Effort pays off

Students at Marple Hall School have a great record when it comes to exams and qualifications. We’re a successful school, we know what works and how to support our young people to do their very best. It’s not just about lessons and homework, but also about showing students different ways to revise, organise their knowledge and practice their skills. At the moment our Year 11 cohort have been looking at these skills again in their form times, and on Wednesday this week we had our first Pomodoro session of the year. Pomodoro is a technique whereby a student focuses on a particular piece of work or revision for blocks of 25 minutes at a time, with short breaks in between. We’ve been running collective Pomodoro sessions in school in the lead up to Trial exams for many years now, and it’s a great way to show students what effective revision looks like. I think when we first ran the after school sessions we perhaps had 40 or 50 students turning up…but this week we topped 160 on week one, which is a fantastic indicator of how much students in the class of 2024 want to succeed.

But…and this is the key point. Attending Pomodoro for two hours on a Wednesday night is just the start. Anyone in year 11 who thinks that they can tick the revision box by doing this one thing will be disappointed in the summer on results day. Pomodoro is there to show the way, but it is not the destination. Successful Year 11 students will be doing their own work regularly each week – whether creating revision notes, testing their own knowledge or (best of all) completing past papers and practice questions. Anyone can do these things, it just takes a bit of planning and determination. When it comes to successful GCSE results we know one thing for certain: Effort pay off.

Have a great weekend,

Joe Barker

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