totems of the literary canon – so they wrestle with sophisticated ideas, unfamiliar structures and rich language that demands sustained intellectual effort.

Build deep disciplinary knowledge.

Expose students to the debates, contexts and theoretical lenses that shape the discipline of English. By introducing ideas from literary criticism, history, philosophy and politics, we enable learners to see themselves as active participants in wider conversations about texts and culture.

Teach sophisticated language, stylistic and rhetorical devices.

Develop students’ ability to speak and write with precision, control and flair, explicitly teaching the stylistic tools, rhetorical techniques and academic vocabulary used by expert writers so that students can communicate nuanced thinking with confidence and authority.

How are our students learning?

Offer open-ended, creative and evaluative tasks.

Plan learning activities that require students to make choices, experiment with ideas and justify their thinking – for example, writing pastiches, crafting alternative interpretations, or expressing a point of view in an engaging and original way.

Integrate reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Ensure students encounter concepts through an equity of exposure to the traditional four modalities of the English classroom. They might debate an idea orally, explore it through analytical writing, respond creatively, and then listen to expert voices – each mode strengthening and expanding their conceptual understanding.

Provide deliberate practice using style models, exemplars and scaffolds.

Use carefully chosen examples of excellent writing to unpick what makes it effective, draw attention to the writer’s craft, and then ask students to imitate and adapt high-level techniques before gradually removing support as their proficiency grows.

How can we support learning?

Model strategies, vocabulary and thought processes.

Make your own thinking explicit by narrating how you approach a complex task – selecting vocabulary, crafting sentences, making inferences, evaluating interpretations – so that students can internalise and practise the habits that underpin successful creative and analytical work.

Differentiate by depth, not volume.

Plan challenge through increased complexity – such as tackling ambiguous ideas, experimenting with form, or synthesising multiple viewpoints – rather than through additional tasks that may simply consume time without enhancing cognitive demand.

Develop agency and structures for independence, rather than relying on PEE paragraphs and similar mnemonics.

Provide high-challenge frameworks, sentence stems or structural guides that encourage students to construct thoughtful, original arguments; over time, weaning them off reductive formulae like PEE so that their writing becomes flexible, mature and authentic.

What do our students do to show progress?

Encourage them to produce work that reflects increasing sophistication, originality and nuance.
Look for growing control, creativity and ambition in how students communicate ideas – for example, through more daring interpretations, subtle shifts in tone, or inventive stylistic choices that show ownership over their writing and thinking.

Help them to demonstrate critical, evaluative thinking through discussion and writing.

Encourage students to interrogate texts and ideas actively – weighing evidence, questioning assumptions, and problematising simplistic readings – so that their viewpoints become more layered, exploratory and confident over time.

Let them articulate and use knowledge verbally.

Give students frequent opportunities to articulate their thinking out loud – in classroom discussion, debates or hot-seating – enabling them to develop academic and creative oracy, rehearse complex ideas and strengthen their command of subject-specific language.

How should our students receive feedback?

Give precise, personalised formative feedback focusing on stretch and refinement.

Rather than merely correcting mistakes, feedback should target what a student needs to do to move forward – pointing towards greater complexity, precision, or stylistic control.

Use dialogue – verbal questioning, conferencing, and live marking.

Respond in real time wherever possible, using probing questions and quick conversations to deepen understanding, unsettle complacency and move learners forward while they are still ‘in the zone’ of thinking.

Facilitate critique of models and peer feedback.

Train students to evaluate work (their own and others’) against ambitious, explicit criteria that has even been agreed in advance as part of the learning process – so that they come to understand effective writing and so they can engage critically and constructively in the improvement process.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, supporting more able learners in English is not about doing more, but doing more thoughtfully. Many of these suggestions reflect effective teaching for learners of all abilities. But by embedding genuine challenge into our curriculum, pedagogy and feedback, we can offer our students the chance to think deeply, work independently and engage with rich ideas.

Find out more…

Join us on Tuesday 17th March 2026 for a free live webinar with the author of this blog post, Anthony Cockerill, Director of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE). During the session, Anthony will share examples of how the strategies discussed above can be implemented in practice, with opportunity for Q&A. Read more and register.