Bella’s A-Level English Literature Journey
Introduction
When Bella and I started working together in October 2025, she’d already received two Ds in AS English Literature. You can see for yourself that those grades weren’t just disappointing. More importantly, they had begun to affect the way she saw herself as a student of English.
After getting two Ds last year I lost hope…
Beyond that, there was something else I noticed very quickly: Bella was clearly capable of much more.
The problem wasn’t a lack of intelligence or an inability to understand Literature. What she hadn’t quite managed to do was make the leap from GCSE to A-level examination technique. It’s a common problem. She knew her texts, had plenty of ideas, and could engage intelligently with Literature. But the ideas weren’t consistently being translated into the kind of precise, developed argument that an A-level examination demands.
So we went back to first principles.
Starting Again
One of the first things we did was strip away some of the mystery surrounding the Assessment Objectives (AOs), and the mark scheme.
What exactly were AO1, AO2, AO3, AO4 and AO5 asking her to do? How did they interact? What does an argument actually look like in an English Literature essay? How do you move from noticing something interesting in a text to constructing an argument that can sustain an examination answer? And what does an exam board mean by ‘sophisticated‘, or ‘perceptive‘?
Once those foundations were secure, we could begin to move towards the authors and texts themselves.
I wrote bespoke examination papers for Bella, including on ‘Jane Eyre’ and an Unseen Poetry paper, and gave her detailed, forensic feedback. The point wasn’t simply to tell her what was wrong. It was to identify what she was already doing well, isolate the things preventing her from moving further, and give her specific ways to develop them.
In one unseen poetry exercise, for example, Bella produced a response that was already demonstrating strong quotation selection, fluent use of terminology and effective comparison. The feedback then pushed her towards something more demanding: making stronger claims about what the writers were trying to achieve, committing herself to interpretations, and considering how a reader might respond to the characters and voices she was analysing.
The next step was to become more confident in developing and defending her own interpretations: something we continued to work on both in our sessions and through wider reading.
That distinction became increasingly important.
The aim wasn’t to teach Bella to produce an essay that looked like an A-level essay. It was to help her understand what sophisticated literary thinking actually involves.
From Technique to Thinking
Bella grasped the technical foundations quickly.
Once she knew what she was doing, we didn’t need to spend every session drilling essay structures or correcting the mechanics of writing. In particular, I expect my students to develop their own writing style, not to sound like Guerrero clones. Her technical writing began to catch up with her ideas, and that meant we could spend our time doing something much more interesting.
We could talk.
We discussed poems, characters, theories, and interpretations. We tested ideas. We sometimes pursued a thought simply to see where it went, and then worked out how – or whether – it could be turned into a convincing argument in an essay. We measured our ideas against the context which shaped the texts.
Some sessions were therefore surprisingly slow-paced. There wasn’t always a visible pile of written work at the end of the hour. Sometimes a scruffy essay plan we had scratched out together might be the only evidence that we had even met.
But a great deal was happening.
We were modelling the process of literary thinking: noticing details, forming a hypothesis, challenging it, considering an alternative, looking back at the text, and deciding whether the evidence actually supported the interpretation. grouping small interpretations into larger theories.
By this stage, Bella knew her texts well enough that I wasn’t simply teaching her what to think about them. We were working out what we thought about them and, more importantly, how she could justify those thoughts herself.
More than once, she independently came up with something about a familiar text which I’d not previously considered: I absolutely love those moments!
An Hour with Larkin and Duffy
One of my favourite examples came on 18 March, when I tried something slightly different with Bella: using a mind map as the principal way of recording our thinking.
It worked remarkably well.
In a single session we moved between Larkin and Duffy, individual poems, thematic ideas, contextual factors, comparison, interpretations and the assessment objectives. The resulting map looks complicated because the thinking was complicated — but it also shows how much Bella could now hold in her head at once.
By this point, the question was no longer simply:
“How do I write an answer on these poems?”
It was much closer to:
“What do these poets seem to be saying, how do they construct those ideas, how might we interpret them, and how can I turn that into an argument?”
That was a very different student from the one I had first met.
