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.

Alongside her webinar for NACE members, author and teacher trainer Sue Cowley shares five ways to ensure all learners are stretched and challenged – it’s differentiation, but not as you might expect!

It is tempting to think of differentiation as being about preparing different materials for different students – the classic ‘differentiation by task’. However, this type of differentiation is the most time-consuming for teachers in terms of planning. It can also be hard to create stretch through this approach, because it is difficult to pitch tasks at exactly the right level.

In reality, rather than being about preparing different activities, differentiation is a subtle skill that is not easily spotted ‘in action’. For instance, it might include adaptations to the teacher’s use of language, or ‘in the moment’ changes to a lesson, based on the teacher’s knowledge of individual learners.

1. Identify and account for prior knowledge

The highest-attaining students often have a great deal of knowledge about a diverse range of subjects – typically those areas of learning that fascinate them. They are likely to be autodidacts – reading widely around a favoured subject at home to find out more. Sometimes they will teach themselves new skills without any direct teacher input – for instance using YouTube to learn a language that is not on offer at school. At times, their level of knowledge or skill might outpace yours.

A key frustration for high attainers is the feeling that they are being taught things in school that they already know. Find ways to assess and ascertain the prior knowledge of your class before you start a new topic, and incorporate this information into your teaching. One simple strategy is to ask the class to write down the things they already know about a topic, before you begin to study it, and any questions that they want answered during your studies. Use these questions as a simple way to provide extension opportunities in lessons.

Where a learner has extensive prior knowledge of a topic, ask if they would like to present some of the knowledge they have to the class – this can help build confidence and presentational skills. It can also be useful for high-attaining learners to explain something they understand easily to a child who doesn’t ‘get it’ so quickly. The act of having to rephrase or reconceptualise something in order to teach it requires the learner to build empathy, understand alternative perspectives and think laterally.

2. Build on interests to extend

Where a high-attaining learner has an interest in a subject, they typically want to explore it far more widely than you have time to do at school. Encourage your high attainers to read widely around a subject outside of lesson time by providing them with information about suitable materials. A lovely way to do this is to give them suitable adult-/higher-level texts to read (especially some of your own books on a subject from home).

3. Inch wide, mile deep

When thinking about how to make an aspect of a subject more challenging, it is helpful to think about curriculum as being made up of both surface-level material and at the same time ideas that require much deeper levels of understanding. A useful metaphor is a chasm that must be crossed: those learners who struggle need you to build a bridge to help them to get over it. However, other students will be able to climb all the way down into the chasm to see what is at the bottom, before climbing up the other side.

For each area of a subject, consider what you can add to create depth. This might typically be about digging into an area more deeply, going laterally with a concept, or asking students to use more complex terminology to describe abstract ideas.

4. Use questioning techniques to boost thinking

The effective use of questions is vital for stretching your highest-attaining learners. Studies have shown that teachers tend to use far more closed questions than open ones, even though open-ended questions lead to more challenge because they require higher-order thinking.

Socratic questioning is a very useful way to increase the level of difficulty of your questions, because it asks learners to dig down into the thinking behind questions and to provide evidence for their answers. You can find out more about this technique at www.criticalthinking.org.

Another useful approach to questioning is a technique commonly used in early years settings, and known as ‘sustained shared thinking’ (for more on this, see this report on the Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years Project). In this approach, the child’s thinking is developed through the use of a ‘serve and return’ conversation in which open-ended questions are asked to build understanding.

5. Consider learner roles

Taking on a fresh role or perspective can really help to challenge our thinking. This is particularly so where we are asked to argue in favour of a viewpoint that we do not ourselves hold. This encourages the learner to build empathy with different viewpoints and to consider how a topic looks from alternative perspectives. A simple way to do this is by asking students to argue the opposite position to that which they actually hold, during a class debate.

Sue Cowley is an author, presenter and teacher educator. Her book The Ultimate Guide to Differentiation is published by Bloomsbury.

To find out more about these techniques for creating stretch and challenge, watch Sue Cowley's webinar on this topic (member login required). 

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