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.

Helen Morgan, Subject Leader for Reading, English Lead Practitioner, More Able Champion & DDSL at St Michael Catholic Primary School & Nursery in Ashford, Surrey

With the ‘Year of Reading’ fast approaching, it’s a good time to re-assess the provisions in place for our children. As an English lead, questions I ask myself often revolve around the following…

• What are our children reading?
• Why do they make the choices that they do?
• In what ways can I support them?

This is especially important when it comes to children sharing what they have read, as I believe there are many effective ways to do this other than merely completing a reading record book. After I have read a great book (or a terrible one for that matter) there’s nothing I love more than discussing it with others. It was for this reason that I joined a ‘Teachers’ Reading Group’, facilitated by The Open University’s Reading for Pleasure volunteers.

The project I undertook at the end of the year involved setting up a staff book club where we read and discussed children’s books. It was very successful, in more ways than I realised it would be:

• We really enjoyed reading and discussing the texts.
• It broadened our knowledge of children’s literature.
• As staff finished reading the books, they were placed in class libraries.
• We noticed that groups of children were taking the books and reading them together, forming their own small book groups.

As the NACE lead at my school, I considered how I could use my findings to benefit more groups of children, so I started running a book club for our more able children. I adopted the Reading Gladiators programme curated by Nikki Gamble and the team at Just Imagine, which focuses on high-level discussion and eliciting creative responses to quality texts. Over the years these book clubs have been extremely popular, so we now run additional book clubs for less engaged readers and a picture book club with a focus on visual literacy.

Here are five reasons why I believe book clubs are a valuable way to foster reading for pleasure for all children, through informal, dialogic group discussion.

1) They develop critical and reflective thinking.

• Through guided discussion, children learn to justify opinions with evidence and challenge assumptions elicited from both the text and from each other.
•  The discussions foster metacognition and allow children to deepen their thinking. Research has shown that this links to higher achievement.

2) They nurture social and emotional intelligence.

• Children build their skills in empathy through exploring different perspectives, including that of their peers.
• It allows children time to reflect on and enjoy what they are reading without the pressure of having to answer formal questions.

3) They foster independence and help children to make meaningful connections.

• Book clubs expose children to a wide range of texts that they might not choose independently.
• They enable leaders to read with rather than to children.
• Reading for pleasure thrives when children can relate what they read to themselves, other texts and the world, thus deepening their ideas.

4) They encourage dialogic interaction.

• Book clubs encourage children to verbalise their interpretations and listen to others’ viewpoints.
• Discussion helps them move from literal understanding to analysis and evaluation — exploring themes, author choices, and symbolism.
• Informal book talk enables children to build empathy whilst exploring different perspectives.
• Collaborative reading builds confidence, listening skills, and the ability to challenge each other’s thinking, which are key aspects of social learning.

5) They promote agency, create a community of readers and foster a love of reading.

• When children play an integral part in discussion direction, they feel ownership and autonomy.
• Book clubs shift reading from a solitary task to a social practice.
• This helps to build a community of engaged readers who are invested, curious and motivated.

References

• OU/UKLA Teachers' Reading Groups
• Case study: St Michael’s Staff Book Club
• Just Imagine: Reading Gladiators
• Reading and Writing for Pleasure – Teresa Cremin et al (Routledge: 2025)
• The reading framework (DfE)

Amanda Hubball, Deputy Head and More Able Lead at Alfreton Nursery School, outlines the use of “thinking booklets” to embed challenge into the early years setting.

At Alfreton Nursery School, staff believe that children need an intrinsic level of challenge to enhance learning. This challenge is not always based around adding symbols to a maths problem or introducing scientific language to the magnet explorations. An early years environment has countless opportunities for challenge and this challenge can be provided in creative ways.  

Thinking booklets: invitations to think and talk

Within the nursery environment, Alfreton has created curriculum zones. These zones lend themselves to curriculum progression, whilst also providing a creative thread of enquiry which runs through all areas. Booklets can be found in each space and these booklets ask abstract questions and offer provocations for debate. Drawing on the pedagogical approach Philosophy for Children (p4c), we use these booklets to ensure classroom spaces are filled with invitations to think and talk.

Literacy booklets

Booklets within the literacy area help children to reflect on the concepts of reading and writing, whilst promoting communication, breadth of vocabulary and the skills to present and justify an opinion.

For example, within the “Big Question: Writing” booklet, staff and children can find the following questions:

• What is writing?
• If nobody could read, would we still need to write?