And it’s worth noting that Larkin and Duffy became one of Bella’s strongest areas, culminating in an A in the final examination: particularly satisfying given that one of the Ds she received the previous year had been in this area.
The Point of a Good Working Relationship
Our sessions weren’t always entirely about English.
We talked about school, the school council, her other subjects, and the general business of being a student. Sometimes those conversations gave us useful connections to Literature; her work in Religious Studies, for example, occasionally intersected surprisingly well with the texts we were discussing.
It became something of a running joke that, after we’d spent a while talking about everything else, I’d eventually say:
Right. Shall we give you some value for your session and do some English?
But the distinction between ‘real life’ and Literature became increasingly blurred anyway.
That was part of what I enjoyed about working with Bella. English wasn’t something that existed in a little examination-shaped box. We could move from a conversation about something happening in her life to a discussion of a poem, an idea or an interpretation without either of us finding the transition particularly strange. Anything could be relevant to her studies.
The result, as Bella has since put it:
through our sessions I remembered just how much I love English
That matters a lot to me.
The grade matters. Of course it does. I knew she didn’t intend to pursue English at uni, but a good grade would open other doors for her. But I don’t think good English teaching should leave a student seeing Literature merely as a collection of examination questions to be answered correctly.
Knowing when to stop
There was one important decision we made together which says quite a lot about how I think tuition should work.
With a few weeks to go before the examinations, Bella was clearly in a very strong position. She was ready to do well in English Literature.
She also had other subjects she was more worried about.
So we deliberately reduced the amount of English homework she was doing and freed up some of her time to concentrate on those other subjects.
Could we have squeezed a few more marks out of English by continuing to push? Possibly. I could easily be writing about Ds to As.
But that wasn’t the most important question.
The question was: what was best for Bella as a whole?
Once I was confident that she was ready for English Literature, it seemed entirely reasonable to give some of her time back.
Sometimes the best tuition is knowing when not to give more of it.
The result
Bella finished with a B overall in English Literature.
More specifically:
A – Shakespeare (Hamlet)
A – Larkin & Duffy (D in 2025)
B – Jane Eyre & Doctor Faustus (D in 2025)
C – John Donne & Unseen Poetry
And, perhaps most importantly, she secured her first-choice university: Glasgow. Sadly, she’s not studying English there.
The result is particularly satisfying because it represents a substantial recovery from where she had started with me.
But Bella’s own reaction says more about the journey than the grade table can.
After getting two D’s last year I lost hope and now I am just elated that I have been able to recover my grades the way I did!
And then, in a message after getting her results, she added:
Honestly thank you so so much, I genuinely could not have done it without and through our sessions I remembered just how much I love English, and that was completely due to your enthusiasm and your help.
She also described our conversations as being like talking about a subject with someone ‘so ridiculously brilliant‘.
I will, obviously, be pretending to be completely normal about that.
What changed?
Bella didn’t suddenly become intelligent between Year 12 and Year 13.
She was intelligent when I first met her.
What changed was her ability to turn that intelligence into a controlled, confident literary argument under examination conditions.
The technical foundations mattered. The bespoke papers and detailed feedback mattered. Understanding the AOs mattered.
But ultimately, I think the most important change was that Bella began to trust her own thinking.
Once she knew what a strong literary argument looked like, she could stop worrying quite so much about whether she was doing English ‘correctly’ and start asking more interesting questions in an environment that encouraged thinking out loud.
- What does the writer want us to notice?
- Why has the writer made this choice?
- Could there be another way of reading it?
- Do I actually believe this interpretation?
- And, crucially, can I prove it?
That is where English Literature becomes exciting again.
Bella came to me after two Ds having lost some faith in what she could achieve.
She leaves for her first-choice university with a B in English Literature, and As in Shakespeare and Larkin & Duffy. Perhaps most gratifyingly of all, having rediscovered that she loves the subject.
The grades tell one part of the story.
That last part tells me the rest.
If this the kind of journey you or your child are on, and you’re interested in chatting about working together, get in touch to book a free consultation, or drop me a line.