Maximising Achievement with Y11 in the final 15 weeks before the 2026 examinations in England

Maximising Achievement with Y11 in the final 15 weeks before the 2026 examinations in England

A companion piece to our Alps Champions Webinar on Wednesday 21st January 2026.

At Alps, we are with you all the way as you face the challenge of maximising Y11’s outcomes and achievement in 2026. 

The Context
  1. Results for 16-year-old students in England in 2025 were marginally higher than in 2024 at 9-2 and above.  
  2. Results for 16-year-old students in England in 2025 were higher than in 2019 at 9-4 and above. They were slightly below 2019 at 9-2 and 9-1.  
Table 1
  1. Based on the provisional KS4 results, the 3 key accountability measures published based on 2025 results show little change from 2024 as shown below in Table 2.
Table 2

If you consider the 2025 and 2024 results, we are almost certainly back in another ‘comparable outcomes’ era at KS4. The 2026 and 2027 results are likely to be awarded in very similar proportions to 2024 & 2025. What are you doing / what will you do to maximise your grades at 4+, 5+ and 7+ in 2026?  

Though the gender gap narrowed in 2025, girls continued to outperform boys at GCSE.  

  • 70.5% of female entries achieved a grade 4 or above, compared to 64.3% of male entries. 
  • 25.5% of female entries achieved a grade 7 or above, compared to 20.5% of male entries. 
  • Based on provisional statistics, Table 3 demonstrates the gender gaps in terms of A8, and the Basics at 4+ and 5+. 
Table 3

Do your KS4 results show similar gender gaps? What can you do to motivate your boys to be more competitive with the girls? They are competing for the same places on L3 Sixth Form courses and, in the future, the same post-18 pathways. 

Disadvantaged students and SEND students continued to under-perform against their peers in 2025 as Table 4 from the DfE shows. 

Table 4

Do your KS4 results tend to show similar disadvantage gaps? What can you do to more effectively support your Pupil Premium students & SEND students? These students are also competing for the places on L3 Sixth Form courses &, in the future, the same post-18 pathways as their non-disadvantaged peers.

With the focus on disadvantaged students, those with SEND & those who are known (or previously known) to children’s social care, in the new Ofsted Framework, how well are you on top of the progress of those groups? 


Some possible priorities 

1. Maximising your share of high grades to: 

  • Improve your Attainment 8 score and the Basics at 4+ and 5+ 
  • Further improve student post-16 pathways and destinations 
  • Recruitment to your L3 courses if your school has a sixth form 

2. Narrowing any cohort gaps, for example: 

  • Males v Females 
  • Disadvantaged (PP) v non-disadvantaged 
  • SEND v non-SEND 

3. Focusing on improving attendance to reduce the negative impact of persistent absence. 


Our Ten Top Tips to support you: 

1. If your main target involves the Basics at 4+ or 5+ in 2025, ensure that both Faculty leaders and their teachers know which are their ‘key marginal’ students at the 4/3 and 5/4 grade boundaries. 

2. Use the English / maths threshold tool in Connect (in Student Analysis – Attainment Measures) in your regular ‘matching meetings’.  

  • Using the Basics at 5+ as the example, first see which students are ‘on’ 5+ in one faculty but not in the other and then see if they are ‘realistic targets’ as currently on grade 4.   
  • If you use fine grades, ensure your 4c or 4- students are secured. 
  • If you use fine grades, perhaps first focus on your 4a or 4+ students. 
  • Identify which teaching sets the Key Marginal 3/4+ and 4/5 students are in. 
  • Discuss the students and strategies with the relevant set teachers. Ensure those teachers can articulate why each student is not currently at the relevant grade. 
  • Use our Connect What-if tool to demonstrate the impact on value-added if those students do achieve the higher grade. 

Our webinar on Wednesday 21st January 2026 will guide you through how to use these tools in Alps Connect. Register your place here. 

3. Make sure sustaining / improving performance at 9-7, 9-5 and 9-4 are priorities in your school across all subjects and (as appropriate) sets. 