Alongside these and other questions, there are images of different types of writing. Musical notation, cave drawings, computer text and graffiti to name but a few. Children are empowered to discuss what their understanding of writing actually is and whether others think the same. Staff are careful not to direct conversations or present their own views.  

Maths booklets

Maths booklets are based around all aspects of the subject: shape, size, number. . .

• If a shape doesn’t have a name, is it still a shape?
• What is time?
• If you could be a circle or a triangle, which would you choose and why?

Questions do not need to be based around developing subject knowledge, and the more abstract and creative the question, the more open to all learners the booklets become.  

Children explore the questions and share views. On revisiting these questions another day, often opinions will change or become further embellished. Children become aware that listening to different points of view can influence thinking.

Creative questions

Developing the skills of abstract thought and creative thinking is a powerful gift and children enjoy presenting their theories, whilst sometimes struggling to understand that there is no right or wrong answer. For the more analytical thinkers, being asked to consider whether feelings are alive – leading to an exploration of the concept “alive” – can be highly challenging. Many children would prefer to answer, “What is two and one more?”  

Alfreton Nursery School’s culture of embracing enquiry, open mindset and respect for all supports children’s levels of tolerance, whilst providing cognitive challenge and opportunities for aspirational discourse. The use of simple strategies to support challenge in the classroom ensures that challenge for all is authentically embedded into our early years practice.  

Read more from Alfreton Nursery School:

• Building metacognition: breaking down barriers to learning
• Environmental education in the early years: intent, implementation, impact
• 5 steps to embed metacognition in the early years
• 4 top tips for implementing P4C into nursery

Amanda Hubball, Deputy Head and More Able Lead at Alfreton Nursery School, explores the power of metacognition in empowering young people to overcome potential barriers to achievement.  

Disadvantage presents itself in different ways and has varying levels of impact on learners. It is important to remember that disadvantage is wider than children who are in receipt of pupil premium or children who have a special educational need. Disadvantage can be based around family circumstances, for example bereavement, divorce, mental health… Disadvantages can be long-term or short-term and the fluidity of disadvantage needs to be acknowledged in order for educators to remain effective and vigilant for all children, including more able learners. If we accept that disadvantage can impact any child at any time, then it is essential that we provide all children with the tools they need to navigate challenge.    

More able learners are as vulnerable to the impact of disadvantage as other learners and indeed research would suggest that outcomes for more able learners are more dramatically impacted by disadvantage than outcomes for other children. A cognitive toolbox that is familiar, understood and accessible at all times, can be a highly effective support for learners when there are barriers to progress. By ensuring that all learners are taught metacognition from the beginning of their educational journey and year on year new metacognition skills are integrated, a child is empowered to maintain a trajectory for success.       

How can metacognition reduce barriers to learning?         

Metacognition supports children to consciously access and manipulate thinking strategies, thus enabling them to solve problems. It can allow them to remain cognitively engaged for longer, becoming emotionally dysregulated less frequently. A common language around metacognition enables learners to share strategies and access a clear point of reference, in times of vulnerability. Some more able learners can find it hard to manage emotions related to underachievement. Metacognition can help children to address both these emotional and cognitive demands.

In order for children to impact their long-term memory and fully embed metacognitive strategies, educators need to teach in many different ways. Metacognition needs to be visually reflected in the learner’s environment, supporting teachers to teach and learners to learn.   

How do we do this at Alfreton Nursery School?

At Alfreton Nursery School we ensure that discourse is littered with practical examples of how conscious thinking can result in deeper understanding. Spontaneous conversations are supported by visual aids around the classroom, enabling teachers and learners to plan and reflect on thinking strategies. Children are empowered to integrate the language of metacognition as they explain their learning and strive for greater understanding.

Adults in school use metacognitive terms when talking freely to each other, exposing children to their natural use. Missed opportunities are openly shared within the teaching team, supporting future developments.

Within enrichment groups, metacognition is a transparent process of learning. Children are given metacognitive strategies at the beginning of enhancement opportunities and encouraged to reflect and evaluate at the end. Whether working indoors or outdoors, with manipulatives or abstract concepts and individually or in a group, metacognition is a vehicle through which all learners can access lesson content.

We use the ‘Thinking Moves’ metacognition framework (you can read more about this here). Creative application of this framework supports the combination of metacognition words, to make strings of thinking strategies. For example, a puppet called FRED helps children to Formulate, Respond, Explain and Divide their learning experiences. A QUEST model helps children to follow a process of Questioning, Using, Explaining, Sizing and Testing.

