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

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

A companion piece to our Alps Champions Webinar on Thursday 22nd January 2026. 

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

The Context

  • Since 2024 Qualifications Wales has returned grading towards 2019 standards as Table 1 using data from the JCQ demonstrates. 
  • In Wales, 2025 GCSE results were marginally higher than in 2024. 
  • In 2025 results at A*-C+ were lower than in either 2022 or 2023 which were treated as transitional recovery years from the pandemic by Qualifications Wales. 
Table 1


Do your GCSE results show a similar gender gap? What can you do to motivate your male students to compete with their female peers? They are competing for places on the same Sixth Form courses, and, in the future, the same university places, degree apprenticeships & careers. 

  • In 2025 the disadvantage gap widened slightly between eFSM students and their peers to 80.0 points from 79.6 points in 2024. 
  • From 2018/19 to 2024/25 the gap has widened in all three subject indicators.  
  • In 2025 the gap was widest in Science and narrowest in Literacy. 
Do your GCSE results show a similar eFSM gap? What more can you do to support your students from disadvantaged backgrounds to transform their life opportunities by gaining higher grades at GCSE? 

  • The gap between White British pupils and Black, Asian and minority ethnic pupils widened in the Capped 9 indicator, with Black, Asian and minority ethnic pupils achieving better outcomes than White British pupils. 
  • In 2025 the gap widened from 19.9 points in 2024 to 22.5 points. 
  • The ethnicity gaps in subject indicators have widened considerably since 2019. 

Do your GCSE results tend to show a similar ethnicity gap? What can you do to motivate your white students to compete with their peers for higher grades?

Raising your Capped 9 in 2026 would be aided considerably if the achievement of boys, eFSM students and White British students was raised. 


Some possible priorities 

1. Maximising your share of high grades to improve student outcomes and post-16 pathways. 

2. Maximising your share of high grades (A*-C) to improve your Capped 9 points score. 

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

4. Narrowing any cohort gaps, for example:

  • Males v Females 
  • eFSM v non-eFSM 
  • White British v minority ethnic pupils

5. Maximising the achievement of Seren Academy learners.


Our Ten Top Tips to support you: 

1. Your goal might be your Capped 9 points indicator score or your Alps Quality Indicator. Whichever you are targeting using Alps Connect to see which students are currently underachieving is highly recommended. Then intervene with impact! 

2. Get everyone on board if you want to achieve your goals. Ensure all middle leaders and set teachers understand their role in achieving the school’s ‘goals’ and feel responsible for helping achieve them. 

3. Using Alps Connect effectively keeps all teachers involved in your quest for success and bases the analysis on student progress. Using Connect ensures you are on top of the subjects, sets and student groups that need to improve to gain outstanding Alps’ Grades and a high Capped 9 points score. 

4. In terms of Capped 9, our advice is to keep a tight focus on the Literacy, Numeracy and Science slots as these slots contain most of the subjects taken by all your students: 

  • Literacy – best result of first awarding of: Welsh first language or English language or Welsh literature or English literature. 
  • Numeracy – best result of first awarding of: mathematics – numeracy or mathematics. 
  • Science – best result of first awarding of): biology, chemistry, physics, science (double award) applied science (double award) and applied science (single award). 

If students perform well in all the subjects they study in those three slots, they may have 6 or 7 good grades to count towards Capped 9. Beyond that, your other most populous subjects will have the biggest impact on your Capped 9 points score and the outcomes and post-16 pathways of the students. 

5. Use Connect to ensure you are on top of any student groups that are underachieving and to be able to visualise the negative impact on outcomes & progress of persistent absence.  

Our webinar on Thursday 22nd January 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 (eFSM) and ethnicity gaps as well as how to have a sharp focus on your Seren Academy students. Register your place here. 

6. 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.

7. 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.  

8. 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. 

9. Focus on raising outcomes and progress by concentrating on improving the performance of targeted students in specific sets in specific subjects. 

10. Based on the identified 5 main priorities in each subject ask HoDs, with the Y11 teachers, to identify 5 key marginal students whose grades are most likely to improve with impactful support between now and 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.

2. Use the ‘What-if’ tool in Connect to demonstrate the impact on subject value-added 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.

3. Use our comparison and filter tools to understand how the student groups in each subject or set are predicted to perform by disadvantage, gender, ethnicity & PA.  
  1. Set up custom columns, so you can track the progress of additional groups such as your students on EMA and your Seren Academy students.  
  2. Set up attendance groups so that the impact of persistent absence is clear and visible, so all can act 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 for intervention who are either:

  • Underachieving in several subjects. 
  • On the C/D border in several subjects. 


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 Thursday 22nd January 2026. 

Register for our webinar  

 

Led by: Senior Education Consultants, John Philip and Dr John Roe 

22nd 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.