4. If your main target involves the Basics in 2025 and 2026, how do you involve all the other HoDs and their set teachers in the pursuit of further raising student achievement with their cohorts? We recommend setting appropriate 4+, 5+ and 7+ targets for each subject that are subsequently fairly devolved to each set.

5. If your main target involves an Attainment 8 score in 2025 use the Attainment 8 tool in Connect (in Student Analysis – Attainment Measures) to be on top of how key student groups are performing and to identify students for intervention with impact. 

6. As these cohorts have no ‘official’ baseline, and will have no P8, a radical solution to setting personal challenge targets that proved popular in 2024-25 is to:

  • Issue appropriate 4+, 5+ and 7+ targets to HoDs 
  • Allow each department or faculty to decide which students should be targeted 4+, 5+, 7+ based on perceived ability in their subject (providing the set target percentages are maintained). 
  • Set personal challenge targets in each subject using that information. 

7. Use Connect to ensure you are on top of the subjects, sets and student groups that need to improve to gain outstanding value-added progress / outstanding achievement. 

The webinar will guide you through how to add custom columns and how then to be on top of analysing your data in Connect by attendance and how to identify gender, disadvantage and SEND gaps. 

8. As usual pay closest attention to maths & English, followed by sciences and your other largest cohort subjects, as these will have the biggest impact on this cohort’s outcomes and post-16 destinations as well as your Performance Tables measures and your Alps’ Quality Indicator. Focus on raising outcomes by concentrating on improving the performance of specific targeted students in specific subjects.  

9. Ask HODs to run department meetings based on:

  • Past papers and mark schemes (especially 2025) 
  • Command words 
  • 2025 Examiner reports & QLA – identifying those ‘silver bullets’ that will improve grades. 

Share this invaluable information with your students.

10. Ensure Mock exams are marked to identify individual and collective learning gaps (skills / knowledge) so that these can be addressed, re-assessed and closed before the summer. Based on what commonly lost students marks & grades in your Mocks and what the Examiner Report / QLA reveals lost students marks & grades in 2025, ask HODs to identify 5 main priorities to work on from January to May to aim to make sure students do not make these same errors in the summer. 



Five Top Tips for getting the most from Connect 

1. Discuss with HODs and teachers which students on their course have the greatest potential to improve their mock / predicted grades.  

  • Use the ‘What-if’ tool in Connect to demonstrate the impact on subject VA of those students achieving a higher grade. 
  • Ensure that all teachers understand what needs to be done to enable each of these students to master the skills or knowledge the lack of which currently blocks them from achieving the next higher grade. 

2. Use our comparison and filter tools to understand how the student groups in each subject or set are predicted to perform by disadvantage, gender & SEND. 

3. Set up custom columns so you can track the progress of additional groups. We strongly advise setting up attendance groups so that the impact of persistent absence is clear and visible.  Empower your ability to act impactfully to improve attendance. 


 

 4. Use our Monitoring Accuracy tools to identify: 

  • which subjects predicted most accurately in 2025?
  • which subjects are predicting outcomes most different to previous monitoring grade-point or are predicting much higher outcomes / higher VA than in 2025?

5. Identify students who are underachieving in two or more subjects for intervention. 


Possible student baselines to measure progress from in Connect





About the author: John Philip 

 

 

John started working with Alps in 2008, while he was working at Little Heath Comprehensive School. At Little Heath, John used Alps to achieve top 2% performance in value-added terms. He also worked with schools regionally and nationally through the Raising Achievement Partnership Programme. Since leaving Little Heath in 2010, John additionally works as an associate for 22 secondary schools through PiXL. 

 

This blog is a companion piece to our Alps Champions Webinar on Wednesday 21st January 2026. 

Register for our webinar  

 

Led by: Senior Education Consultant, John Philip

21st January 2026 at 3:30 PM GMT 


This webinar will give practical advice on how to use Connect effectively to ensure you are on top of the subjects, sets and students who need support if you are to maximise achievement for your Year 11 cohort as you approach the final 15 weeks of the academic year.