Metacognition supports children of all abilities, ages and backgrounds, to overcome barriers to learning. Disadvantage is thus reduced.

Moving from intent to implementation

Systems and procedures at Alfreton Nursery School serve to scaffold day to day practice and provide a backdrop of expectations and standards. In order to best serve more able children who are experiencing disadvantage, these frameworks need to be explicit in their inclusivity and flexibility. Just as every policy, plan, assessment, etc will address the needs of all learners – including those who are more able – so all these documents explicitly address how metacognition will support all learners. To ensure that visions move beyond ‘intent’ and are fully implemented, systems need to guide provision through a metacognitive lens.  

Metacognition is woven into all curriculum documents. A systematic and dynamic monitoring system, which tracks the progress and attainment of all learners, ensures that children have equal focus on cognition and emotion, breaking down barriers with conscious intent.

 

At Alfreton Nursery School, those children who are more able and experiencing disadvantage receive a carefully constructed meta-curriculum which scaffolds their journey towards success, in whatever context that may manifest itself. Children learn within an environment where teachers can articulate, demonstrate and inculcate the power of metacognition, enabling children to be the best that they can be.

How is your school empowering and supporting young people to break down potential barriers to learning and achievement? Read more about NACE’s research focus for this academic year, and contact us to share your experiences.

NACE Associate Dr Jonathan Doherty outlines the focus of this year’s NACE R&D Hub on “oracy for high achievement” – exploring the impetus for this, challenges for schools, and approaches being trialled.

This year one of the NACE Research & Development Hubs is examining the theme of ‘oracy for high achievement’. The Hub is exploring the importance of rich and extended talk and cognitive discourse in the context of shared classroom practice. School leaders and teachers participating in the Hub are seeking to improve the value and effectiveness of speaking and listening. They are developing a body of knowledge about provision and pedagogy for more able learners, sharing ideas and practice and contributing to wider research evidence on oracy through their classroom-based enquiries.

Why focus on oracy?

Oracy is one of the most used and most important skills in schools. To be able to speak eloquently and with confidence, to articulate thinking and express an opinion are all essential for success both at school and beyond. Communication is a vital skill for the 21st century from the early years, through formal education, to employment. It embraces skills for relationship building, resolving conflict, thinking and learning, and social interaction. Oral language is the medium through which children communicate formally and informally in classroom contexts and the cornerstone of thinking and learning. The NACE publication Making Space for Able Learners found that “central to most classroom practice is the quality of communication and the use of talk and language to develop thinking, knowledge and understanding” (NACE, 2020, p.38). 

Oracy is very much at the heart of classroom practice: modern classroom environments resound to the sound of students talking: as a whole class, in group discussions and in partner conversations. Teachers explaining, demonstrating, instructing and coaching all involve the skills of oracy. Planned purposeful classroom talk supports learning in and across all subject areas, encouraging students to: 

• Analyse and solve problems
• Receive, act and build upon answers 
• Think critically
• Speculate and imagine
• Explore and evaluate ideas

Dialogic teaching’ is highly influential in oracy-rich classrooms (Alexander, 2004). It uses the power of classroom talk to challenge and stretch students. Through dialogue, teachers can gauge students’ perspectives, engage with their ideas and help them overcome misunderstandings. Exploratory talk is a powerful context for classroom talk, providing students with opportunities to share opinions and engage with peers (Mercer & Dawes, 2008). It is not just conversational talk, but talk for learning. Given the importance and prevalence of classroom talk, it would be easy to assume that oracy receives high status in the curriculum, but its promotion is not without obstacles to overcome. 

Challenges for schools in developing oracy skills

Covid-19 has impacted upon students’ oracy. A report from the children’s communication charity I CAN estimated that more than 1.5 million UK young people risk being left behind in their language development as a result of lost learning in the Covid-19 period (read more here). The Charity reported that the majority of teachers were worried about young people being able to catch up with their speaking and understanding as a result of the pandemic (I CAN, 2021). 

With origins going back to the 1960s, the term oracy was introduced as a response to the high priority placed on literacy in the curriculum of the time. Rien ne change, with the current emphasis remaining exactly so. Literacy skills, i.e. reading and writing, continue to dominate the curriculum. Oracy extends vocabulary and directly helps with learning to read.  The educationalist James Nimmo Britton famously said that “good literacy floats on a sea of talk” and recognised that oracy is the foundation for literacy. 

Teachers do place value on oracy. In a 2016 survey by Millard and Menzies of 900 teachers across the sector, over 50% said they model the sorts of spoken language they expect of their students, they do set expectations high, and they initiate pair or group activities in many lessons. They also highlighted the social and emotional benefits of oracy and suggested it has untapped potential to support pupils’ employability – but reported that provision is often patchy and that CPD was sparse or even non-existent. 

Another challenge is that oracy is mentioned infrequently in inspection reports. An analysis of reports of over 3,000 schools on the Ofsted database, undertaken by the Centre for Education and Youth in 2021, found that when taken in the context of all school inspections taking place each year, oracy featured in only 8% of reports.

The issue of how oracy is assessed is a further challenge. Assessment profoundly influences student learning. Changes to assessment requirements now provide schools with new freedoms to ensure their assessment systems support pupils to achieve challenging outcomes. Despite useful frameworks to assess oracy such as the toolkit from the organisation Voice 21, there is no accepted system for the assessment of oracy.

What are NACE R&D Hub participants doing to develop oracy in their schools?

The challenges outlined above make the work of participants in the Hub of real importance. With a focus on ‘oracy for high achievement’, the Hub is supporting teachers and leaders to delve deeper into oracy practices in their classrooms. The Hub supports small-scale projects through which they can evidence the impact of change and evaluate their practice. Activities are trialled over a short period of time so that their true impact can be observed in school and even replicated in other schools. 

The participants are now engaged in a variety of enquiry-based projects in their classrooms and schools. These include:

• Use of the Harkness Discussion method to enable more able students to exhibit greater depth of understanding, complexity of response and analytical skills within cognitively challenging learning;
• Explicit teaching of oracy skills to improve independent discussion in science and history lessons;
• Introduction of hot-seating to improve students’ ability to ask valuable questions;  
• Choice in oral tasks to improve the quality of students’ analytical skills;
• Oracy structures in collaborative learning to challenge more able students’ deeper learning and analysis;
• Better reasoning using oracy skills in small group discussion activities; 
• Interventions in drama to improve the quality of classroom discussion.

Share your experience

We are seeking NACE member schools to share their experiences of effective oracy practices, including new initiatives and well-established practices. You may feel that some of the examples above are similar to practices in your own school, or you may have well-developed models of oracy teaching and learning that would be of interest to others. To share your experience, simply contact us, considering the following questions:

• How can we implement effective oracy strategies without dramatically increasing teacher workload?
• How can we best develop oracy for the most able in mixed ability classrooms?
• What approaches are most effective in promoting oracy in group work so that it is productive and benefits all learners? 
• How can we implicitly teach pupils to justify and expand their ideas and make clear opportunities to develop their understanding through talk and deepen their understanding?
• How do we evidence challenge for oracy within lessons?

Teachers should develop students’ spoken language, reading, writing and vocabulary as integral aspects of the teaching of every subject. Every teacher is a teacher of oracy. The report of the All-Party Parliamentary Group inquiry into oracy in schools concluded that there was an indisputable case for oracy as an integral aspect of education. This adds to a growing and now considerable body of evidence to celebrate the place that oracy has in our schools and in our society. Oracy is in a unique place to support the learning and development of more able pupils in schools and the time to give oracy its due is now. 

References

• Alexander, R. J. (2004) Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk. York, UK: Dialogos.
• Britton, J. (1970) Language and learning. London: Allen Lane. [2nd ed., 1992, Portsmouth NH:  Boynton/Cook, Heinemann].
• I CAN (2021) Speaking Up for the Covid Generation. London: I CAN Charity.
• Lowe, H. & McCarthy, A. (2020) Making Space for Able Learners. Didcot, Oxford: NACE.
• Mercer, N. &. Dawes., L. (2008) The Value of Exploratory Talk. In Exploring Talk in School, edited by N. Mercer and S. Hodgkinson, pp. 55–71. London: Sage.
• Millard, W. & Menzies, L. (2016) The State of Speaking in Our Schools. London: Voice 21/LKMco.
• Millard, W., Menzies, L. & Stewart, G. (2021) Oracy after the pandemic: what Ofsted, teachers and young people think about oracy. Centre for Education & Youth/University of Oxford. 
  

Read more: 

• Speaking up: developing oracy for high achievement
• 7 steps to establishing a whole-school oracy culture
• 6 ideas to develop oracy in your school
• Four ways Covid restrictions have affected learning and development